Readers who have read articles I have written over the course of the last decade will know that in the early 1990s I used to devote more time to rule-based techniques.

The more I'm involved in project planning meetings and project reviews, the more I see a particular problem crop up.

Microsoft has a long tradition of renaming things. In the case of its component standards, they have gone from OLE and OCXs to VBXs, and from COM and ActiveXs to Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). Now that Windows 2000 is out and COM and MTS have been combined, it's time for another name change, and apparently the new name is DNA components.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Cutter Consortium Summit 2000 and, over the course of this year's Summit, I sensed an undercurrent around Extreme Programming (XP) versus more conventional, model-driven development. I don't remember the issue being specifically framed for formal discussion and debate, but it was alluded to several times.

Recently, I was rereading one of my favorite stories about strategy implementation, It's Not Luck, by Eli Goldratt (North River Press, 1994). Once again, I was struck by a particular insight the protagonist has that many managers never acquire. Let me explain.

Sun held its annual Java Users Conference in San Francisco this past week. There were about 5,000 very enthusiastic people in attendance -- mostly young developers eager to learn the latest Java programming tricks.

I recently had a conversation with an old colleague from my quality assurance days on the topic of configuration management. As is typical in these conversations, the first challenge was to make sure we were talking about the same thing.

ASPs (application service providers) have been on the scene for about two years now. During that time, their early, almost exclusive, focus on ERP applications has expanded to include everything from e-mail to business intelligence. These applications are offered on a pay-as-you-go rental basis, which slashes the initial investment required to begin using them.

There were a number of interesting announcements at Java One and I'll be considering various different ones and their implications in upcoming few weeks.

When we are behind schedule, we often compound our problems by acting like we're behind schedule. The trouble is, we're behind schedule and don't realize what we are doing. There are, however, things we can do to break this downward spiral.

In discussions of the disruptive impact of the Internet on established business, the question is often asked, "Well, what about the railroads?" The implication is that the railroads apparently failed either to anticipate or to embrace the impact on transportation that airlines would ultimately have, much of that impact at the expense of the railroads.

As most readers know, Sun has moved away from supporting the Java language, as such, and prefers to create packages that include not only the Java Virtual Machine (Interpreter) and the basic classes to support the Java language, but also classes to support a wide variety of interface and data access functions, Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) and EJB components, applets, servlets, and IIOP, as well as a variety of utilit