Mike-O-Matic

(This is the fifth article in the Better Living through CodaServer series)
Most software developers work in the trenches, the corporate IT departments, writing code to help automate a company’s various processes.  While the Googles get the glory and Facebooks find the fame, our intrepid warriors make life better for one knowledge worker at a time.
One […]

(This article is the fourth entry in the Better Living Through CodaServer series.)
Most business systems implement the concept of “users,” those crazy scamps who login and actually use the software.  They’re pretty important; each has different capabilities within the system and their access levels need to be made available to application code so that it […]

(This is the third article in the Better Living through CodaServer series)
Databases have always been a little awkward in the versioning department.
A database server is an environment all its own.  Different databases can have identical schemas but much different data in them.  Some of this data is very much part of the “structure” of […]

Web Services come in lots of flavors.  In all of the confusion of vendor positioning and jibberjabber across the tubes, it can be hard to keep them straight.  In my experience they roughly break down into two classes:

Procedure-Based: Like XML-RPC or SOAP, where you call procedures on remote machines that do stuff.
Document-Based: Like REST, where […]

(This is the second article in the Better Living Through CodaServer series)
Benjamin Franklin once said “Lost time is never found again.”  That is doubly true if that time is when your company’s batch processing was supposed to run, and now none of your suppliers are going to get their checks.  And they cancel your accounts, […]

(This is the first article in the Better Living Through CodaServer series)
Validation means many things to many people.  It’s that feeling you get when you are unconditionally accepted by the one you love, when all the toil and tears finally…
Uh…
For most of us programmers, validation comes in two forms:

Format-level Validation: Does this piece of data […]