The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (John P Baker) writes: > Back in the 80s, we operated under the premise that a seasoned > programmer should be able to produce 20 lines of bug-free assembler > code per day. there have been periodic statements that code generation can be the simplest part of the problem. we've periodically commented that the effort to produce a service can be 4-10 times that of a straight-forward application (or taking a well-tested and well-debugged application and turning it into a service can take 4-10 times the effort of the original application development). frequently this may have only a little to do with lines-of-code. we were called in to consult with a small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on servers ... they had this technology called SSL ... and subsequently the activity has frequently been referred to as "electronic commerce". Part of the infrastructure that the server payment application talked to was something called a "payment gateway" ... misc. past posts mentioning payment gateway activity http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway the initial take was to take transaction message formats from existing circuit-based infrastructure and map them to packets in internet infrastructure. this somewhat ignored a whole lot of telco provisioning that went into circuit-based operation ... and provided a basis for business critical dataprocessing ... which was all missing in the initial transition to internet-based operation. as part of supporting an operational environment (as opposed to somewhat trivial technology demonstration) ... we had to invent a lot of compensating processes for the internet environment. some other recent posts raising the issue about business critical dataprocessing http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#37 Is computer history taught now? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#51 IBM to the PCM market(the sky is falling!!!the sky is falling!!) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#78 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#10 The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#76 PSI MIPS http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#77 PSI MIPS http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#23 Outsourcing loosing steam? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
