Software Engineering: What Makes it Run The Software Engineering Online Learning Center sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) is a wealth of useful information for anyone interested in the disciplines this organization is committed to advancing knowledge in. Divided into webcasts, DB2 tutorials, Amazon.com and eBay tutorials, Java learning tools and Linux certification tutorials, the learning center strikes a good balance between open source and proprietary software. What makes the site especially useful is the successful use of IBM DB2 tutorials and free sample code downloadable for students. The IEEE has made working with its other partners a priority as well, as the content shows how effective this strategy has been. All the partnerships and content support the main purpose of the site, which is to provide students with both the deeply theoretical and practical, pragmatic insights necessary to excel in an engineering career. The pros or positive aspects of the site include the pervasive support and overview of open source technologies, the balanced approach it takes to IBM and other partners, and the ability to get to tutorials without having to go through a lengthy opt-in process. The cons or negatives are that there would be even more open source information available, including updates on the Linux distributions. There also could be more information on big data trends including...

Specifically looking at how to optimize the performance of XML networks where there are exceptionally large data sets designed using Hadoop, MapReduce and other big data oriented platforms is also critical for the long-term growth of enterprise software as well. At the center of the integration of XML protocols and schema and the big data sets based on Hadoop and MapReduce are the retrievability and reusability of taxonomies and query strings (Pal, Mitra, Kamps, 2011). This aspect of XML integration with large-scale data sets has major implications on how taxonomies can be streamlined, tailored to specific needs of smartphone and mobile device users as well (Gavalas, Economou, 2011). Initial test of these approaches to managing taxonomies with XML to preserve role-based queries show that this data format is slow and often cannot keep up with mobile traffic however (Tan, Liu, Wang, Shi, 2010). What is needed is a more streamlined approach…