I read recently that a tech vendor had "the largest market share in financial services", which seemed really impressive if it wasn't for the superscript number indicating there was a qualifier in the footnotes.  "Ranking applies only to pure-play EAI vendors," it read.  Oh, of course, EAI.  Whoops, I mean, what exactly is EAI?

According to whatis.com:

EAI (enterprise application integration) is a business computing term for the plans, methods, and tools aimed at modernizing, consolidating, and coordinating the computer applications in an enterprise. Typically, an enterprise has existing legacy applications and databases and wants to continue to use them while adding or migrating to a new set of applications that exploit the Internet, e-commerce, extranet, and other new technologies. EAI may involve developing a new total view of an enterprise's business and its applications, seeing how existing applications fit into the new view, and then devising ways to efficiently reuse what already exists while adding new applications and data.

Translation:  it's middleware.  And I know middleware isn't the easiest thing to understand, so let's just say EAI is the way you get data in and out of mainfranes (legacy systems) when you want to do something cool with those legacy systems like get them connected to the Internet.

"Pure-play middleware vendor" is an interesting concept though, since most middleware has grown as an extension of one of the connected systems.  I suppose this term is used to keep Oracle and Microsoft out of the comparisons with this firm, since Oracle dabbles in ERP and Microsoft meddles in everything.

Tags: EAI, middleware, you learn something new everyday

No, this is not a comment on English-only legislation for the United States (this is /tech...), just a link to a great little rant by Joel about which programming language to use for your software development project.

In the midst of my network design work, an application challenge has presented itself, and I'm diving back into Python to develop a solution.  So I was particularly interested to see Joel identify Python as the fourth "half"-alternative that might be appropriate for developing web-based apps "(C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python)".  I turned to Python because with my limited experience, I knew I could use it to expose some COM objects and crypto libraries that I needed for this task.  And basically because I'm still in the "if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" stage, and I'm confident with Python I can bang away at a problem and eventually get it into place.  I know this is antithetical to good programming practices, but as I've repeated over and over, "I'm not a developer, I'm a hack."

Tags: programming, languages, Python, hack