British policy makers seem to have a tendency to first develop land and then put suitable transport infrastructure in place. Obviously, a significant factor for people choosing their next residence is road infrastructure and, to a lesser degree, public transport. Current government plans include creating over 100,000 new houses in regions like the South East, partially to release some pressure from the already overcrowded London. In cities like Ashford, in Kent, the local job market is almost non-existent, and the only population that can potentially be attracted to these new developments are London commuters which move their residence but keep their jobs in London.
The recent advent of Web 2.0 no-software start-ups like 37signals, salesforce.com, Writely, etc. is getting plenty of attention by the media and VCs alike, but I have not seem much about the pricing model of these no-software business models.
While developing our trading application, I have come across two key things Rails does not have.
No, they never do. Here is the deal. A centralized Enterprise Architecture (EA) function represents a compromise between the distributed functions in the enterprise. The distributed functions give up some control to invest in the enterprise technology strategy. As with any good investment, the returns need to outweighed the risk profile, otherwise the business functions will pull out of the whole EA thingy.
The Java EE 5 architecture, with its use of annotations brings the Java world close to being agile. The architecture is absolutely fantastic and powerful, with superb messaging (JMS), persistence (EJB3), transactions (JTA), and integration (JCA) capabilities.