Posted by Jeroen van Wilgenburg in the early evening: June 25th, 2011
Since my pet project (I will eventually blog about that) is in desperate need of a database and I’m doing enough Java on my day job I decided to give a Scala ORM framework a shot.
I have to warn you that I’m kind of a Scala hacker. I abuse it like a scripting language and usually grab some examples, put them together and wait for my colleagues to say “You don’t want that” or “You’re doing it wrong”. So don’t hesitate to correct me, maybe I’ll learn something too 
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh mid-afternoon: June 24th, 2011
To celebrate my move to the Agile Consulting and Training division of Xebia I thought it would be very appropriate to start playing with some hip new technologies.
From their homepages:
Node.js: Evented I/O for V8 JavaScript. (A framework for building completely non-blocking servers in Javascript)
NPM: A package manager for node.
CoffeeScript: A little language that compiles into JavaScript
Express: High performance, high class web development for Node.js
Jade: Node Template Engine
Redis: An open source, advanced key-value store
In this guide I will take very small steps so that you can verify that you are check whether you are still on track.
The result is an extremely performant, scalable and lightweight alternative for web development.
Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early evening: June 23rd, 2011
Tonight in one of our knowledge exchange sessions, one of my colleagues challenged us to writing a TagCloud in JavaScript. He had prepared a nice setup with a server producing twitter hashtags over a WebSocket to the browser and using Processing.js to produce a graphical representation of the tags zooming by on twitter. Since he had already done all the heavy lifting in integrating all these fancy new frameworks, what was left to do, you might ask. Well, we still needed to implement the algorithm to count the number of tags on the continuous stream, sorting this list on the bases of the counts and making sure the system wouldn’t run out of memory by removing less used tags in some smart way. His point to all of this was, that although JavaScript is being prophesized in some circles as the new-old-new language of the future, writing and testing a non-trivial algorithm in it is a big challenge.
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Posted by Mark Bakker at around evening time: June 22nd, 2011
In my current position as Performance Engineer and in my past position as a Middleware Architect I did quite some work with closed source performance monitoring and analysis tools (i.g. CA Wily and later AppDynamics).
These tools are both expensive but also do quite a good job most of the times. In the same field there are more tools, but all in the same price range for as far as I know.
To name some: Foglight, Dynatrace, Newrelic, JXInsight, Tivoli Performance Viewer, Compuware Gomez.
Around 2006 several initiatives to create open source performance monitoring tools for java production environments started to appear.
This was mainly because AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming), the technology used in most of these products, was getting attention in the market and there were quite some developments in that area at the time.
I am interested to see how the open source community around these kind of products is evolving. The outcome is quite surprising…
Posted by Andrew Phillips late at night: June 16th, 2011
Earlier this year, I was invited to present a talk at Devopsdays Boston about deployment as the new build: how deployments are carried out now, how they will need to adapt in a more virtualized, on-demand application landscape and what fundamental improvements will need to come before deployment matures into the invisible, it just works™ experience build is today.
In the previous post, we looked at how Reusable commands, Models and Conventions++ helped turn build from a “black box” process into the “just works” experience we know today.
We then shifted back to deployment and identified Develop a common model, (Re)discover vanilla and Support a “clean build” as three key steps required to achieve a similar transition.
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Posted by Urs Peter in the wee hours: June 2nd, 2011
The Scala Option type is key for dealing with variables that can have values or not. Most libraries and applications make use of this handy type. However, it’s usage in certain cases can lead to rather verbose code. This blog explains how to deal with this particular case in an elegant way using implicits. Read on to see how easy it is to tailor any kind of existing Scala type to perfectly fit your needs based on an example with Options.
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Posted by Arjan Molenaar in the early morning: June 1st, 2011
In the first installment on Xebium, Cirilo explained the ideas behind this FitNesse fixture:
Xebium creates a simple way to use Selenium IDE (low learning curve) and FitNesse (ease of maintenance) to it’s fullest when it comes to maintaining a web application test suites.
Xebium is using the same keywords as Selenium IDE. This has the huge advantage that no person should learn another DSL. Since tests are stated this way, they can be copied between Selenium IDE and FitNesse without a hassle (the FitNesse formatter for Selenium IDE is rather trivial). And to be honest: as long as there are XPath and Regular Expressions in the code, it makes no sense to come up with a substitute for verifyText
.