March 18, 2019 Posted in Blogs, UX Design, Wireframe Design

I remember when I designed DBinsight many years ago, I drew the UI design on paper. During past 25 years, web-based applications have been increasing extraordinarily. Many organizations use intranet as internal business foundation and web-based applications as their production systems, which generates high demanding of UX design, and UX design tools, such as Balsamiq, Mockplus, Justinmind, etc. But none of them is free.

If you have MS Office and Visio 2010 or later installed, actually you already have decent wireframe / mockup tools after a few setups, no need to look further.

Let’s see how to setup MS PowerPoint as your mockup tool first.
If you haven’t installed a version of Visual Studio 2013 or later or Team Foundation Server Standalone Office Integration (free), then you will need i...

November 19, 2018 Posted in Blogs, Database, Enterprise Integration

Recently I worked on an interesting use case from auditing which requires to roll up status of lower level tables into higher level. We already have a tree hierarchical design in our data model.

There are two options: one is to handle the roll-up pair by pair; another is to design a context table which presents the tree structure and use Oracle hierarchical query to go through tree traversal based on depth first search. The second  option is obviously an optimized approach to go. Since it may easily handle larger size model – as long as we have the context table ready. Let’s dive in and see how we handled this.

First, I created a context table which presents the context id and parent context id relationship. It’s a self-reference table.

create table ls_context_info
(
  context_id numbe...

January 31, 2018 Posted in Blogs, BPM, Enterprise Integration, ESB, SOA

It’s an era with many directions! There are so many tools available for enterprise integration. To choose the right one usually means whether the organization may get expected return on the possible huge investment.

Each enterprise integration requirement can be different. I assume you are working in a SOA environment, facing the pressure to move to cloud, but not quite ready.

We will talk about our preferred BPM and ESB tools, plus the choice of SOA integration and web service protocols.

Let’s start from analyzing business requirements and setting the processes using BPM application. By defining business processes, we get well-defined boundaries of services.

BPM: Activiti (Open Source, Free)

Alfresco Activiti can be the best choice to define and manage business processes and workflows...