One of the things that is a constant surprise is finding clients with slow Java systems that spend a tonne of cash on new hardware but don’t configure their systems to make full use of it.  A classic problem is leaving the application server settings as per first install, with very low JVM heap size and a poor garbage collector, another problem being running only one instance of a JVM, a situation where you may have a new server with 4GB of RAM and a quad-core CPU but running the software in only 512MB RAM with threading likely to be tied to a single core.

Sceneric consultants are experts at optimising our clients platforms to ensure the hardware is properly utilised.  Our consultants have deployed applications on clustered IBM Websphere, Weblogic, Oracle iAS and JBoss servers, and have created Coldfusion Enterprise clusters on JRun 4.0 leading to significant performance and stability gains.

The key thing to remember is that Java runs within a virtual machine which has limits ordinarily significantly smaller than the avialable hardware.   Without explicit tuning expertise applied, the applications running within the virutal machine will not be performing to their optimum potential.

Some things in life are just the “right” thing to do.  Take implementing a content managed website.  In the early days of content management systems (CMS), there was often no division of content from presentation.  This meant that changing branding & look and feel or re-using content across trading divisions was difficult and costly.  Also, the content was only available as HTML, there was no ability to make the content available through any other mechanism without considerable extra work.

However, even these systems could be implemented correctly, separating content from presentation and utilising content tagging to allow web experiences to be personalised.  Sceneric has built a number of award winning websites forcing this separation and providing the content as discrete, tagged items of information.  This very much the building blocks of the semantic web and can be demonstrated by Friends Provident’s news items being made available as an RSS feed with only 1 hours development, the first FTSE100 company to offer this service. Sceneric have published these guidelines as best practice which can be downloaded here.

This approach has been formalised by all modern CMS projects, in the JSR170 Java standard as used by Magnolia, LiveRay, Alfresco and Oracle CMS, and in the templated approach of Joomla, Drupal, CMS Made Simple in the PHP and Python arena.  In fact, Microsoft’s Sharepoint is also an excellent implementation of this idea.

The key point is that project implementation can be just as rapid and cost the same to produce a platform that seperates content and presentation as to rush something into production that will cost orders of magnitude more to fix in future.

I first started using ATG at version 5.1 in 2001.  It struck me at the time as an excellent eCommerce product suite and as my role over the years from changed from consultant to purchaser and back again I was surprised that there were very few (if any) equivalent packages out there.  As the director of a company building solutions in Financial Services and Retail with the ATG platform, I’ve been struck by 2 things:

• ATG’s ability to rapidly develop a new online store, and to maximise conversions with personalisation software is still market leading
• With the advent of Web 2.0, the personalization, user profiling, content management, data exposure and integration functionality made me realise that ATG has been a leader in this area, providing Web 2.0 functionality in the early days of the web

In the early naughties it was often difficult to explain the capabilities of ATG to users – with Web 2.0 ideas becoming prevalent it’s now much easier to explain them leading me to think that ATG was indeed ahead of it’s time.

With the launch of Facebook connect, web users have immediate access to over 120 million registered Facebook users.  We’re helping our clients take advantage of this by integrating their site’s with Facebook at registration time – if a user is registered on Facebook they can register on a “Facebook Connected” site with a single button click.  By removing a barrier to entry, registration numbers increase and more users are attracted to the web experience.

The 2nd level of integration is the ability to share event data between the sites.  Imagine you have a web site that tracks steps in a financial process, or your progress in a sports league.  By integrating this with Facebook the event notifications appear in the Facebook status notifications, building your brand and attracting new visitors to your site.

As social networking becomes the standard web application, it’s important not to lose business to competitors who understand the value of recommendation marketing.