Xebia Blog

Last week Viktor Grgic explained the Missing skills en this week we’ll continue with #2 - Unclear ownership / Project based funding

In the world of standalone applications, there is typically a clear sponsorship and ownership of an application. There is also a single project with one project manager. The systems could be small or big, but the pattern remains the same. Funding is based on a business case and can be easily defended.
In SOA world, the story is different. There are the usual projects, each having their own objectives and often reluctant to work on generic services or enterprise components. If the ownership and funding for these components and aspects are unclear then chances are high that nothing happens on enterprise level or that it's not according to enterprise architecture or nobody feels responsible when things on enterprise level go wrong (e.g. security).
Several projects working together is not a bad situation, but there should also be a SOA steering committee and SOA competence center well funded and supported by company board.
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Filed under: Project Management, SOA
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Last tuesday I attended the “RubyEnRails2008 dag”, which is the Dutch RubyAndRails conference. It was the third time this conference was organized and this year it was located at the Hoge school in Amsterdam. The line up was really impressive. A number of the Ruby Rockstars gave presentations and at the end of the day David Heinemeier Hansson joined from Chicago for a Q&A session

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Filed under: JRuby, Rails, Ruby
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Last week Gero Vermaas explained the Incorrectly Applied CDM en this week we’ll continue with #3 - Missing skills

Just like any other paradigm, a level of new knowledge and experience is required. Unfortunately, SOA requires lots of new knowledge and experience. It requires a different way of thinking of more or less everyone involved. People are used to closed environments on both organisational and technical level; largely well protected from influences and unwanted dependencies with the outside world. It's all in their area of influence which makes achieving short term results relatively easy. I'm referring to silo applications where the world is complicated enough. From their view, SOA makes things even more complex. There should be awareness that there is lack of knowledge, experience and attitude and something should be done about this first. There is no real solution, except for the obvious one: educate everyone involved. Also, agile methodologies have proven to be effective in building up knowledge and experience.
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Filed under: Agile, Architecture, SOA
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A thing I was playing with today was many-to-many relationships in Grails to create a Tag Cloud. To create a Tag Cloud, I must have a set of key/value pairs, each with a label and a value of the label, which could look like this:

['Java': 5, 'Grails': 16, 'Groovy': 12]

But to query this, I need to query a many to many relationship and produce the above result. This blog will describe how to do this with HQL, Criteria and the HibernateCriteriaBuilder.
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Filed under: Grails, Groovy, Hibernate, Java
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Consider the following senario: we want to display some data in a table like manner, and we want it to update when we click on a link or button. We do not want to do a complete page refresh, we want it in an ajax way. Also we would like the modify the css for each cell.

In wicket you can use a ListView iterate over a List of Objects and display them in a table like manner.
This blog describes how you can update ListView data and modify the css for each cell.
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Filed under: Ajax, Java, Wicket
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