Software development projects can get incredibly complex, even with judicious planning. The Sample IT projects section of developerWorks demonstrates the processes of planning, executing, correcting, and delivering a project in the On Demand Business model.
A few examples of development-related issues, and their solutions, include:
Developing a customer-to-customer Web application -- The now-infamous dragonslayers focus their efforts on integrating new products and technologies on heterogenous platforms. The scenario addresses such tasks as going wireless, handling performance and capacity issues, and expanding the reach of your application with Web services.
Building an on demand workplace environment for the retail industry -- Here, a team modified an existing application to deliver it, through a portal, to a point-of-sale device, such as a kiosk. You'll learn how to distill the needs of the application, apply the portal composite design pattern, and manage users and access.
The following articles and tutorials provide training and specific instructions for the essential activities of the On Demand Business framework:
Integration
Simplified portal applications with DB2 Information Integrator: Interested in simplifying your Web or portal-based applications that access relation and non-relational data? Use this tutorial to learn how to develop applications that bring all of this data together in a simple relational view. You'll learn how the integration capabilities of DB2 Information Integrator enables you to rapidly deploy portal applications. DB2 Information Integrator provides a single interface to heterogeneous information, allowing you to focus on the portal interface, content, and logic.
Building Portals with Enterprise Information Integration Technology: Using Enterprise Information Integration (EII) technology to develop portal application components that integrate data from disparate sources can simplify design issues and cut coding requirements by 50 percent or more. In this article, we'll explain why and review a project in which we built functionally equivalent portal components with and without EII.
Virtualization
Grid computing -- next-generation distributed computing: As companies strive to utilize their existing computing assets and to become more flexible to respond to rapidly evolving markets by being able to intelligently allocate finite resources to the appropriate business applications, the concept of grid computing has made significant inroads. Get a head start on your future with this article, which provides a cursory analysis of the similarities and differences between grid computing and such distributed computing systems as P2P, CORBA, cluster computing, and DCE.
Accessing DB2 UDB using the Globus Toolkit and OGSA-DAI: Are you interested in experimenting with grid technology with grid technology with DB2 UDB? This article contains instructions for setting up and accessing IBM DB2 Universal Database through the open source grid technologies and OGSA-DAI and Globus Toolkit.
Geographically dispersed grid, Part 1: When your grid is spread across sites -- or continents -- what's the best way to manage the data and compute components of grid jobs? The author investigates the challenges you must face, in this first article in a four-part series.
Build Grid portals with GridPort3: This free tool aggregates grid services and provides an API to build grid portals. This article shows you how.
Automation
Take a quick tour of autonomic computing: Autonomic computing architecture is a range of software technologies that enable you to build an information infrastructure that can, to lesser and greater degrees, manage itself, saving countless hours (and dollars) in human management. And all this without giving up control of the system. This tutorial explains the concepts behind autonomic computing and looks at the tools at your disposal for making it happen -- today.
ABCs of the Autonomic Computing Toolkit: Refreshed by popular demand, this definitive guide about the Autonomic Computing Toolkit is the quickest way to become familiar with the Toolkit's newest release.
The state of autonomic computing: Ric Telford, Director for Autonomic Computing at IBM, talks about the state of autonomic computing today and the challenges of developing with, and for, next-generation autonomic systems.
