Skiing as an agile vs waterfall metaphor
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the wee hours: January 31st, 2010
I was asked by one of my clients to give a short introduction into Agile. As we did not have an appropriate presentation for this kind of audience and knowledge level I decided to create a new presentation. And while I was thinking of a good metaphor to compare traditional waterfall against agile methodologies the pictures of my recent snowboarding trip caught my eye and it hit me; Skiing (or snowboarding) is a very good metaphor to compare both methodologies.
It has the same characteristics as a project in that once you get started it just keeps on going; There are other projects (or skiers) in your way, environments change and conditions might not be what you expected them to be.
Let's see how it works out:
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Web performance in seven steps: Summary and Conclusions
Posted by Jeroen Borgers at around evening time: January 20th, 2010
Previous time I blogged about the last step of the seven steps, step 7: Share the responsibility for the whole chain, a non-technical but rather a communication and behavior thing which I found crucial for success. We now have reached the end of this series and I'll sum up the topics we've dealt with and draw some conclusions. (more...)
Slow change in agile consultancy
Posted by Luuk Dijkhuis around lunchtime: January 20th, 2010
We as Agilists are extremely result driven: delivering value to the customer as soon as possible is the axle around which our work and vision revolve. This can help us but also hamper us in the process of bringing Agile to a non-Agile environment. Being aware of this may already help us be more effective in bringing about changes in an effective way. The question “is this a quick-change or a slow-change organization” should be an explicit part of your analysis. Be patient!
Using Spring JavaConfig on Google App Engine
Posted by Andrew Phillips at around evening time: January 17th, 2010
Recently, I put together a Spring demonstration for jclouds, the Java cloud library. This quickly turned into unexpected multi-dimensional experiment in integrating Guice, Google App Engine and Spring, but after much trial-and-error I finally came across a configuration that does the trick - or at least works1 as well as seems possible on GAE. (more...)
Middleware integration testing with JUnit, Maven and VMware, part 3 (of 3)
Posted by Vincent Partington in the wee hours: January 7th, 2010
Last year, before the Christmas holidays 
, I described how we do middleware integration testing at XebiaLabs and I described the way we deploy test servlets by wrapping them in WAR and EAR files that get generated on the fly. There is only one thing left to explain; how do we integrate these tests into a continuous build using Maven and VMware?
Running the middleware integration tests
So let's start with the Maven configuration. As I mentioned in the first blog of this series, the integration tests are recognizable by the fact that the classnames end in Itest. That means they won't get picked up by the default configuration of the Maven Surefire plugin. And that is fortunate because we don't always want to run these tests. Firstly they require a very specific test setup (the application server configurations should be in an expected state, see below) and secondly they can take a long time to complete and that would get in the way of the quick turnaround we want from commit builds in our continuous integration system.
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Integrating Tivoli Access Manager with JBoss AS 4.x
Posted by Mark Bakker in the early morning: December 22nd, 2009
Introduction
Currently I am working at a big Enterprise where they use Tivoli Access Manager as authorization and authentication source for a lot of there applications.
This Enterprise is using JBoss as open source application server platform and is using this more and more. When they began using JBoss they got a TAM plug-in for JBoss from IBM. This plug-in did the complete authorization and authentication by implementing JAAS and registering all the used security roles in TAM. This is done during deployment time.
If you have an application with a lot of roles this is very frustrating because it can take a lot of extra time to start up (think of 30 minutes per application) because TAM is synchronizing all the new roles.
Most applications at this customer are using JAAS but do not have special method level authorizations implemented by using TAM. So only the roles are important.
After realizing this I thought is could be a good idea to create a simpler solution for integration TAM and JBoss. For this I wrote some custom code (only 250 lines).
Future of deployment: Part 1 – Monuments vs Cheap housing
Posted by Robert van Loghem in the early evening: December 21st, 2009
I'm going to start a series on the future of deployment. How and what do we deploy in, say 5 years or so. Of-course this is my opinion and please add your own ideas in the comments below.
To start this series off i'm going to talk about the current state of things, or at least what i see at a lot of enterprise customers. Most of the enterprises i've been at have physical servers which are used by numerous applications from different development teams. Some of these servers are old and have been in maintenance by operations for years (+4 years ). That means that the server has changed, lots of deltas, aka, patches, deployments etc. have been applied and as my colleague Vincent has stated applying deltas has its cons Of-course i'm talking about servers and not applications and the same rules do not apply, or do they?
Google Guice and Multibinding
Posted by Mischa Dasberg around lunchtime: December 21st, 2009
Last week I started migrating an application that used Spring for DI to Google Guice when I stumbled on multibinding.
Since Google Guice 2.0 we can use Multibinding which allows us to bind multiple objects to a collection.
But the one thing I missed in the current release is the ability to bind objects with a specific annotation. So I thought, why not build it myself 
Middleware integration testing with JUnit, Maven and VMware, part 2 (of 3)
Posted by Vincent Partington at around evening time: December 14th, 2009
Last week I wrote about the approach we use at XebiaLabs to test the integrations with the different middleware products our Java EE deployment automation product Deployit supports.
The blog finished with the promise that I would discuss how to test that an application can really use the configurations that our middleware integrations (a.k.a. steps) create. But before we delve into that, let us first answer the question as to why we need this. If the code can configure a datasource without the application server, it must be OK for an application to use it, right? Well, not always. While WebSphere and WebLogic contain some functionality to test the connection to the database and thereby verify whether the datasource has been configured correctly, this functionality is not available for other configurations such as JMS settings. And JBoss has no such functionality at all. So the question is: how can we prove that an application can really work with the configurations created by our steps?
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Improving web application performance by parallelizing requests
Posted by Kris Geusebroek mid-afternoon: December 9th, 2009
For a web application i develop we had a problem with the performance. After a small investigation we found out that it had relations with the amount of requests to the server that were done.
The application is running in a browser (currently IE7) and browsers are generally limited to do not more then 2 parallel request to the same domain.(this has improved a bit in later versions of the browsers). In this post i will describe the quest for solutions.
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