Tuesday, December 12th we had a Open Space knowledge session and one of the Open Spaces we had was about Agile Architecture in "large systems".

The question was how to do architecture: should there be any in the beginning or should it "evolve"? The answer we came up with is not very surprising, it is that a base architecture is needed, but the size of it is variable and the architecture shouldn't be static but evolve.

The way we came to that conclusion is interesting however. During the discussion, in which a lot of views were expressed, we came up with a list of good old, much used, words, that everyone agreed on are needed. Based on those words we came to the conclusion as stated above.

This blog will list the words on which we based our conclusion, with an explanation on how we arrived at the conclusion.

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At a client we are now using files and datasources together. We want the write actions to the database and the files to be in one transaction. We want this because the files represent the database data for legacy applications. As there is no distributed transaction API for files which is JTA (Java Transaction API) compatible we had to find a solution to implement this. This post describes the (big) steps we did and the solution we found. Of course, you can skip the steps and go straight to the solution.
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The Java Management eXtensions are really good to dynamically alter the behaviour of your application. The JMX API is standard in Java 5, but if you're stuck with an old version then you have to build your own or use an existing API. In WAS 5 you can easily integrate with the WebSphere API. This post will describe how to do that. I will do this by an example of how to get a JMX Managed Log4J configuration in WAS 5.

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