Posted by Erik Pragt at around evening time: September 25th, 2008
A short while ago, a collegue and I decided to write an application with Grails and Eclipse RCP. We choose Grails for the ease of development, and Eclipse RCP (in favor of Flex and Plain Old HTML) because we wanted to give our users a solid and native look and feel, for which Eclipse RCP works really well.
Since the Eclipse RCP front-end would actually be a remote front-end, we needed some kind of kind of communication between the client and the server. One of our first idea’s was to use XML-RPC, which is pretty well supported in Grails, but it would force us to to do some mapping between our domain and the XML. Since we wanted to use the same domain classes is Eclipse as in Grails (by exporting the Grails domain to external domain jars), we opted for a different approach: Burlap/Hessian.
Posted by Serge Beaumont around lunchtime: September 19th, 2008
In the past three projects I’ve been involved in (one as team member, two as agile coach) I’ve seen that the usual Sprint burn down based on tasks leads to a dangerous trap: you might end up with nothing done. In two cases we had nearly zero velocity for a Sprint, while the tasks were 90% done… Luckily there’s a fix: burn down user stories, and toploading.
Posted by Jeroen Borgers in the early afternoon: September 15th, 2008
By Jeroen Borgers
Recently, I was called in by a company with a website in trouble. And because they make all their money on-line, it was evident that they really wanted to have the issue solved. The day I came in, the site had gone down about 5 times the last 24 hours. Because of this they got less traffic, which directly meant less revenue. The log files showed periods of long response times and OutOfMemoryErrors. Their questions were: Why do we get this behavior? and How do we fix it? My short answer turned out to be: because of too many loitering objects; and this can be fixed by not holding on to them in the HTTP session. (more…)
Posted by Jeroen van Erp around lunchtime: September 15th, 2008
In many JEE apps today, you almost cannot forgo XML. Whether it is in configuration, data structures or service interfaces, you will certainly use a number of XML files. In a recent project we had to deal with a number of external services which used an XML interface. Little did we know that we introduced a potential time-bomb in our application… (more…)
Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early afternoon: September 11th, 2008
By Eelco Rustenburg and Maarten Winkels
Picture this: You enter a room and seated at a conference table you find two grumpy looking men, arms crossed, that tell you: “We want fixed price, fixed date, fixed functionality!” Now imagine you are the manager of a Software Development Company championing Agile, what would you do? It is easy to spot the conflict: Agile dictates to embrace change and to do away with stringent planning. How could you approach this difference? It takes a special person to fit a square peg in a round hole.
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Posted by Lars Vonk in the early afternoon: September 6th, 2008
Some leaky abstractions are sneaky, they are not visible right away. At my current assignment we are thinking about refactoring some co-located Services so only one single Service per machine exists. One way to achieve this is to “remote” the Services using RMI. Since the service is already an interface and configured in an IOC container you would think it is ready to change the underlying implementation; from co-locating to remoting. However I came across some sneaky leaky abstractions that caused the refactoring more time consuming than I expected.
Posted by Kris Geusebroek mid-afternoon: September 3rd, 2008
Because Xebia is cooperating with India a lot in the distributed offshoring model for our projects, I got the opportunity to visit our Indian office last month. The overall goal of this visit was to form a team to handle multiple projects. Besides that I also wanted to get to know the people whom I only saw through Skype and to experience the environment and culture over there.
This blog will be about the second part: Me experiencing India
Posted by Anurag Shrivastava in the early evening: September 1st, 2008
An article by the management guru, Peter F. Drucker, published in Harvard Business Review in 1988 had clues to what new organizations may look like after 20 years. He talked about the end of departmental boundaries and emergence of cross functional teams to perform a task. He warned about the disappearance of the whole layers of management whose main function is to serve as relays. In year 2008 we can see that the middle management has not disappeared. In typical IT services companies it goes by various names such as resource managers, people managers or business unit managers. However Peter F. Drucker would be proven right perhaps one or two decades later because IBM is working on a new project that will automate the management of its IT staff as the Business Week reports in an article on a book titled The Numerati by Stephen Baker.
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Posted by Anurag Shrivastava terribly early in the morning: September 1st, 2008
You can’t complain about the venue of IBM Rational Software Developer Conference 2008 because it takes place at one of the oldest luxury landmark of New Delhi known as Hyatt Regency at Bhikaji Cama Place. Wizcraft, a company better known for organizing star studded Bollywood award ceremonies, add a glamour to this themed event around comic strip hero’s. Radio Mirchi and others air radio commercials to advertise the event among their young and upwardly mobile audience which includes thousands of software professionals and users of IBM products in NCR.