FirstPartners.net build the ugly bits of websites. Not the lovely front ends but the bits that do the heavy lifting – the bits that ensure your bank balance is correct, that your ticket is there when you arrive at the airport, or bits that capture your teams’ knowledge . We deliver using a combination of Enterprise Java Technology, our custom Red-Piranha framework and Agile project techniques.

More at www.FirstPartners.net

Ken of Calmar has just sent out information on Irish Consultants .ie - it does exactly what it says on the tin.

It’s not just for Information Technology Consultants (where yours truly lives), but the site also covers:

• Advertising & Media
• Archaeological
• Design
• Environmental
• Financial
• General Management
• Health & Safety
• Human Resources
• Information Technology
• Legal
• Marketing
• Property Management
• Public Relations
• Research & Development
• Risk Management
• State & Semi State Agencies
• Training & Development

Basic listing is free, although a ‘premium’ listing costs around 300 Euro. That sounds a very ‘Web 2′ business model , even if the site (thankfully) doesn’t use those words!

[Link to crisp OO and Java consultants]
It’s clear , it’s honest , and more importantly , it’s not trying to sell you anything (Rational consultants, you know who you are). Ok, they’re not trying to sell you anything , not unless you’re in the market for a bit of OO consultancy in Sweden.

[Link to BHConsulting.ie]

Now , Brian Honan has started blogging and the content is well worth checking out. Brian is a Dublin based Enterprise Security Consultant whose writing will make you suitably paranoid.

If you’re planning to travel by Irish Rail, don’t trust the timetable information given out by it’s website. On a recent trip from Drogheda to Portadown, the actual outgoing and return times were between 5 and 10 minutes earlier, due to timetable changes made up to 6 months before. It’s all very well getting consultants to redesign your website , like CIE did recently , but if your organisation can’t keep it up to date , what’s the point?

There’s no excuse for giving out inaccurate information. Translink , the company that operates the northern half of the Dublin-Belfast Enterprise service, manages to display the correct train times. Incidentally , Translink is also publicly owned , so the ’shrug shoulders it’s just public service’ excuse isn’t valid either.

Get your act together , and display accurate times, or don’t give out any information at all. I made the train , but how many people have been caught out by this? Bluire has found more reasons to be angry with Irish Rail.

Update: Red Cardinal has shown that at least the ex-CIE group of companies are consistent, with Bus Eireann showing an appalling web design for their site.

Update 2: Ken reports about a recent webchat with Irish Rail. Interesting reading.

Update 3: And I thought I had problems. This is much worse.

I hadn’t checked the stats for a while , so I’m astonished to learn that 25,000 people have downloaded a copy from sourceforge. What’s more amazing is that these downloads are for version 1 – a sort of ‘mini Google’. As I write this post the latest (beta) version is being made available to developers. This moves it firmly into the Enterprise Web 2.0 space, adding workflow, rules and rich internet application capabilities (including Ajax and mashups) – more on this blogpost.

By the way , if you’re looking for more information on Enterprise Web 2.0 , you can check out Jerry Bowles blog on this area.

By Paul Browne

Can’t make it along in person? We’re going to do a 2nd Java meetup, but in a ‘virtual pub’ for people who find it hard to get to Dublin. We’ll still carry on with the existing (face to face) meetups. As an extra, at 7.30pm the last Tuesday of the month we’ll have an open chat session (We’ll setup chat software on this or another website).

So, for 7.30pm on Tuesday 25th July I’ll be online. We’ll start with ‘What technologies should I be learning in the next 12 months?’ and let things develop from there.

1. Write a Project Outline. Say exactly what will (and just as importantly) won’t be carried out as part of the project. This can take a lot of time to put together, but is essential to avoid trouble later. Even better get the client to pay you to write this, as it’s vital for them as well.
2. Client dependencies. Do you depend on the client to get things done? If so, specify exactly what the must provide and when. Can’t specify exactly when you need (and there are many projects where this is the case)? Then do the work on a time and Materials basis only.
3. Be visible to end client. The temptation is to go into a dark corner and start coding. The trouble is that you emerge blinking into the daylight at the end to find (i) The client frantic with worry about how the project is going and (ii) that events have happened that you sh. ould have known about. Price in regular time on the client site to keep in touch.
4. Contingency. A wise man once said (In this case the instructor at the PMBOK course in Chicago): ‘If you can’t carry out the project with 15% time left over , don’t start it. For fixed price projects, make this something like 30% as the client will ask you to do little ‘extras’ and you can’t ask for extra money for every single one.
5. Almost as important as knowning when to start (see point 1) is knowing when to finish. Document everything and do a final ‘handover’ day (a good idea is to hand over a CD whith all project deliverables on it). If you don’t do this, the project will never end, and you will never get paid.

Notice that all these items are about process , and not technology. Put simply; you can mess up your project just as easily using Java , PHP or .Net . Mess up as an employee or consultant, you get shouted at by the boss. Mess up on a fixed price and you’re into serious pain as you burn through (unpaid) extra time.

Scandanavian Airlines (SAS) Website.

Hint to SAS: Here is how to fix this (pdf), or hire us and we’ll fix it for you.

Or if you prefer , reassure yourself that you’re not the only airline with Ajax problems.
More blogposts on Ajax.

• Gets information from users over the web
• Does some business processing on that information
• Saves the information in a database.

At a conservative estimate , about 99% of Enterprise systems would fall into this category.

If so, why do you need an architect , when you can use our ‘one size fits all’ architecture diagram (below)?! Most non-trivial systems, regardless of the language they are written in (be it Java, .Net , or your language of choice) follow the pattern seen in this diagram.

3 Tier Enterprise Diagram

There are 3 Pieces to the Solution:

• Web Browser (for the user / client).
• Web and Application Server – carry out business logic.
• Database Back End – to store data and ensure data integrity.

Within the Application Server (the middle bit above, which as Java Architects is the bit we are interested in), there are a further 3 tiers

• A Presentation tier (or layer), which is mainly about talking to the user (it gets and sends requests to the web browser).
• A Service layer , which is mainly about talking to back end such as databases, legacy systems (such as mainframes) and XML-Web services that we may use.
• A Business layer, the ‘meat’ of the sandwich, where the ‘Value add’ is in terms of business processing and validation.

For each of these layers , your priority in building them are slightly different.

• The Presentation layer is the bit the user sees. You want it to be fast and give a good impression to the client. Underneath, use a standard framework (link: pick your framework here) and then customize the look and feel.
• The Service layer you want to work fast and well (e.g. no data faults), but then then forget about. Unless things go wrong, no user is going to complement you on the quality of database persistence! Use standard libraries for the entire layer.
• Unless your company is a clone or franchise, the business layer in the system is going to be completely different. Aside from the user-interface , concentrate most of your project effort here as this is the core of what system does. We’ve written quite a bit about how to increase the value-add of the business layer (link to O’Reilly Technical Articles)

By the way , we’re only half-joking about the ‘why do you need an architect’ bit. We can be contacted here.