We had on our newsgroups at news://news.components4developers.com recently a question about if kbmMW can be considered a 'corporate product'.

My answer to that was that in our opinion, yes, but we certainly dont have the marketing muscles of the big ones that are considered 'corporate'. I consider something to be 'Corporate' if the following conditions are fullfilled:

1. It serves a corporate purpose
2. It provides a reasonable ROI
3. It is backed by a stable organization/vendor
4. It has a future
5. It is maintainable
6. It is maintained

Lets take them one at a time:

1) Well.. if it doesnt serve any purpose in corporate sense (eg. a company cant use it for something useful), it isnt corporate.
2) If it is costing an arm and a leg to install or use to serve purpose 1, then it isnt corporate.
3) If its looking like abandonware, or anyway highriscware, then it isnt corporate. A company has to be able to trust that the vendor is around to support it.
4) If the product do not have a future, its not corporate. There is no idea for a company to spend energy on something without a future.
5) If the product is next to impossible to maintain and require too many manhours, its not corporate.
6) If the product is not maintained it means that the product is reaching a status that would kick in point 4. No future. Its not corporate.

In reality I see large corporations use products that they consider corporate, but that typically do not live up to those 6 criterias. Lets look at some examples:

Sun - J2EE: For the most part it doesnt live up to the 2nd and 5th criteria. It is typically difficult to get to perform (why there are lots of highly paid contractors in that area), and its equally difficult to deploy an application server. Some vendors of application servers have made it somewhat easier than others, but the base line is that a scalable, performing production deployment is not easily made.

Sun - JMS: In addition to the difficulties in deploying a production system, thus violating point 5, it also violates 2 as JMS by itself does absolutely nothing. Routing mechanisms, request/response mechanisms, quality of service mechanisms etc. must all be handcoded by each project wanting to implement JMS. There exists frameworks based on JMS that makes this somewhat easier, but that may actually end up in making the maintainability even worse.

Microsoft - VB: The number of VB3-6 applications still running in corporate environments are quite staggering. However it is abandonware, and no longer maintained by MS, hence violating 3, 4 and 6. In addition upgrading in the good old days from one VB version to another usually required rewriting specially the database access code as MS had an idea to reinvent the wheel on a 6 months basis.

Microsoft - .Net: That surely must be corporate, right? Well.. the corporations that based millions of US$ on VB in the good old days should actually have removed the 'Corporate' label of that product, although most havnt. The trackrecord (as in whats the chance your application can be recompiled with the next version) of MS development products except perhaps for Visual C/C++, has not really been something to make corporations feel a good warm fuzzy gut feeling. The amount of US$ spend to rewrite existing applications to move them to the new version or to support the new Vista etc. is simply staggering. People who believed in WinForms being the future also have to count with uncertainty to what amounts of rewrites are needed.

IBM - Visual Age for Java. It was actually a very capable Java development IDE, with some features that made it really unique. After IBM chose to drop VA for Eclipse, developers using VA had no choise but to follow to the new platform, despite that the new IDE didnt contain all the wizard functionality originally found in VA.

IBM - ComponentBroker. IBM's CORBA solution for Java and C++. It was dropped about 4 months after I attended a quite expensive course in the product. Fortunately we the company I worked for at the time didnt get to actually integrate it into something, but if we had, it would have cost serious US$ to replace it with something still maintained and supported. In addition it was cumbersome and errorprone to use it. However it was still considered 'Corporate' all the way until it was dismissed.

In my opinion, the label 'Corporate product' often is a synonym with big, difficult to use, difficult to manage, difficult to deploy, overly expensive software backed by the 3-4 most PR active IT companies.

What is your definition of 'Corporate'?

Kim

People who have registered on our myc4d portal or on TurboMiddleware now have access to a new cool freeware utility - kbmDiff.

As the name says, its a tool that can compare files and show you the differences. In addition it allows you to manually merge selected differences from one file to the other.

I cant take the credit for all the work behind it, as 95% of it was made by Angus Johnson as a demo for his TDiff component. I have however added several features to it like:

• Ability to compare normally non comparable files like unformatted XML (ofcourse using kbmMW's DOM XML parser/generator) and binary files.
• Scrollwheel support
• Support for clicking and dragging in the right differences summary pane to show where the difference is in the text

and some more details here and there to imo improve the user experience.

The application is actually quite versatile, and can easily be compared with the typical commercial tools in the market.

Angus Johnson, who deserves every credit, have a home page here: http://angusj.com/delphi/ where the original source code for TDiff and the TextDiff (as his project was called) can be found.

To get the kbmDiff version of it signup at: www.myc4d.com or at www.turbomiddleware.com

best regards

Kim Madsen