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MokaByte
Numero 03 - Dicembre 1996
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Melissa Hunt |
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MokaByte
Numero 03 - Dicembre 1996
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Melissa Hunt |
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La sezione americana di California Connection sta' predendo vita a se stante. Marie Alm sta' buttando le basi per la formazione di un distaccamento della redazione in California sotto il suo controllo. Questo mese troviamo un articolo di una nuova collaboratrice Melissa Hunt. (ndr)
"...This month's California Connection is from the electronic pen of Melissa Hunt. Melissa is the lead engineer of a very large project development effort at a major high-tech company in Silicon Valley. She was a major player when the design decisions were being made regarding the nuts and bolts of the system. In particular, she was heavily involved when the team was evaluating whether or not emerging technologies should be used, such as browser-based intranets based upon Java. "
The
software of the system on which I work is undergoing dramatic changes.
Our architecture is undergoing a major metamorphosis from a FORTRAN/C VAX/VMS
monolith into a distributed, object based, n-tiered, client-server system.
Not only is the system receiving a series of extensive internal organ transplants
in the form of a new database, the induction of a CORBA-based API interface,
but also major software rewrites are being done into object-oriented C++.
The surgeons (that is, the software engineers) are already at work on the
face-lift for the user interface. The new interface is browser-based and
written in JAVA and HTML.
At
the heart of the user interface upgrade is a transition from VAX FMS forms
into JAVA applets that run in a WEB browser. JAVA applets were selected
to support our implementation due to our need to support thousands of clients,
each of whom may run various parts of our application, on various platforms,
and who must receive upgrades and bug fixes in a simple, cost-effective,
and timely fashion. What better way to satisfy our customers' needs than
to provide an interface that can be upgraded the very next time they enter
the display. What better way to help control access to our system than
by using a language and a technology that ultimately must have security
as its top priority? And what better way to control our own configuration
issues than to build code that can run on any platform that supports a
NETSCAPE browser? These conveniences were what led to the selection of
JAVA for our user interface language of choice.
What
we've found since that selection has been made is that the JAVA language
does not have some of the pitfalls of C++. Our C/FORTRAN developers have
been able to quickly build a prototype of the user interface, while our
C++ development languishes, even though our developers have had C++ training
courses. To support our C++ developers, we've had to purchase a COTS (Commercial
Off-The-Shelf) standard library from a third-party vendor , thus marrying
ourselves to that vendor. In contrast, the JAVA API library supplied with
the JAVA Development Kit offers an extensive, though daunting, selection
of methods to be used by the programmers. It has not been necessary to
purchase additional software to support the JAVA developers. None of this
is to say that the JAVA development has been without its wrinkles. There
are always problems when embarking on a development effort using a technology
that is fresh off the presses. We have struggled over and over with incorrect
or behind the times manuals, bugs in the compiler, and seem to be always
a revision or two out of date with the latest and greatest compilers and
tools. And we continue to face these issues on a daily basis. This is a
rapidly growing technology that in a large organization is hard to keep
up with. We've just been fortunate to have programmers eager to toss off
their FORTRAN VMS hats so that they may embrace what's here and now and
what is obviously the wave of the future.
About
Melissa Hunt:
"I work as a Software Development lead for a large high tech computer company in the Silicon Valley area near San Francisco, CA (USA). One of my primary roles is the up front architecture and design portion of a development effort. Once that is defined, my job becomes one of verifying that all of the pieces fit together in the end. We typically have more than one build cycle happening at a time so I often find myself architecting on top of something we have yet to actually build into code. Outside of my work, I enjoy hiking in the woods, writing poetry, reading, and working out with weights. And I enjoy cats. I'm getting married next spring and we plan to honeymoon in Italia! "
Melissa, who speaks a little Italiano, may be contacted through Marie Alm at aalm@bayarea.net
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