Sales pitch or public service announcement to follow, depending on your point of view. In any event, Dr. Dobb's DVD Release 4 is now available. The DVD includes all articles, source-code listings, and more, from January 1988 to (and including) December 2007. By my count, that's 20 years worth of DDJ packed onto a single DVD.

But wait--there's more! No, we haven't included Ginsu knives, but we have included 14+ years of the C/C++ Users Journal, 4 years of The Perl Journal, and 4 years of Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook. We've also thrown in dozens of audio podcasts, and new with this year's edition are videos.

The DVD is cross-platform, running on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.

And the price is right--$49.95 for the time being--unless you're an upgrade person. Then the price is only $29.95. Who qualifies as an upgrade? Well, if you've previously purchased a Dr. Dobb's CD or DVD, or known someone who has, or heard about someone who has--well, that probably puts you in the ball park.

So don't waste time. The holiday season is upon us and if you're like me, you've been wondering what holiday gift you were going to get for your mother. Now, like me, you don't have to worry. Happy holidays, Mom! Here's that Dr. Dobb's DVD Release 4 you've always wanted.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

In the previous installment, I talked about the architect and the architectural decisions, I also said (okay, "wrote") that architects do more than that. Well, here are a few of the duties I think architects should have (sometimes not exclusively).

The folks at AdventNet have taken the Zoho Writer word processor offline with the Google Gears API. Previously you could save read-only versions to proof your work, say on a flight to China, but now you can go offline with multiple docs and edit them locally. Once you're back online, the Gear-enabled Zoho Writer handles the syncing and versioning between online and offline docs. Not all the online features are available offline, but it's a pretty robust Ajax app.

This week we return to the topic of Entity, Activity, and Process services and compare their usages as top-level SOA elements and as implementation details of the application architecture inside a business service.
And the question that this answers is: