my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

ZenQuery: From Idea To Product In 2 Weeks

Earlier this week I've launched a new product called ZenQuery. In a nutshell, ZenQuery is an application that creates an instant REST API (with JSON, XML and CSV formats) for SQL queries. This allows you to easily access any kind of data from your database without having to deal with technical details such as database drivers, connections, ORM or caching. A typical use case is an enterprise company which for example wants to create a new mobile application. The data needed for such ...

Surrounded By Idiots?

This week a video called 'The Expert' (based the short story "The Meeting" by Alexey Berezin) was spread by a CNET article aptly titled 'This is how an engineer feels when he's surrounded by idiots': I think most engineers can relate to this situation. However, the real question remains: Why do engineers time and time again find themselves in such Dilbertesque situations. Is it really because we're surrounded by idiots, nitwits and PHBs? Perhaps, but this is only a small part of the ...

Sunday April 6th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Resources For SaaS Businesses And Enterprise App Developers

SaaS Club is a new website that keeps track of relevant resources for SaaS businesses and developers. These resources are organized both in categories such as 'product', 'metrics' and 'sales' and according to their target audience, e.g. 'developers & designers' or 'managers & product people'. Enterprise App Developer Atlas is an 'interactive map of the developer journey', i.e. it's a catalogue of tools for enterprise web app development. Tools are organized according to product phases and aspects such as API, testing, deployment ...

Sunday March 9th, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Natural Language User Interfaces And Internet Search

Recently, there was an article at Wired about IBM’s Watson and how IBM might be able to supersede Google as the dominant search engine by providing a question-answering kind of search engine. Every few years the idea of a natural language / semantic / question answering search engine crops up again. Indeed, natural language understanding is quite relevant for the crawling and indexing part of information retrieval systems and Google is very good at that. Just look at their quite formidable automatic translation ...

Sunday November 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

i18n is a hard and largely unsolved problem

After last week's post about the intricacies of dealing with date and time representations in software I promised to write about another seemingly simple yet surprisingly complex area of software development: Internationalization. Some time ago a I wrote about an interesting presentation on i18n and localization in Rails by Heather Rivers of Yammer. If you're in any way dealing with internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) of software (which you basically should if you're into software development) have a look at the video of ...

Sunday June 30th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

The World Runs On Excel

There's been a lot of talk lately about the importance of Excel and that Excel is everywhere. I'd even go as far as saying that most of the world in one way or another runs on Excel. Excel in my opinion is the best piece of software Microsoft has made so far (other people seem to agree with me, by the way). While Microsoft didn't invent the spreadsheet - that credit goes to VisiCalc and IBM with Lotus 1-2-3 - they were ...

Saturday February 16th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Developing with Apache Wicket

I've been working with Apache Wicket on a rather complex client project for quite some time now and I'd like to share my experience. Apache Wicket is a component-based web app framework for Java. In contrast to MVC frameworks such as Rails (or Play and Grails in the Java world), which map requests to controller actions and views, Wicket is more similar to stateful GUI frameworks like Swing. Wicket applications are made up of trees of components. Each Wicket page is a root ...

Sunday January 27th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

WebSphere Blues

Lately, I've been doing a lot of work for a customer involving deployment and configuration of applications on IBM WebSphere Application Server. While I really dislike being the grumpy developer I just have to say that WebSphere Application Server - at least till version 6, which is the one I'm working on - sucks beyond measure. I can hardly think of any piece of software as ill-conceived, convoluted and error-prone as this one. Usually, Java applications live up to SUN's "Write once, run anywhere" claim but not so with IBM ...

Thursday November 22nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

Topicalizer – an information extraction suite – now open source

Topicalizer is a suite of text analysis and information extraction tools developed by me. It used to be available under http://www.topicalizer.com. However, I unfortunately don't have any time any more to properly maintain it, which is why I'm open-sourcing the code for others to learn from and build upon: https://github.com/BjoernKW/Topicalizer

Thursday November 22nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.