Mike-O-Matic

(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 […]

Back in DC I worked at a place that attempted to make developers interchangeable.  This makes a lot of sense; you want redundancy on your team if someone gets sick, takes a vacation, or leaves the company to go raise yaks for fiber-harvesting in Nepal, or instance.  It’s also helpful to prevent “siloing,” that thing […]

(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, […]

So the other day I had a comment on one of my articles from Kenneth Downs over at Secure Data Software.  Intrigued, I headed over to his blog and found a great article called “Minimize Code, Maximize Data.”
He uses an example of a magazine delivery operation and shows two ways that the same problem could […]

Interesting article at Spoiled Techie today.  Scott disagrees with the relevance of stored procedures today, despite Microsoft’s pleas.  Amongst his points:

SP’s mangle the three tier architecture designed for apps.

Instead of having a structure which separates logic from storage, you have storage and logic on the same tier.  This will cause potential problems down the road.

Business […]

(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 […]

CodaServer 1.0 Alpha is up and ready for download.
CodaServer is a new category of server software called a “Business Rules Engine.”  It sits between the database and the application server layers in the traditional two-tier architecture, and provides a home for business logic that would otherwise be hardcoded into one either application code (such as […]