I have now booked exam 701: IBM Lotus Notes Domino 7 Application Development Update for April 10 and hope to pass in order to upgrade my IBM Certified Advanced Application Developer – Lotus Notes and Domino certification from R6 to R7.
In preparing for the exam I am using the resources listed on the exam 701 page plus an article on Web Services:
Ted Stanton – one of the bloggers from InsideLotus – has kicked off what he calls Sametime Sunday with a presentation of the chat history in the upcoming Sametime 7.5 release. Stay tuned for more Sametime Sunday blogs.
Some interesting news from around the blogosphere:
The Redbook Security Considerations in Notes and Domino 7: Making Great Security Easier to Implement has just been published.
One of the authors is Richard Schwartz who has his own blog at Power of the Schwartz.
Rational Data Architect has been announced:
“IBM® Rational® Data Architect is an enterprise data modeling and integration design tool designed to help data architects design relational and federated databases, understand data assets and their relationships and streamline database projects.”
Update: a DeveloperWorks article called “Use Rational Data Architect to integrate data sources”has been published that shows some of the features of Rational Data Architect.
April 11 update: DevX has published the article “Pulling it All Together with IBM Rational Data Architect” that “gives new users a top-level view of RDA and touches on some of its core features with a couple of quick walkthroughs.“
Via the Mainframe blog I came across a post on reasons for running Linux on the mainframe. The post is very interesting and discusses the I/O difference between a mainframe and a PC based server.
I am currently involved in a project that establishes several Linux servers in both a DMZ and in an internal LAN all running in z/VM on a mainframe. Some of the purposes of these Linux servers is to load balance and reverse proxy requests from the Internet to back end systems.
Peter Eeles (Senior IT Architect, IBM) today published an article in developerWorks Architecture on the characteristics of a software architect. The article is an interesting read on the role of an architect in software development projects.
As I see it Peter Eeles is describing the T-shape of skills that the software architect must have – horisontal breadth combined with vertical depth (broad experience and deep specific knowledge). Philip Hartman has heard this described as a Pi-shape.
I am not quite there yet – but I am working on it 🙂
The presentations from the nordic Lotusphere Comes to You sessions are available on ibm.com:
Ed Brill has just posted an entry in his blog showing the latest Lotus Sametime 7.5 alpha 2 release. I am also running the alpha 2 release along with many other early adopters inside IBM. This way of mass testing a product both internally and externally before being publicly released to our customers is very common in IBM.
The alpha release was released for internal test this friday and the alpha2 release that Ed is showing was released yesterday.
Andy Piper recently blogged about this upcoming release also.
There has been lots of fuzz lately around whether IBM will move away from Windows (and not use Vista at all) and instead completely switch to Linux for desktop clients used internally.
IBMeye has an article on the subject that clarifies a lot on what IBM is doing with Windows and Linux.
I will not comment on the rumours but I can add that I run the internal IBM customized Windows XP as my primary desktop client on my Thinkpad T40 and that I also run the IBM customized Linux desktop client.