http://microintellia.com/blog Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:10:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en "Growth now depended more on the operation of markets, something that sits uneasily with the institutional inheritance. Innovation-based growth  is risky, uncomfortably so for security-oriented European societies. It responds to financial incentives, which is difficult to reconcile with the value Europeans assign to earnings equality. It requires continous reallocation of ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2010/08/04/european-dilemmas/ Watching Eric Evans explaining how to incorporate agile methods in domain driven design gives you an understanding of some of the differences and commonalities between domain driven development and agile methods. Agile methods grew out of the fact that up-front design which involved months of analysis was getting out of synch ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2010/07/31/domain-driven-development-and-agile-methods/ In this post I will go briefly over some important issues regarding regression testing and they can be used for managing complexity that I have come across in my experience. A batch of regression tests covering an appropriate part of an application is a very good strategy to deal with growing ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2010/05/24/managing-complexity-with-regression-tests/ This Infoq presentation on DDD reminded me of some opinions that I wrote a while ago about DDD and about how it can be effectively applied in a typical development environment. From my experience there are a few obstacles to using DDD in a typical development environment and one of them ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2010/04/23/ddd-and-it-management/ If you followed various presentations on Event Driven Architecture for a while you must be familiar with one advantage that many people talk about without going into detail: the ability to recover from crashes simply by re-playing events that were sent to your system. Most presentations give the impression that ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2010/03/29/replaying-requests-in-flows/ From my experience I see that replication of data usually helps deal with performance problems, but that sometimes this replication involves replication of functionality, sometimes you end-up replicating some data on a different system (let's call this the client system) and then you find yourself needing to code on the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/12/17/replication-of-data-and-replication-of-functionality/ Recently I was working on a business flow to which we had to add a new requirement: grouping a particular type of transactions under a file. The file had to be unique per day, it had to be created on the fly when the transaction batch starts getting processed and ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/10/27/non-blocking-flows/ Typically knowledge is considered to be an asset, some going as far as saying that knowledge is power. Well, when you design interactions between systems is better to avoid systems know to much about each other. Having deep knowledge about a system with which you are integrating is both a ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/09/26/when-knowledge-is-a-liability-and-not-an-asset/ Decidedly, this is the acquisition season. After Oracle buying BEA it is now the time for VMWare to acquire SpringSource. I wonder what VMWare gets from this acquisition and different from a partnership with SpringSource and the only thing that I can think of is the exclusivity of selling certain ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/08/13/vmware-acquires-springsource/ I have been reading lately A History of Economics: The Past as the Present by John Kenneth Galbraith and one of its main ideas, namely that economic concepts are the product of the times and societies they are born rather than the other way around, made me look at the concept of ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/08/09/copyright-as-a-fading-concept/ For the past 2 weeks I have been staying at home without a computer and without cable TV. I took this opportunity to try to see how my grand-parents would get their news and read newspapers all thru-out this period. When I went back to work and back to a ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/07/29/old-and-new-media-2/ Relational databases are going thru a rough patch right now, some pundits going as far as writing them off. Their main problem is the fact that they are constrained to run within the same physical box (*) and scaling out is pretty hard. Once the datasets reach a certain size ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/07/02/key-value-stores-and-relational-databases/ I was reading Malcom Gladwell review of Free by Chris Anderson and I was left with the impression that both of them got pretty wrong the issue of information distribution in the current era of low prices for computing power. I think that Malcom Gladwell makes a mistake when he compares ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/06/30/not-all-information-wants-to-be-free/ You probably have read about how GMail added a new feature that lets you read messages written in a different language, language that you may not understand, by having them translated into your language. This is a pretty interesting feature that will not get much adoption outside Google labs, the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/06/02/message-translation-in-gmail/ I was reading this article on the Experimentia blog and I have to agree with its conclusion: internet applications are turning computing devices from platforms where applications are run into interfaces into various applications deployed remotely. As applications are moved off to the internet it follows that they are accessible to a larger ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/05/27/laptops-vs-mobile-phones/ In a previous post I was saying that some technological issues are simply proxies for organizational issues and that whether one techonology will thrive or fail within an organization is not determined exclusively on the technology itself but it could be influenced by the organization itself. I ended the post ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/05/27/dsls-and-apis/ This post on the BW blog echoes some feelings that I had when the web2.0 "revolution" took off and everybody with an internet connection put a blog. I was wondering how long it will last because it was seemed similar to a trend in fashion, a trend that you don't ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/05/01/volatility/ I still cannot fully absorb the news that Oracle is buying Sun. First, I don't understand the rationale for it (since when Oracle wanted to become a hardware vendor???). Second, because I see the development environment I grew used to (an environment which gives the developer a lot of freedom in ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/04/21/a-defining-moment-for-java/ I think that this presentation by Rebecca Wirfs Brock on driving the design from responsabilities pretty much hits the nail on the head: responsabilities drive design and good design is a good separation of responsabilities. From what I have seen most of the errors in software development arise either from grey-zones ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/03/31/assigning-responsabilities/ I was watching this interview with Tim Bray in which Tim downplayed Rich Internet Applications in favor of ordinary web-apps and I find myself agreeing with Tim, I think that web-applications have the means to become the applications with the largest marketshare and this is due to the low costs ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/03/25/ria-and-web-apps/ Open source started with the desire to create applications whose code could not be closed away from the general public and for a few decades followed this course. Operating systems, databases, application servers, frameworks, applications were written, had an OS license pasted on it and then released into the public. ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/02/28/open-source-domains/ I maintain a different "blog" (*) hosted with Wordpress, a "blog" that I use for storing various information and that I visit rarely. In fact, I visit it so rarely that almost every time that I log on I see that a new version of Wordpress has been released and ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2009/01/05/too-much-change/ Lately I have found myself doing something that I have not done for a pretty long time: reading newspapers and I mean real newspapers, made of paper (*). The main reason for this is that I find reading news from a laptop is pretty inconvenient when you have kids (**) ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/12/31/old-and-new-media/ Code reuse is one software development goal consistently sought for. Its main benefits are that the code which gets reused becomes an investment on which you can build later. However, code reuse has its limits when the codebase is shared by a large number of participants, limits due to communication ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/12/09/code-reuse-limits/ I am following with a great deal of interest Amazon's offerings to the point where I think that they are the company that understands the web the most, more than any Web2.0 company including Google. Amazon brought to the world the cloud, the MTurk, fulfillment and now they are bringing ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/12/08/a-company-that-understands-the-web/ A very fine blog on issues related to globalization is posting its last entries. I am sorry to see it go and I wish all the best to Daniel Altman, the host of this incredible source of information about our increasingly inter-connected world. http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/12/03/goodbye-managing-globalization/ I have avoided reading and writing about SOA lately because SOA has attained buzzword status and the high number of articles written about it makes it pretty difficult to follow. I also see so much repetition of the same terms and concepts that pretty much every article I have read ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/12/01/various-takes-on-soa/ As I was saying in my previous post a lot of technological issues (such as the debate of REST vs. WS-*) are actually organizational issues and that at the bottom of them you will find that the process of communication has been broken down into tasks (namely the task of  the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/11/03/task-allocation-and-designing-interactions/ One of the best presentations that I have seen lately is Mark Little talking about REST and WS at QCon London 2008, or rather about the differences between the uniform interfaces and the specific interface. Mark Little gets right at the bottom of the differences between REST and WS, and ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/10/16/rest-and-ws-part-5/ ESBs is an essential enterprise computing capability which allows for mediating connections between various parties. Typical EBS usage consists of message producers sending messages to an ESB which transforms them and then forwards them to message consumers. It is at the transformation stage that the thorniest issues arise with ESBs. As ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/10/10/esb-transformations/ Typically OOP inheritance is used for sharing various common methods and a typical example would be something like this: You have interface Vehicle which has sub-classes Bicycle and MotorVehicle. MotorVehicle in turn has the sub-classes Car and Truck, each with its specifics. Car, Truck and Bicycle are all sub-classes of Vehicle and as such are all inheriting ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/09/23/oop-inheritance/ I was reading this post on BW's Blogspotting and I think that link-less is not going to work because the content producers will be pushed out of the equation like it is explained below: But what Raghavan is describing sounds very much like an effort to push relevant Web pages down, ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/09/19/link-less-search/ Chrome, the browser developed by Google is about to be released. I get a pretty weird feeling from this, because Google was known to support Firefox, because it comes on such a short-notice and because I don't see any benefits to Google, at least not immediately. Firefox is a pretty decent ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/09/02/speculating-on-chrome/ You are probably familiar with Martin Fowler's Technical Debt, a metaphor around the idea that doing things the quick-and-dirty way creates bad code, bad code which can be viewed as a debt which needs to be paid later in installments (the principal is the re-factoring of the bad code and ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/08/28/technical-debt/ A while ago I looked at the transition currently occuring in enterprise computing from ACID transactions to compensation by message passing. I concluded by saying that relaxing ACID properties and achieving state alignment via message passing is essentially shifting the costs from the costs of ACID transactions (such as database ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/08/12/relaxing-acid-properties/ Today when I went to check my RSS feeds on bloglines I was presented with the following: Quickly I realized that I was cut-off from any source of information that I use because I access sites mostly thru their RSS feeds and my RSS feed reader was down. It was out ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/08/06/an-unsual-single-point-of-failure/ A while ago I went to a presentation where the speaker was talking about the migration of an application from a typical MDB-based work-flow application to an EDA-based application. One of the drivers of this migration was the fact that their application`s data has grown so large that the database ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/08/01/eda-clustered-caches-and-triggers/ ... then all you have to do is download and install Firefox 3 (download link is not provided on purpose, I do not want to feel guilty for directing people towards it). I was pretty happy with Firefox 2 and I started using Firefox 3 only after a friend recommended it. ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/07/31/if-you-want-to-make-ie-look-really-really-good/ If you read literature on economic development you are probably familiar with the declining American high school graduation rate and its effects on inequality due to the differences in income between the educated and non-educated members of society. A person which has not graduated from high-school will have quite a ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/07/23/future-education/ I am watching with a great deal of interest developments in the grid and large scale computing environment because I always found distributed computing interesting. One very interesting thing that I come across pretty often is the fact that in large scale computing data tends to get de-normalized, basically it grows ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/06/10/grid-design-patterns/ I was reading this post on BW's Blogspotting and at first I agreed with it, maybe in the future the companies that currently hold our data to release it to the outside so that it can be mashed-up with other data that we have created and that is stored ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/05/27/freeing-our-data/ You must have heard about the latest offering from Spring Source, the SpringSource Application Platform, a platform based on OGSi which aims to help developers partitions their application into logical units (called bundles) and then manage the interactions between them. A very interesting product from Spring Source in an environment ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/05/18/the-spring-application-platform/ Like many other people I use a Bloglines for reading various RSS feeds to which I am subscribed. Bloglines has a pretty nifty feature, it lets you pin various items in an RSS feed so that you can re-visit them later. Pretty nifty, and I use it a lot. Except that ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/04/23/pinned/ This is what carrying the Olympic torch thru San Francisco looked like: The first torchbearer held the Olympic flame aloft triumphantly. She waved to the crowd and set off — and promptly ran into a warehouse.(src). After, of course, being carried thru London (seconds 25 thru 35 are particularly telling) and Paris ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/04/10/the-olympic-torch-saga/ I find that insufficient knowledge about a system or a package poses a moral hazard because it encourages people interacting with that system or package to take all sorts of short-cuts in order to get something done and do so thinking that they know what the effects of their actions ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/04/09/insufficient-knowledge-as-moral-hazard/ I was walking down the aisles at Walmart the other day when I came across this product: fair trade coffee. You have to wonder what is the relationship between Walmart and the producers of fair trade coffee: does Walmart reins in the urge to apply its enormous clout in order to ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/04/02/things-you-would-not-expect-to-find-at-walmart/ If you are living in Quebec you are probably aware about the debate surrounding the privatization of health-care, a debate that has been going on for quite a while. The debate about health-care in general has been going on for more than a decade, I wish I had a dollar ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/03/27/what-future-for-health-care-in-quebec/ I was watching this infoQ presentation by Alexandru Popescu and Cedric Beust on testing when I realized that a big market for testing is seriously neglected. Regarding my use of testing I would say that JUnit pretty much fills my bill and I don't see a need to move to TestNG. ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/03/17/testings-new-frontier/ I was reading Bill Burke`s post on transaction compensation via REST and JBPM and I have to tell that I agree with most of his remarks. Bill makes a very interesting point about compensating a transaction: that the compensation itself is an activity of a business process (the activity of handling failure, very likely outside ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/03/12/pros-and-cons-of-standards/ Today the weather in Montreal has been particularly brutal, we got 15 centimeters of snow at the temperature of -11 Celsius. Actually, it was not snow, it was some sort of ice pellets, around 1 millimeter in size that gathered on the roads. Anyone in Montreal would not describe this ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/03/05/determination/ I was reading this post about how architects should approach a project considering their team as a stake-holder, which is probably a bit misguided. I would not say that the team is a stake-holder because stake-holders are usually financially invested into the project and this investment drives attitudes around the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/02/27/some-of-todays-development-problems/ Of all the problems of Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) the one that stands out is the anemic domain problem: DTOs are basically objects with a few variables and getters/setters for them, lacking any complex behavior. This way of developing applications has been decried times and times again so I will ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/02/22/dtos-are-not-rich-beans/ Au dessus des vieux volcans, Glisse des ailes sous les tapis du vent, Voyage, voyage, Eternellement. De nuages en marécages, De vent d'Espagne en pluie d'équateur, Voyage, voyage, Vole dans les hauteurs Au dessus des capitales, Des idées fatales Regardent l'océan... Voyage, voyage Plus loin que la nuit et le jour, (voyage voyage) Voyage (voyage) Dans l'espace inouï de l'amour. Voyage, voyage Sur l'eau sacrée d'un ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/02/06/voyage-voyage/ I was reading this post on infoq about how good object-oriented programming mimicks a lot asynchronous processing. It is a pretty interesting post, even though it is not very organized, the author surfs around a few concepts, finds some interesting relationships between them and then ends the article. The post looks ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/02/01/asynchronous-processing-and-oop/ It is really interesting what is happening right now in the grid or cloud computing field: the biggest player in this field is Amazon.com, a retailer. You would have expected grid computing or cloud computing to be championed by a tech company, I personally would have thought that Sun would ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/01/28/amazons-ec2/ I was reading the Prefer Design Skills post on Martin Fowler's bliki and I agree with most of its conclusions. He's spot on on the need to prefer someone with design skills vs. someone with skills about a particular language. Design skills carry a lower risk of becoming obsolete than the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/01/23/hiring/ I am testing a few things with my RSS feed, it will change the way it exposes the contents of this blog. I hope it will not create much of a disruption. http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/01/22/testing/ I was reading this post on manageability.org which is hi-liting some of the problems with large projects in dynamic languages. I am not familiar with these problems, never having to code in a dynamic language on a large-scale project, but I am currently working on a large scale project in ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/01/21/communication-problems-in-dynamic-languages/ If you are to read most of what is published today about the Java platform it seems that the future of Java doesn't look pretty good at the moment as it keeps losing battle after battle with the movement behind dynamic languages such as Ruby and PHP. At the same ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/01/17/java-now-and-in-the-future/ "For cooking instruction please go to so-and-so.com". Far out. I wanted to cook some couscous and when I was looking on the package for the time I had to boil it and for how much water to add I came across "For cooking instruction please go to http://phoeniciaproducts.com". Guys, I wouldn't bank ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/01/16/things-that-you-dont-want-to-read-on-food-packaging/ Andrew Odlyzko, the head of University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center has this interesting paper on Net Neutrality. While I don't buy all of its arguments, especially the ones on financial markets, Andrew puts an interesting perspective on the Net Neutrality debate: a brief history of price discrimination in history ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/01/11/an-interesting-take-on-net-neutrality/ ... is probably WebLogic Server 10's management console because the moment you encounter it you feel like leaving enterprise Java completely. After using it for a while the phrase "bloated piece of garbage" comes to my mind upon seeing its blue colors. I find that WL10's console fails pretty badly the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2008/01/08/one-of-rubys-best-friend/ You know the old debate between PL-SQL developers and Java developers: "Your Java app will never run as fast as my PL-SQL programs", "you will never be able to pass a message to an external system and update a DB row at the same time". Well, the 2 camps are both ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/12/28/pl-sql-vs-java-speed-vs-ease-of-development/ The biggest cost associated with knowledge is learning: in order for one person to absorb the necessary knowledge so that it operates efficiently in a particular environment it is necessary for it to learn that knowledge. It is important to acknowledge this cost because the cost of operating in that ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/12/28/random-notes-on-the-economics-of-knowledge/ Customer service has emerged as one way to fund an open source package which grows so much that you cannot support it by relying only on code committed by random committers: you release the APIs under a particular license and you pay for the expenses by selling support subscriptions. This obviously ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/12/27/tech-support-for-open-source-projects/ Probably the most interesting thing that I read in quite a while is the paper "The Nature of the Firm" ** by Robert Coase which can be viewed here. Ronald Coase answers a pretty interesting question: why in some cases it makes sense to gather resources together to carry out ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/12/03/transaction-costs-in-software-development/ Code contains knowledge about the application and not only the commands to execute that application, this is a thing that is a bit unknown. Meaningful names for classes/methods, etc... will expose the knowledge buried in the code better to a person working with that code. When you are changing the behavior ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/11/16/the-case-for-meaningful-names-for-methodsclasses-etc/ I was listening to this presentation by some people at ThoughtWorks about designing an application when I was struck by this quote which goes roughly like this: I keep thinking of clever designs to push the technology out of the picture so that changes in the business domain can be ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/11/16/push-the-technology-way-back/ Most of the social network operators depend on creating network externalities, the relationships between people using the same social network make leaving a social network more costly. It is interesting to see the effects of Open Social, essentially a cross-corporation platform for hosting social-network widgets on Facebook. I am not arguing ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/11/15/the-facebook-platform-and-open-social/ Various thoughts on one hot buzzword: One recent development in the IT world is the emergence of the Software as a Service, or of services that are provided to someone running an IT operation. This is due primarily due to the drop in the cost of communication which allowed for closer ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/11/14/software-as-a-service/ A post of various thoughts that I have about Agile development. Judging from my previous posts you may believe that I am against Agile Development. I am not, as a matter of fact I agree with a few of their 'practices': I agree that you need the team members need to be ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/11/03/agile-development/ I was reading this post from Bill Burke's blog and I found myself shocked by the sheer number of annotations required for making a business object WS-BA compatible (if I understand well the post). One thing that I don't like about using annotations is that they tend to stay with the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/10/15/annotations-used-for-deployment/ I was thinking about how blogs combat for spamming thru comments when I came across this idea: There are entry barriers for comments because the user, along with a third-party, do the job of filtering comments, but as far as I know there are no entry barriers for track-backs. A spammer could ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/10/12/a-new-attack-vector-for-spammers/ Yet another short post on a topic dear to XP-developers everywhere. Testing as documentation. Testing is not documentation. Or rather put is poor documentation. Sure you encapsulate the desired behavior of your application in tests, but this doesn't mean that you actually document it. One of the reasons that testing is ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/10/11/xp-testing/ Another short article on agile development. You are probably familiar with people complaining that software development is one of the most error-prone and wasteful industries (if cars were manufactured by developers they would consume 50 gallons of gas per 100 miles, would require a visit to the mechanic every second week ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/10/08/pair-programming/ I don't have time to carefully write this so I'll just give a few thoughts on this apparent contradiction: Waterfall was the main way to produce software, actually to code it, because the requirements didn't change. A marketing team was going out, analyzing the market, coming out with target user and ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/10/04/iterations-vs-waterfalls/ The great tenor passed away on September 6 2007. A sad day... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/09/07/rest-in-peace-pavarotti/ I was reading the transcript that of a talk that RMS gave on copyright protection at U of Waterloo when I came across these 2 paragraphs: THere are four essential freedoms that users should have: freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish (there are programs that ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/08/02/rms-on-copyright-protection/ You are probably familiar with various management consoles that various application servers provide you with in order to manage your application. The problems that these UI consoles have are the problems that any UI has once the number of features starts to grow: they simply run out of space (most ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/07/31/scripting-vs-ui-based-management-consoles/ I was watching this presentation by Rod Johnson on infoq when I came across the part when Rod Johnson started talking about using dynamic languages in a Java application. The main reason that he gave for using dynamic languages in a Java app was that due to pushing the core ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/07/04/java-and-dynamic-languages/ I was reading this post on infoq about applying AOP for implementing business logic transparently. It was a pretty good example (actually the author displayed a very interesting way of consolidating a series of different business concerns into a general advice using a Map of Command objects), but what caught my attention ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/06/28/when-to-use-business-logic-aspects/ Une des blogues les plus connus dans le 514 vient de s'éteindre. C'est dommage, il etait un de mes favorits. http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/06/21/la-mort-dun-blogue/ I was reading this post about writing complex applications REST-style and all seemed pretty well till I came across this business logic method wrapped up as a DELETE HTTP method: /{acct_id}/open_orders/{order_id} DELETE orders delete cancelOrder Mapping a CRUD method to a business method is a pretty bad thing, if anything the service which gets exposed REST-style ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/06/21/rest-and-ws-part-4-or-when-rest-turns-ideological/ It looks like there are other people trying to use economic concepts for describing software development. Pretty cool... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/06/20/econo-computing/ A while ago I wrote about transparent development - a way to develop software that implements new business logic in a code base while making minimal, if any, changes to the existing code. I wrote about this primarily because I am working with legacy systems and making a change in ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/06/19/transparent-development-one-example/ I was reading this article on infoq about REST winning in front of WS. Rather than REST gaining ground I see this as a split in software development environments. The fact that Amazon, eBay, etc... are using REST doesn't validate REST as a technology, it simply opens up Amazon's IT ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/06/01/rest-and-ws-part-3/ One interesting development is the appearance (re-appearance?) of EDAs and the traction they are gaining in the developers mind-share. I see the interest in EDA to be an extension of the interest in asynchronous processing, EDA is asynchronous processing taken to a higher level. It is interesting because it is ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/29/event-driven-architecture/ Sometimes your application requires customization which is quite complex. This would be an example: Suppose that you have a B2C application which is selling shoes. The business decides that in order to promote business in New York the app should detect users from NY and give a 15% rebate to these ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/25/complexity-in-customization-and-its-effects-on-application-support/ I think it is obvious, but I have not seen it mentioned anywhere: you need to test an application which has been AOP-ed (which has been built using AOP). Suppose that you wrote an advice that re-prices a shopping cart. You should unit-test the advice on its own, unit-test the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/22/aop-and-unit-testing/ The need for diff-ing and merging designs doesn't necessarily appear during the design phase, it is possible to solve differences in design thru team-work such as discussing together any design changes. The need for diff-ing and merging designs is more pressing later in the application life-cycle when design is used as ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/18/the-case-for-diff-and-merge-in-design-tools/ I was watching this rather boring infoq presentation on SOA when Gregor Hohpe, the guy giving the presentation, asked this question: "We went from client-server development to thin client and now to services. The CIO, the guy paying for your IT implementations should ask you: What is next?" Gregor Hohpe went ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/15/what-used-to-drive-it-change/ This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password: http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/15/weird-feeling/ This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password: http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/08/cum-sa-transformi-2-canale-de-informatii-din-concurenti-in-colaboratori/ You are probably familiar with the template design pattern. It lets you define a life-cycle and declare functionality unknown at design time in abstract methods, effectively delegating this functionality to the sub-classes. While initially described in C++ terms in the famous Go4 book it is widely used in Java applications ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/07/the-demise-change-of-the-template-design-pattern/ While posting to this blog I have been using the term "transparent" a lot, transparent usually meaning making changes to a system without touching its internal mechanism. More often than not I posted about using AOP for transparent programming. What about when you do not have the chance of using AOP ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/02/transparent-development/ Weblogic's implementation of JMS allows for redelivery of the message on exceptions. Sometimes this helps, especially when interacting with outside systems (say that you have an MDB that should forward messages to an external system. If you cannot connect to the external system the exception thrown will put back the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/05/01/some-cool-things-about-working-with-multiple-systems/ I was listening to this podcast on the MWD blog, a podcast with Kris Horrocks from Microsoft. I find it weird given the reputation that MS has in enterprise computing, but this is the first podcast with a vendor involved in SOA which stands out. Some points that I extracted from ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/04/23/microsoft-on-soa/ A while ago I made the case for business logic aspects, arguing that in a sense AOP is similar to SOA: you basically compose together an application by weaving business logic aspects where necessary. The example I gave was that of a taxing aspect that gets applied transparently to various ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/04/17/business-logic-aspects/ I took a look at Yahoo Pipes and decided to write a small post about it. Don't expect too much from it, as it is the case lately I don't have the time to take a deep look at it. I like the theme that Tim O'Reilly put on it in ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/04/16/yahoo-pipes-the-revolution-took-place/ All is quiet on new years day, A world in white gets underway. http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/04/13/new-years-day/ Remote EJB Homes should be cached because in order to instantiate one you need to create a context binding to the server hosting the remote EJB home. The context creation is a pretty heavy operation (involves among other things checking security certificates, etc...) so it should be minimized. The fact ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/04/12/caching-remote-ejb-homes/ I was reading this interview with Arjen Poutsma on Spring Web Services when I came across this paragraph: One of the newest additions is the Spring Web Services subproject, which according to the Web site "is focused on creating document-driven Web services [and] aims to facilitate contract-first SOAP service development, allowing ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/04/11/some-random-thoughts-on-contract-first-web-services/ This is the language which develops when developers/architects talk to domain experts during requirements gathering, etc... It is used for creating a common vocabulary which can be used by the rest of the team so that knowledge flows more efficiently. Pretty good, except that I find pretty limiting, I get ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/04/05/the-ubiquitous-language/ I was reading this post on manageability.org when I came across this quote: So banking om my own experience, the primary reason I never spent the effort to upgrade was that a lot of my data was not independent of the modules used for viewing them. The three main culprits were ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/04/02/functionality-lock-in/ A while ago I wrote a post about tagging. I was arguing that even if tagging was the buzzword du-jour when it came to Web 2.0 (another big buzzword) it had its limitations. Today I decided to compare it against the other Web 2.0 stalwart: HTML links. I decided to ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/03/29/tagging-vs-linking/ Lately I have been involved in some extensive reverse-engineering, I needed to talk to a system and the guy who wrote it wasn't there. What I learned is that it pays off to think of the other system as a series of blocks that you use in order to achieve ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/03/27/reverse-engineering-101/ I really needed one thing today: inheritance between managed beans. Well, I didn't find out how to implement it. I basically needed one managed bean (let's say PersonList which has a List persons) to share its persons with another managed bean MortgagePersonList which subclasses PersonList and uses the persons List ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/03/26/some-jsf-short-comings/ I'll take a break from writing over here. I'm pretty busy and I don't get much sleep, all this adds up. I'll get back to writing somewhat later, when I'll have more time. http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/03/25/pause/ ... then you may want to read this, this, and this. They are pretty entertaining and miles away from the Web2.0, YouTube vs. Hollywood, Media 2.0, Content 2.0 stuff that keeps stuffing your feed readers. Some nice thought experiments, nothing more... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/03/23/in-case-you-want-a-different-take-on-music-industrys-problems/ I can't believe how much spam I'm getting lately, hundreds of spam messages daily. I try my best to scan it for valid comments, but there is a chance that some will slip by. Sorry about it... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/03/16/spam/ I was reading this post by Rod Johnson on the Interface 21 blog about Oracle Application Server and Spring when I came across this quote: Because Spring provides a rich, portable transaction abstraction, it does the work under the covers of driving JTA and other APIs, so your code doesn't need ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/03/13/competition-in-transaction-semantics/ I was reading this article in Business Week on a particular XML format (XBRL) for tagging financial information to various operations within a company so that it can be reported better. At first I wondered how this format will play out in the real world. Its main strong point is ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/03/09/a-new-play-from-microsoft/ A while ago I wrote a post about a particular type of container that I called the transparent container (*), a container which basically binds various pieces of functionality to each other transparently. Anyway, I was thinking today that this container exhibits features pretty close to LISP: easy binding between components, ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/03/06/the-transparent-container-and-lisp/ I was reading this article on infoQ about service registries. I was struck by the end paragraph: I periodically get to attend meetings where someone has a vision which involves a single registry/repository to rule them all. There follows a list of all the great metadata which this single truth will ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/02/24/soa-its-more-about-service-management/ Who would've thought it up someone like you Just as they brought me round Now that they brought you down Roundabout and roundabout Who wants a life anyway? Another heart has made the grade Forget it, forget it, forget it I don't understand how the last card is played But somehow the vital connection is made http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/02/20/just-felt-like-saying/ I planned to write this post after a series of posts about unusual uses of the Spring framework. I have written so far only one post and I have 2 more started. I don't have enough time to finish them (I have a small backlog of posts that I started, ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/02/11/the-emergence-of-the-transparent-container/ For the past week I have been working on an SQL script that was updating a few dozens millions of records in a table. It was very interesting and it was my first occasion at handling data sets so large. I first suggested Tom Kyte's famous approach to updating very ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/02/10/handling-large-data-sets-in-sql/ I was reading this article about some guy implementing some JSR that I don't really care about. What I really liked about this article is this quote: Until java has first class support for properties, some syntax will need to be adopted. EL was created for needs similar to beans binding ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/02/06/language-re-use/ In this post I will be considering applying business logic transparently thru interception for some specific scenarios and discuss the pros and cons of such an approach. Let's say that you have a content-management system (CMS) and a forum application, the CMS being written in Java. The CMS is used for ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/02/04/customizing-applications-transparently-thru-interceptions/ Tagging is pretty much synonimous with Web 2.0 and collaboration. It seems to pop-up all-over the place: you tag movies, posts, your bookmarks on del.icio.us, etc... I think it is pretty popular because it requires minimal input from the user: just give us 2, 3 words about this page and ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/01/30/tagging/ I wrote a while ago a post about the differences between REST and WS. I'd like to re-visit this issue today. I like REST conceptually, but I find it too crude. It revolves around 3 or 4 very simple operations which, its proponents claim, scale at the size of the Internet. ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/01/27/rest-and-ws-part-2/ I created a new category "Econo-computing" which addresses issues in the computing field seen from an economics point of view. I am not sure what will go in this category, but I find this field interesting and I will continue to explore it. http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/01/08/new-category/ I was talking in a previous post about how the demand for interceptions in an application was not met properly by the supply until AOP came about and created a scalable process that could handle interceptions efficiently. I am thinking that you could generalize this case and state that this ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/01/08/supply-and-demand-in-a-computing-environment/ I was thinking about the roots of AOP, about what makes it different from others programming paradigms, about what defines it and it came down to interceptions. AOP is pretty much about intercepting method calls and doing something before or after. This interception mechanism grew into a full-fledged language in ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2007/01/08/interceptors-and-scalability/ I was thinking about the good practice of using names for classes and methods which describe what they implement and I came to the conclusion that one benefic side effect of this practice is that it promotes to a certain extent the principle of black-boxes. Meaningful names and clean code ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/12/14/clean-code-meaningful-names-black-boxes-glass-boxes/ Large organizations come with large number of people. As you work in such an organization you will interact with many people and it is important that you interact with them efficiently. Email is the form of communication that you will use the most for interacting with other people. One good thing ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/12/13/interacting-with-a-large-number-of-people/ I was talking to Derek about what would open APIs mean for the big corporations providing them. In particular we were talking about the last paragraph in this Jon Udell post: I don't think ads are the endgame for Gmail. The real monetizable asset will be the APIs that we're all ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/12/11/some-benefits-of-open-apis-and-mash-ups/ I did one cool thing today: I wrote an interceptor that manipulates a data set in order to create various tests. It is interesting, the interceptor was retrieving data from a live data-feed and changing it according to various patterns which were further tested. I really like the fact that ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/12/05/interceptors-for-manipulating-a-live-data-feed/ I've been reading a few tech books lately and all of them are concerned with OO concepts, how to apply various solutions to various problems, how to create an agile/loosely-coupled/flexible/etc... architecture, how to interact with domain experts, etc... What is sorely missing is literature on how to deal with a software ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/11/29/a-short-coming-of-tech-books/ I was reading this interview on infoq with Gavin King when I came across this paragraph: "Second (change in SEAM) is the new concurrency model. With the death of the old paradigm of coarse-grained synchronous request/response, the assumption that concurrent requests in the same session are very rare is totally ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/11/23/an-interesting-effect-that-ajax-has-on-development/ It is possible that a legacy system on its way to being decommisioned will try to push legacy behavior to a new system. One example could be a new tax services that has to get input from an old system handling commodity trades. The new tax system has its interface ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/11/22/issues-with-legacy-systems/ We are all familiar with the concept of applying various concerns transparently to an application. These concerns are, more often than not, infrastructure concerns such as: concurrency, data-caching, security, running a component in a particular transactional context, etc... A component should not know whether the data it works with comes ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/11/17/applying-business-logic-transparently/ Later Edit: I would take what is written below with a grain of salt. It is not N-tier architectures which gave birth to SOA, but rather the drop in communication costs which made feasible connecting various applications which previously could not be connected. At about the same time EJBs were ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/10/31/soa-and-n-tier-architectures/ I have picked up economics as a hobby. It is a very interesting field and I think it pertains significantly to software development since it deals primarily with the efficient allocation of scarce resources. Anyway, I started looking at various applications thru an economists' glasses. Let's take a look at various ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/10/18/economics-applied-to-software-design/ I'm looking at how the business processes become more and more complicated and I get a feeling of deja-vu. Business processes are becoming more and more complex, they are increasingly inter-related, they are created by persons not trained in security and more often than not they are done by ear. ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/10/15/hacking-20/ I was reading (belatedly) Crazy Bob's rant about Spring. It is an interesting point, the fact that your configuration settings become code because they do what code is meant to do, that is, they implement a desired behavior. Yes, the lines between configuration and code blur, just look at the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/10/08/spring-config-as-code/ The latest buzz in IT is "rich clients". Well, apart from SOA. And AJAX ;-). It is interesting to see how some people consider this as the emergence of a new paradigm (even though client-server development was hot only a decade or so ago) and consider that this new paradigm would ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/10/03/a-large-array-of-rich-clients/ I was reading this article. Interesting development... It looks like the mobile devices are starting to have the computational resources (CPU, memory, disk space) that make the creation of complex software for them a reality. However, there is one huge obstacle for the development of complex software for mobile devices: ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/10/03/mobile-transition/ A while ago I worked on a project that was laid-out as an assembly line: it had an entry point which did some work after which it sent a message out to a queue. This queue was taking the message, did some work, transformed it and send it out to ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/09/19/the-assembly-line/ Sometime ago I was going thru the codebase of a project in order to become more accustomed with it when I detected a code-smell: an interface used for error handling had 2 very similar methods: one for producing a list of issues and another one for taking a list of ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/09/15/uber-architects-and-uber-developers/ I have started reading on REST-type architectures (I recommend this intro in particular). It is an interesting exercise to compare them to SOAP, one of the main differences being the amount of information a client has to know about the remote system it is interacting with. With SOAP the client ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/31/rest-and-soap/ You wouldn’t have guessed that this post is about EJBs, right? I wrote a rather critical post about EJBs, but I’d like to take a second look at them.I was looking at EJBs from a historical point of view and I realized that the EJBs are probably the first managed ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/30/the-emergence-of-the-managed-environment/ I am reading Martin Fowler’s UML Distilled and I am going over his introduction to use cases. So far it looks like use cases are one point where domain experts and developers come together and is the main interaction between them. Basically, the domain experts communicate the behaviour of the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/29/communication-thru-uml/ One of the revenue models for open source (OS) companies is the selling of support services and documentation. JBoss is widely known for pioneering the model of making money off support rather than off selling a product. The question that is posed is how do they protect this revenue stream? ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/25/open-source-trademarks/ These days I have done something that I have not done for the last year: I searched on Google. Yep, I didn’t do a search on Google for quite a while. The reasons that kept me away from Google was first the Google desktop which behaves more like a trojan ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/25/using-google/ I have been reading the specs for the Service Data Objects (here and here) a bit puzzled. The scope of the spec is daunting: "You need to know only one API, the SDO API, which lets you work with data from multiple data sources, including relational databases, entity EJB ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/20/service-data-objects/ You are probably familiar to the chorus of C programmers saying "We were doing OOP in C and we were doing a good job of it", if you are not here is an article about how to program in C using OOP concepts. The article addresses only encapsulation, inheritance and ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/16/c-programming-is-not-oop/ RSS, or Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a popular broadcasting protocol. A collection of items is made available to outside parties by packaging a digest of it and releasing it. The outside parties can determine what items have been added to the feed, which ones were updated, ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/13/various-uses-of-rss/ I have been working with JSF and ADF for a while and I have to say that I am impressed. The level of abstraction is simply outstanding, I am waiting for an AJAX implementation that could map the relationships described in the web application and generate AJAX components. The navigation ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/12/working-with-jsf-and-adf/ Spring 2.0 has been released. Check out this great article about the integration of AspectJ into Spring 2.0 using annotations. The way Spring piggy-backs on various AspectJ services, such as information about an aspect, is simply delicious. I really liked the part about throwing the AspectJ compiler out of the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/11/spring-20-is-released/ Anyone remembers this? Before .Net, before ActiveX, before COM there was OLE, the way that various software products could communicate one with another. The idea was that a software product would delegate various tasks to another product which was better equiped for it. I remembered it a few months ago when ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/10/object-linking-and-embedding/ I was thinking about the "Keep It Short and Simple" mantra applied to UI for desktop products and I was wondering how you could build a large desktop application and have your users manage a large array of components very different in functionality one from another. I was thinking mostly ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/08/01/interacting-with-users/ I’m not the first person to write about the transformation of IT. It is pretty obvious when you look out there that you have today is not what you had 5 years ago, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP, Apple, IT’s blue chips have changed dramatically. They are no longer pure tech-players: ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/07/28/it-transformation/ At one point I wrote a code-generator that was looking up the table description in an Oracle database, take a look at some configuration files and create a DAO for accessing that table. The DB was accessed thru straight JDBC and not thru an ORM framework. We basically had to ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/07/25/infrastructure-business-logic-and-degrees-of-expression/ I am looking at AOP as an example of applying the theory of Division of Labor to development. With AOP it is possible to have different types of professionals working on the same project at the same time. In theory a security expert would secure the application or even better a ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/07/17/aop-and-the-division-of-labor/ A new kind of APIs is emerging: the APIs written by businesses rather than by IT corporations. Some examples would be Operations Support Systems for Java and Transaction Workflow Innovation Standards. Various corporations are collaborating and setting up standards regarding the processes that they have to manage, and I think ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/07/13/business-driven-apis/ Recently I started perusing literature concerning SOA  - Service Oriented Architecture, the latest buzzword in the IT industry. As any other new concept it is pretty vague and in the process of getting defined. I find it very interesting and I read on it heavily.I cannot consider myself an expert ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/06/26/soa-is-not-corba/ JBoss is a very unusual open source project. It is an open source project that behaves more and more like a corporation. It doesn’t shy away from money, in fact it sold itself to Red Hat for a lot of money, the price tag being somewhere in the vicinity of ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/06/19/jboss-professional-open-source/ I was in an interview with another BU when the question popped up: "What are the differences between DOM and SAX XML parsers and when would you use one or the other?". I started with a brief description of DOM (tree-like representation of an XML document that loads an entire ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/06/15/dom-vs-sax/ I’ve been away from my blog for a while. I am in the process of getting a SCEA certification and this kept me pretty busy.Now I’m back, ready for writing more about enteprise computing. http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/06/06/away/ This is obviously not the first time someone points out the deficiencies in the EJB spec but I just could not help it. I have started my SCEA certification process and for the first exam I had to revisit the EJB architecture. I read EJB 2’s spec and at the ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/06/06/going-thru-the-ejb-spec/ I developed some components that interacted with the server in an AJAX-like manner (posting to a servlet, registering a callback function that would process the output from the server). I ran into a few issues and spent some time thinking about AJAX development. I noticed some tight-coupling for calls that returns ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/04/25/working-with-ajax/ I am following the dynamic vs static debate and its by-product, the debate of Ruby vs Java, not really understanding what the fuss is all about. I think we could say that the language used in the XML descriptors of a package using declarative programming (such as an EJB XML descriptor, ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/04/17/declarative-programming-and-dynamic-languages/ One big difference between Spring’s proxy-based AOP implementation (referenced from now on as Spring AOP) and annotation-based AOP is the fact the Spring AOP declares the advices outside of the code while annotations declare the advice in the code. This causes some side effects: 1) Spring AOP lets you apply different ... http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/04/11/spring-proxy-based-aop-versus-annotation-based-aop/ http://microintellia.com/blog/2006/04/04/hello-world-2/