Software Engineering - Best Practices

[Tech] Integrate Tests as a Language Featuere?

2009-11-09T14:51:00.004+01:00

The blog of Cedric Beust (author of TestNG and captured by Google) is always an interesting read.His last posting discusses the question if generic test features should be included into the language:http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000522.htmlHe mentioned an interesting D feature. Personally I...

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[Misc] Subversion turns into an Apache Project: so what?

2009-11-08T06:19:00.007+01:00

Since a few days it is official: The Subversion project has submitted to become an Apache project. It seems that the incubation phase will start soon. Now my question: Subversion is conceptually dead, so what difference does that make? Ok, let's discuss this a little more in detail:The thing is:...

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[Tech] 7 Languages in 7 weeks

2009-10-30T11:48:00.005+01:00

Dear Readers,als you are all interested in programming languages I would like to point your interest to this link which I was pointed at (lots of thanks to the source!):http://rapidred.com/blog/seven_languagesIt is from the blog of Bruce Tate we all know as one the Java Experts and his stunning...

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[Arch] Resource for Software Architecture

2009-10-27T08:30:00.003+01:00

I've found a realy good resource for german audience about software architecture hosted on MSDN. On the MSDN Architecture Center you'll find:Actual news and trends about software architectureBasic information about software architecture (concepts, styles, etc.)PodcastsTool PreviewsA free english...

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[Conf] Zurich Open Source Jam

2009-09-08T09:54:00.013+02:00

On August 13th, more than 50 other people, interested in open source software, attended the 8th Google Open Source Jam in Zurich, which is an informal (bar-camp like) meet-up at Zurich office (also available in other parts of the world) and a perfect opportunity to meet other open source...

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[Process] Distributed Source Code Management and Branching

2009-09-03T09:08:00.005+02:00

I am using Mercurial a lot recently (and love it); I really do wonder, why I struggled so long with Subversion. When I first heard the GIT presentation from Linus Torvalds (which is, hm, very entertaining) the whole distributed SCM thing sounded very esotheric for me. However I decided to give it a...

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[Misc] Clojure & Clojure Book Review

2009-09-01T08:26:00.006+02:00

It looks like we are living in a fantastic time concerning programming languages. Creating a new language has never been easier then before. With the two great platforms Java and .Net it's not extremely difficult any more to generate intermediate code from the language you are dreaming of. And even...

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[Misc] Two Pragprog Books Reviewed

2009-08-31T15:55:00.005+02:00

Book Review: The passionate programmer and Pragmatic Thinking & LearningRecently I am getting more and more attracted by the books from "The Pragmatic Programmers / Bookshelf" (link). So I share my thoughts with a review of three books for you. Here I review:Chad Fowler, "The Passionate...

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[Arch] UML Tools for Mac OS X

2009-08-20T09:40:00.006+02:00

Following up a question I received via Twitter, and the fact, that a significant part of the developer-community is using Macs, I thought this might be a good opportunity to discuss some "UML Options" for the Mac. Now, this article is not meant as a definitive answer, I would hope for some...

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[Tech] Monitor your WS calls

2009-07-02T15:05:00.003+02:00

If you develop applications, which consumes web services from other applications or integration platforms, debugging can often be very deflating. If you don't use the correct debugging tools, you don't see the generated SOAP messages which are delivered between the parties.A very useful tool is the...

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[Pub] Mule Tutorial

2009-07-02T09:00:00.001+02:00

In the current issue of the Java Magazin I published a tutorial to develop loose coupled systems with Mule. The tutorial illustrates the usage of an Enterprise Service Bus in an airport domain, where different airport systems communicate with each other over the ESB. In the example I use a set of...

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[Misc] Hot deployment with Mule 3 M1

2009-06-29T16:50:00.004+02:00

Some interesting news from the Open Source ESB Mule. The first milestone from the third version of Mule is out and comes with a major important feature: Hot DeploymentWhat is the meaning of hot deployment?Hot deployment is a process of deploying/redeploying service components without having restart...

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[Misc] Resilient Services & Software Engineering

2009-06-18T11:17:00.004+02:00

I recently read the interesting paper by Brad Allenby and Jonathan Fink "Toward Inherently Secure and Resilient Societies" published in Science August 2005 Vol. 309 and surprisingly enough, free to download. This paper is apparently "inspired" by the attack to the World Trade Center, however...

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[Misc] Technical Debt

2009-06-13T15:33:00.001+02:00

Recently I stumbled over a smart blog entry about the 'technical debt' (link).The idea is quite nice: imagine everyone would have a 'perfect' software system in mind to be build. Well in fact we live in a 'real world' and a 100% perfect project is always a goal but not the current status. But of...

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[Tech] Cloud Computing

2009-06-09T10:54:00.003+02:00

As I think, I already mentioned here, I believe, that Cloud Computing (and Software as a Service, but this is a slightly different topic) are true game changers in our understanding of software infrastructure and development/deployment. Currently things are still quite rough around the edges, but I...

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[Tech] Kent Beck's JUnit Max

2009-05-26T08:45:00.003+02:00

JUnit is a testing-framework well known to every Java developer (according ports to other languages exist). Kent Beck and Erich Gamma were the core-developers of JUnit, which was published around 2000 as Open-Source framework. It is fair to say, that JUnit and its ports had a huge influence on...

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[Tech] What about Maven 3

2009-04-21T21:04:00.003+02:00

At thte last Maven Meetup Jason van Zyl talked about the future of Maven and important milestones of Maven 3, including:Support of incremental buildingsChanges about the Plugin-APIBetter Multilanguage supportand moreThe video and slides about the presentation are available here.

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[Misc] Sun and Oracle

2009-04-21T11:29:00.004+02:00

Now it finally happened: Oracle bought Sun for 7,4 billion dollar. It sure is a little bit surprising, as the deal with IBM seemed to be settled already. From a developers point of view, the Oracle deal might be better for the community, allthough it also has certain risks.For IBM Java is...

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[Arch] Maven Best Practices

2009-04-14T15:29:00.003+02:00

In this blog of sonatype there is a useful list of best practices with Maven, including:Why putting repositories in your pom is a bad ideaBest Practices for releasing with 3rd party snapshot dependenciesMaven Continuous Integration Best PracticesHow to detect if you have a snapshot versionOptimal...

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[Misc] Open Protocol vs. Twitter: 1:0 ?

2009-04-11T16:20:00.006+02:00

In a current ZDNet Blog Posting, Sam Diaz analyses the recent technical issues Twitter has (again). Twitter is growing dramatically in the last months and apparently the Twitter backbone is increasingly in trouble. The same happened already about a year ago.The analysis of Sam Diaz is of course...

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[Process] Successful Distributed Agile Development

2009-04-10T10:01:00.002+02:00

Andy Singleton from Assembla wrote a nice blog entry about success-factors in distributed agile development. He focusses on 6 factors:Fix-schedules for releasesContinuous BuildTicketingDaily Report and ChatTeam-Activity StreamsRecruitementI am missing automated testing and QS though, which I...

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[Tech] Mavenizing AppEngine!

2009-04-09T21:29:00.002+02:00

As I nagged yesterday about the fact, that AppEngine has no proper Maven-build system, already today the guys at Sonatype reacted ;-)They describe preliminary attempts in how to "Mavenize" AppEngine projects; hope they will be able to fix also the last issues!

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[Tech] Google AppEngine (and Java)

2009-04-08T21:13:00.003+02:00

AppEngine is a rather recent new service from Google. It is probably Google's answer to Amazon's cloud-computing platform, yet targets a very different market. Where Amazon offers a a broad range of services and high flexibility (with the disadvantage of higher administration effort) Google targets...

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[Misc] Operating Systems for Netbooks

2009-04-01T11:18:00.003+02:00

Netbooks are different from notebooks and desktops; they are used in other contexts, have smaller screens, not so powerful hardware, less diskspace and so on. Windows is hardly the best system for regular desktops and notebooks (in my opinion) and definitly only a temporary solution for the netbook...

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[Tech] HSQLDB Version 1.9 alpha is out

2009-03-25T07:56:00.003+01:00

Finally hsqldb 1.9 (alpha, though) is released. This release was announced for, I believe, nearly one year. It seemed to me already that hsqldb is a rather dead projects. I am glad they made the next round, because in a way I still like that system a lot. Sure, Apache Derby is most likely the...

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