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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.

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 ...

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