Sunday, February 17, 2013

Some API "best suggestions"

In today’s modern world of computing it’s a no-brainer to expose some kind of service for the outside world to access your enterprise platform in a controlled fashion. Because of good old legacy systems, we all know that “the perfect world” never exists in any of our clients’ current environment. There are always compatibility issues regarding unified communication between these systems and we end up building all kinds of middle layers to facilitate this interaction. The latter makes it a nightmare to implement any kind of external service.

By building a platform with a collection of loosely coupled components and exposing specific functionality via an unified interface is much better than having all kinds of silo systems talking to each other. We can achieve this by implementing an API over REST (Representational state transfer).

Monday, February 4, 2013

Train yourself, yourself

Getting skilled up is the only way to stay alive in the IT services business, and the best way to do that is hands-on experience.  But it isn’t always easy to explore a new tech or skill if you are not working on a project that it is being used on, apart from time constraints the hardware and software you need may be lacking. So I decided to post a couple of things I`ve come across to help in this regard. And since I`m a SQL guy, I will focus on SQL type things.

I`m not saying formal, class based or course-type training is useless, it is great to introduce you to a new field and get you going quicker, but to become skilled, it will have to be some dirt under the nails stuff.
 

So let`s start at the beginning.