Posted by Urs Peter in the wee hours: November 26th, 2011
For testing a restful service API I was looking for a lean library, which would allow me to test CRUD operations of rest services with as little code as possible.
My search led me to Dispatch, which is a highly compact Scala DSL wrapper around Apache’s reliable HttpClient. This DSL, however, is not very well documented and rather hard to decipher due to it’s heavy usage of symbolic method names but nevertheless highly appealing when understood.
In this blog I’ll decipher it for you and show how easy it is to test restful services with mere oneliners.
Posted by Daniel Burm around lunchtime: November 25th, 2011
I am convinced that the next blue ocean of agile minds can be found in the creation of sharing ecosystems that are built on shared purpose, trust, intuition and a facilitation of the deeply wired human urge to cooperate as a collective. Understanding that modern day individualism is smothering our effectiveness is a catalyst for our drive to start working together and forming the effectiveness of these systems.
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Posted by Jarl Meijer in the early evening: November 24th, 2011
Imagine you are playing a game of rugby against some blacksuited guys who are doing some odd dancing and screaming exercise before you finally get to start playing. You win the game 27 – 3. You can imagine it wasn’t just one beer at the big party after the match and you did not see home before early morning. A year later your team finds itself in the same stadium against the same guys, doing the same little piece of folk dancing, just a little louder than last year. This time you win 27 – 6, only. The coach and the crowd are going mad: your team lost half of its performance in just a year time! You take a shower, no beers, go home and go to bed early. Measuring the improvement in performance is easy! How about Scrum teams? ….
Posted by Iwein Fuld just before lunchtime: November 2nd, 2011
In the past years there has been much ado about the quality of software. Programmers have emancipated and evolved into software craftsmen. Metrics have been defined and honed to measure the quality of code and deliverable artifacts. More and more of our clients are asking for guidance in achieving higher and higher quality goals.
The discussion about software craftsmanship hasn’t been all positive. Many developers that I’ve worked with express the feeling that certain levels of quality are only driven by the personal gratification of craftsmen and not in line with the economic realities of our trade. In this article I strive to establish guidelines in the compromise between quality and speed. I feel it is warranted to be more nuanced than the simplistic statement: “Going fast by going well”. This is because “going well” can mean different things in different contexts.
I look for a line in the sand between improving quality to improve procreation and improving quality for mere self indulgent practice.
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Posted by Geert Bossuyt at around evening time: October 16th, 2011
Market Driven Development (aka Agile Fixed Price)
I propose a paradigm shift in developing software to deliver business value.
For a team to satisfy a business need,
it is not the amount of work that defines the time needed,
it is the available time that defines the amount of work that can be done.
The deadline is part of the need, and not the result of estimation or planning techniques.
With the deadline being part of the need, the Team and the Product Owner have a shared budget ( = number of Sprints ) to realize the Vision.
Instead of using Poker to give insight in the estimated time of delivery, let’s create a Market Place where Product Owner and Team ‘negotiate’ on the complexity of each story.
Posted by Urs Peter at around evening time: August 17th, 2011
Abstract types in Scala can make your life much easier. In this blog I’m going to recap my intellectual journey to compare ‘apples to pears’ in a typesafe manner, which led me to abstract types.
Posted by Freek Wielstra mid-afternoon: August 16th, 2011
What is NodeJS?
The NodeJS five-word sales pitch from their own website is “Evented I/O for V8 Javascript”. We’ll get to what that means exactly in the How. NodeJS, in a few more words, is a server-side application framework with a focus on high concurrent performance. Applications written for Node run in a single-threaded, event-based process.
Node is an open source project initially conceived and developed by Ryan Dahl in early 2009, and has been in active development ever since. Joyent, Dahl’s employer, is backing and sponsoring the project.
Before we go in-depth, let’s explain what’s probably the core point of NodeJS – event-based I/O.
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Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early morning: July 19th, 2011
In my previous post we setup a Maven/Eclipse project for developing RESTful web applications on JBoss AS 7. A RESTful web service that is not using a database is some what of an oddity. Therefor in this blog we’ll extend the project with JPA.
Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early morning: July 12th, 2011
JBoss AS 7 CR1 has been released recently. On the previous release it was pretty easy to develop RESTful applications with the build in JAX-RS support based on RESTeasy. In this blog I’ll look at how well the new version of JBoss keeps up with the rest of the field.
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh terribly early in the morning: July 4th, 2011
At the Boston Agile Game Conference Alex Boutin and myself attended the ‘How to design your own game’ workshop given Don McGreal (@donmcgreal) and Michael McCullough (@mccm68) of Tastycupcake.org fame.
The game is designed to let people experience the how to plan with stable teams and let them experience the advantages of planning with agile projects. It does this by giving a group a somewhat simplified portfolio wall and challenge them to optimize the value generated by the teams.
After they have made the perfect 3 year plan, we of course hit them with random events to mess up that plan.
The explanation of the game is up at tastycupcakes.org