Andrew Astor

This session will detail a best-practices approach to enterprise adoption of open source software, focusing on five common migration mistakes and recommendations for successfully avoiding them. We will cover the characteristics of open source offerings that make them especially s... (more)

In 1998, Michael Kunze wrote an article for c't, a biweekly German computing magazine, hoping to demonstrate that free software could be an effective substitute for its commercial counterparts. In the article, he coined the acronym "LAMP" to describe an illustrative collection of... (more)

This article makes the case that Web services provide a significant benefit to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance projects, and that they will therefore be used extensively on these projects. We begin with a very brief primer on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, then describe the connection between... (more)

Over the past couple of years, several technology vendors have defined a comprehensive set of specifications that, when complete, will provide an infrastructure for enterprise-class Web services interoperability. The names of these specifications generally begin with "WS-", so th... (more)

This article makes the case that Web services provide a significant benefit to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance projects, and that they will therefore be used extensively on these projects. We begin with a very brief primer on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, then describe the connection between... (more)

This column may require a little patience on your part, but I think it will be worth it in the end. Let's start with a simple premise: within a year, nearly everyone reading these words will be deeply impacted by Sarbanes-Oxley, yet many have never heard of it. The purpose of thi... (more)

We're at a major inflection point in the development of Web services; one that can be paralleled against the evolution of previous infrastructure technologies, including databases and programming environments. The next year will see certain vendors step forward to offer value-add... (more)

In many respects, Web services are nothing new. They are just a natural evolution of an approach to building systems that dates back 40 years. On the other hand, they hold the promise of truly transforming computing in the same way that client/server computing did over the past 1... (more)