Xebia Blog

Summary

Systems integration within limited timeframes is not mainly a technical art. It is a matter of social and organizational skills. Work on the touchy feely side, and tech will follow. “If you don’t manage the above factors well, you will be in for it anyway, no matter how cool, flexible, state of the art and gorgeous your technology.”

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Filed under: General, Project Management
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RIA and now! Web 2.0 guy, Bart Guijt talks in this episode of the Xebia Podcast about;

- Web 2.0 vs RIA (is there a link?)
- Adobe AIR deployment in the business
- Dutch article in Java Magazine about 3 popular RIA toolkits

So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!

Filed under: Ajax, Flex, Podcast
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Last week we started the Top 10 SOA Pitfalls countdown with #10: NIH syndrome. This week it's time for #9.

Version mismatch is one of the growing pains of a SOA. A SOA starts simple, but after a while new versions of services will appear and the complexity will grow. Good life cycle management and supporting tools will help you to control the complexity.
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Filed under: Architecture, SOA
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Bart Guijt and Robert van Loghem brainstorm about Enterprise Micro Blogging. (aka Twitter for the Enterprise)

What lead to the idea and what are they planning? Well, they plan to create a product called Roopr -> http://www.roopr.com

So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!

Filed under: General, Podcast
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Erik Pragt shows you in this silent but excellent Screencast how to use Grails in the IntelliJ IDE.

So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!

Filed under: Grails, IntelliJ, Podcast
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At Xebia we are involved in quite a number of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) projects, from small to big. In that capacity we see a lot of good stuff happening, but we also encounter quite a number of projects that have stalled or failed.

To share our experiences with these SOA projects, Gero Vermaas, Viktor Grgic, Rik de Groot, and myself have decided to write a series of blogs about the most annoying pitfalls of SOA. Each week we will be publishing one item from the list. This way we hope to spread awareness of these dangers and also provide you with a checklist of what to watch out for. Of course, as is always the case with these kinds of lists, they are not complete and not all the issues are as absolute as the title may imply. YMMV!

The first item we want to discuss is the Not Invented Here Syndrome (NIH). Of course this is something that can be witnessed in more areas of IT, but in a SOA context it actually applies on two different levels.
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Filed under: Architecture, SOA
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At April the 4th, 2008, we held another one of our quarterly Tech Rallies. A Tech Rally, as the name implies, is a whole day of technical training for the whole Software Development department.

The subject of an ITR can be almost anything, as long as it's technically focused, or related to our work. For example, previous Tech Rallies were about Ruby, Grails, CSS/Javascript/Ajax and Oracle Databases, to name a few. This time, our Tech Rally was about creating the best SCRUM tool ever. Quite a challenge, when you've only got 8 hours, but to give a quick conclusion: the results were very impressive. It's quite challenging to organize an event like this, so to put a bit of focus on the fun and team aspects, the group was divided into smaller groups (of approx. 4 people in size) and could pick the technologies of their liking.
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Filed under: Java
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These days a lot of big organizations are spending a good amount of money on making their websites more usable. And you may want to know why?

Think about a Fortune 50 organization (with around 100 thousands employee strength) which has many web applications working across the organization. It may have intranet applications, some business applications etc to facilitate business in effective way. These organizations spend a lot of money on IT spending and generally require many new applications every quarter. Now think about a case where all these new web based applications are different in their look and feel (navigation, fonts, colors etc) from each other.
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Filed under: Java, Usability
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According to CATB, the act of shaving a Yak is "Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on.".

The first time I read about the term was on this blog, but that was a long time ago. I was only recently that I noticed that a) I was doing it again, and b) some of my collegues where unfamiliar with the term. Therefor, I decided to (also) blog about it.
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Filed under: Agile
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In web development, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. It has a simple syntax, and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties. Its specifications were maintained by W3C. It still hasn't became a standard over all browsers.

Here I want to share some of my experiences( pains I went through ) while developing styles for my previous projects. One of the project is based on div structure and other is based on table and div structure. (more...)

Filed under: CSS
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