Future of deployment: Part 1 – Monuments vs Cheap housing
Posted by Robert van Loghem in the early evening: December 21st, 2009
I'm going to start a series on the future of deployment. How and what do we deploy in, say 5 years or so. Of-course this is my opinion and please add your own ideas in the comments below.
To start this series off i'm going to talk about the current state of things, or at least what i see at a lot of enterprise customers. Most of the enterprises i've been at have physical servers which are used by numerous applications from different development teams. Some of these servers are old and have been in maintenance by operations for years (+4 years 
). That means that the server has changed, lots of deltas, aka, patches, deployments etc. have been applied and as my colleague Vincent has stated applying deltas has its cons Of-course i'm talking about servers and not applications and the same rules do not apply, or do they?
So what is a deployment really?
Posted by Robert van Loghem in the early afternoon: July 8th, 2009
You just baked the first release of your application using Maven. Next you start up the administrative console of the application server in the development environment. Then you deploy the fresh loaf of ear-file to the server and fire up your browser to see if you can reach the application. As you try to load the page, you get a DNS error, "Host not found". Time to phone Bob! - the friendly operator of all that funky infrastructure and middleware. Bob is of course happy to add a DNS record that will point www.app-in-dev.com to an Apache server. "Wait! An Apache server?"-you exclaim! "But it should point to our application server, not an HTTP server thing."
Bob, by now used to having to teach young developers the intricacies of modern network topologies, calmly explains that all requests coming from a browser first must go through a cluster of HTTP servers before the requests are routed to the application servers. "You also need to configure Apache!" he says. "But I am developing a Java application, I only need to deploy to an application server and then I am done." you respond. Bob, sighs. "Listen son, pressing the deploy button in the administrative console is only a small sentence in the big deployment story."
(more...)
Multimedia Communication: When to use screencasts/movies in demos.
Posted by Robert van Loghem in the early morning: April 24th, 2009
For the last 9 months I've been working as a team member of Xebialabs on a product called Deployit. The product automates deployments of applications. As any Xebia team we use SCRUM for our development. Now at the end of our two week sprint we give a demo to the product owner and stakeholders of what we've been building.
We demo deploying applications onto a variety of Application Servers and other Middleware, like for instance WebSphere/Oracle-Bea Application Server/Portal, MQSeries, HTTP Servers and so on... Sometimes demo-ing a story, like deploy application A to application server B can take 10 to 15 minutes. That means, for an hour of demo time we can not show every user story that we finished in our sprint. So we only show the important ones. But what happens when demoing a story can take up to 45 minutes? How can can we cram multiple finished stories into the hour?
(more...)
Java Persistence API – Podcast – JSpring ‘09 Preview
Posted by Robert van Loghem mid-morning: April 3rd, 2009
On the 15th of April the NLJUG (Dutch Java User group) will be holding their J-Spring conference. Four Xebians will be presenting. Every week we'll be providing a sneak preview on the podcast of one of those presentations.
The second sneak peek is about The Java Persistence API - How do i build a real application by Vincent Partington.
The preview is in Dutch, a full interview in english will be coming in about 4 weeks.
You can find more information here or read Vincent's JPA blog series.
Vincent's presentation is from 14.25 to 15.15
So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!
Software Transactional Memory – Podcast – JSpring ‘09 Preview
Posted by Robert van Loghem around lunchtime: March 28th, 2009
On the 15th of April the NLJUG (Dutch Java User group) will be holding their J-Spring conference. Four Xebians will be presenting. Every week we'll be providing a sneak preview on the podcast of one of those presentations.
The first sneak peek is about Software Transactional Memory by Peter Veentjer.
You can find more information at the NLJUG presentation page.
Peter's presentation is from 11:20 to 12:10.
Hosted by Robert van Loghem.
This preview is in Dutch. After the 15th we'll be doing a full episode in english about STM.
So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!
Podcast 22 – Choosing a technology stack
Posted by Robert van Loghem in the early evening: January 27th, 2009
Narinder Kumar, Vivek Kumar Yadav and Vincent Partington talk about choosing a technology stack for building an automated deployment product, currently named Deploy it.
- What is a technology stack.
- Why do you need it.
- What did they choose and why.
- How Agile/SCRUM helped the team to make better choices.
- Lessons learned.
- What not to do when choosing a technology.
Hosted by Robert van Loghem.
So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!
Podcast Episode 21 – Introduction to Automated Deployment
Posted by Robert van Loghem around lunchtime: August 22nd, 2008
Vincent Partington and Robert van Loghem give an introduction about Automated Deployment (automated installing applications on complex infrastructures).
- What are the complexities in todays big corporate infrastructures.
- Why is automated deployment needed.
- What is the future for automated deployment. (also see; Deploy it)
So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!
Video Podcast Episode 7 – Screencast Introduction
Posted by Robert van Loghem mid-afternoon: May 16th, 2008
Serge Beaumont shows us in this introductory video how we approach Screencasting here at Xebia.
- Why screencasting is useful.
- What are the steps to create a screencast.
- How to release the screencast to your intended audience.
There will be a technical explanatory video following this non-techy episode very soon.
So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!
Podcast Episode 20 – Multimedia Introduction
Posted by Robert van Loghem in the early evening: May 7th, 2008
Serge Beaumont and Robert van Loghem talk about their Multimedia experiences at Xebia.
- How did they get into multimedia
- How did they introduce it to Xebia
- What were the reactions
- What are the differents formats and concepts. (Podcast, Vodcast, Screencast, Comics, Whitepaper video etc....)
In the near future they will provide different Vodcasts where they show the different formats, including howto and where you can apply them.
So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!
Podcast Episode 19 – RIA vs Web 2.0
Posted by Robert van Loghem around lunchtime: April 29th, 2008
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!
Archives
Xebia Sites
Categories
- Java (282)
- Agile (109)
- General (50)
- Testing (42)
- Performance (42)
- Hibernate (36)
- Scrum (33)
- Podcast (31)
- Architecture (31)
- Spring (28)
- SOA (24)
- Maven (22)
- Project Management (22)
- Middleware (23)
- Deployment (14)
- Flex (17)
- JPA (17)
- Eclipse (15)
- Xebia Labs (15)
- Quality Assurance (14)