J2EE bashing seems to be the flavour these days. While I do agree that J2EE does seem tedious at times, especially when you compare it with the likes of Ruby on Rails, I still realize (and appreciate) why and how J2EE got to be the way it is.

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I like to think of Ruby as a weapon. A weapon with which I can attack problems my way! Ruby appears simple, and convenient, and hence poses a question; Why aren’t enough techies using it?

That’s when I realized - Ruby is like a Samurai’s sword, a Katana. Not of much use to the corporate coder, but in the right hands, extremely effective. (more…)

An Information System’s key purpose is to manage and serve information to it’s users. Thus information storage and retrieval is at the heart of any IT system. Most systems use Relational Databases (RDBMS) for this purpose.

As technology matures, software development tools progress towards working in the business domain. As an example, programming languages have come a long way from machine code to assembly language to procedural languages and now to object-oriented languages and 4GL. I don’t see why data storage, retrieval and management shouldn’t follow the same evolution cycle. In the past developers used punched cards, followed by flat files and moved to relational databases for data storage and have been stuck at relational databases for around 20 years now. (more…)