Developing and deploying Java on middleware and in the cloud: rise of the Virtual Appliance?
Posted by Andrew Phillips mid-morning: March 9th, 2010
From Java EE to Google App Engine to GigaSpaces, the idea of developing against a middleware or "infrastructure" API is well established in the Java world.
But these are fixed environments. With the (re-)advent of virtualization, it is now becoming feasible to package and rapidly provision your own environment, custom-designed to meet your application's needs.
As the big middleware vendors are realizing, it is not just possible to create such Virtual Appliances, but necessary: a production app's setup inevitably includes more than just a couple of EARs.
Here, we'll look at the current state of cloud and middleware deployment tooling, examine possible future developments and draw parallels between deployment and related processes.
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Implementing Deployit, part 2: technical considerations
Posted by Andrew Phillips around lunchtime: March 8th, 2010
In a recent post, XebiaLabs' CTO Vincent Partington discussed some important organizational topics you will want to address while introducing deployment automation using Deployit.
Preparing your organization is, of course, crucial to getting maximum possible benefits from deployment automation. A few technical considerations also apply when introducing Deployit, and here we'd like to go into these so that you can be sure your infrastructure is ready when it comes to carrying out your first fully automated deployment.
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Speed up your dev cycle with git
Posted by Iwein Fuld at around evening time: February 28th, 2010
Git has made me more productive, and I will explain in a few words why that is. I could almost do it with twitter, but I like to take a little more time to make my point. The main benefit that git has given me can be found in performance of certain things I want to do when I am managing changes in my code base. The performance improvements of some critical parts of it are even so profound that they have changed the way I am working. In particular the fact that I can skip builds for most of my commits is a big time saver.
There have been many things said about git already and I suggest you use your favorite search index to bring yourself up to speed if you need to. Git is a simple distributed versioning system that is challenging many assumptions I had about development. Let's go over these assumptions. I'll show you my (svn based) assumption and why it doesn't hold if you're using git.
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Implementing Deployit, part 1: organizational aspects
Posted by Vincent Partington in the early morning: February 25th, 2010
Last month XebiaLabs released the Personal Edition of Deployit. Now that people have been able to experience in a simple environment how Deployit can work for them, you might wonder how to start using Deployit for real in your development and operations environments. In this blog and its sequel we will go over the things we've learned when starting to use Deployit. We will also be covering this subject (and a lot of other subjects!) in our upcoming Deployit webinar series.
There are organizational and technical consequences to introducing a deployment automation product. But let's focus on the organizational aspects first. These pointers will help you get started with implementing Deployit in your organization in the right way.
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Deployit!
Posted by Vincent Partington mid-morning: February 10th, 2010
We've already been talking about Deployit, XebiaLabs' deployment automation product, for some time. Now we are proud to announce that you can try Deployit for yourself by downloading the Personal Edition of Deployit!
If you don't know what Deployit is yet, have a look at the movie below!
To summarize; Deployit will automate your Java EE application deployments and, because of the overview it offers and the history it keeps, it also allows you to manage and optimize your deployments.
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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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