Yesterday was a very good day! After speaking at QCon the day ended with CloudCamp. An evening dedicated to everything cloud with an amazing turnout! More then 500 folks joined.

Turns out that although in general people tend to agree what a cloud is, nobody actually knows exactly what to do with it! (more...)

Filed under Amazon Webservices, Architecture, General, Performance, Virtualization, qcon | No Comments »

Adobe AIR is a great technology to provide platform-independent desktop RIA applications. Gone are the days when Windows operating system used to be ubiquitous in desktop market. That's the reason why Adobe AIR is considered as the future of desktop applications. Desktop applications are here to stay as they come with the power of providing rich features in efficient/optimal way compared to browser mode.

(more...)

Filed under Architecture, Flex | No Comments »

I've just read Robert C. Martin's Clean Code and Kent Beck's Implementation Patterns back to back. I actually picked up Clean Code first because my colleagues were raving about it. But then Robert Martin's book quotes from Kent Beck's book on the third page of the first chapter already, and disagrees with the quote, so I decided it'd be fun to read Implementation Patterns too.
(more...)

Filed under Architecture, Hibernate, Java, Testing | 11 Comments »

The talk "Unshackle Your Domain" given by Greg Young was the highlight of QCon for me. An architectural approach that is relatively easy to understand, incredibly scalable, and supports a rich domain model. (more...)

Tags: ddd, qcon
Filed under Architecture, Domain Driven Design | 7 Comments »

The QCon San Francisco 2008 conference was opened with an interesting keynote by Rebecca Parsons and Martin Fowler. In their talks they addressed the often strained relationship between traditional architects and agile development and how to improve this relationship to the benefit of both the agile development team and architects. These benefits include cross-project and cross-department knowledge exchange, sharing of the architects many years of experience with the developers, and only working on the architecture that is actually needed. (more...)

Tags: Agile, Architecture, qcon
Filed under Agile, Architecture | No Comments »

Flex provides means to create RIA applications in declarative fashion using MXML. Unlike Swing where you need to do the entire coding in Java, Flex hides a lot of complexity behind MXML tags like JSTL/taglibs do for JSPs. In JSP world, view level scripting is done in JavaScript and presentation layer server side code is written in Java which kind of provides a separation between client side code and server side code. If you really want to do some dynamic stuff on JSPs, either you write some Java code inside JSP (not recommended though) or you use/create taglibs to achieve the same effect. In Flex world, it's all about ActionScript (AS). Irrespective of whether you are writing some scripting or server side code, it's all AS code which kind of creates a confusing situation in front of a developer. It becomes very difficult to separate the scripting code from server side code. That's one of the reasons people complain about Flex as it looks like it doesn't provide a clear separation between scripting code and server side code.

(more...)

Tags: cairngorm, fluint, prana
Filed under Architecture, Flex, Frameworks | 5 Comments »

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.

(more...)

Filed under Architecture, Java | 1 Comment »

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.

(more...)

Filed under Agile, Architecture, Testing | 1 Comment »

The Top 10 SOA Pitfalls countdown hit #1 last week with Rik de Groot's post on "Ignoring culture when introducing SOA", time for a wrap-up.

Putting all pitfalls together in one simple 10 item list quickly reveals a grouping of types pitfalls. Number #1 and #2 are both related to organizational aspect. If the culture, mindset and attitude are not right, these are typically the pitfalls that a SOA endeavor may run in to. The next group covers the items #3 till #7, these are all related to architectural/design skills. And the last group, numbers #8 till #10, relates to implementation issues (although proper design could help to prevent these pitfalls from manifesting themselves).

(more...)

Filed under Architecture, SOA | 5 Comments »

Last week Viktor Grgic explained Unclear ownership / Project based funding. This week we’ll continue with #1 - Ignoring culture when introducing SOA.

SOA is an approach. The culture aspect of introducing a SOA is important, but it seems that companies want to invest in tools and not in people. In order of making this SOA to work they force their employees into this new way of thinking/acting. Often this leads to resistance which undermines the SOA goals. In this part we will look into ignoring culture when introducing SOA.
(more...)

Filed under Architecture, General, SOA | 4 Comments »