InfoQ

News & Notable in the Community

Interview with Alistair Cockburn

Community
Agile
Topics
Methodologies,
Agile Certification,
Agile Education,
Training / Certification

Alistair Cockburn is a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, a book author, a keynote speaker at numerous Agile conferences, and most recently, the spokesperson for ICAgile.org, a credentialing body offering several levels of Agile certification. This is a multi-part interview that covers a wide range of current topics in the Agile space.

Microsoft Web Farm Framework, a Tool for Automating Operations Across a Server Farm

Community
.NET,
Operations
Topics
Web Frameworks,
Web Servers

Microsoft Web Farm Framework (WFF) is a free IIS plug-in used to provision and manage systems in a web server farm, enabling the installation and configuration of software components across the farm plus support for automated deployment of ASP.NET applications.

Cloudant releases Java based view server for CouchDB

Community
Architecture,
Java
Topics
NoSQL

Cloudant the company behind CouchDB just released Java View Server for CouchDB. That means that not only Erlang and interpreted languages like Javascript or Python can be used to write Map-Reduce jobs but also JVM based languages.

Simple Tools Preferred in the Agile Tools Space

Community
Agile
Topics
Survey,
Tools

Agile does not necessarily mandate or recommend the use of tools. Ideally the development could be done on a command line interface with requirements present on index cards. However, in the last few years, several tools have emerged and they have acted as a catalyst to successful Agile development. Migan and Gaia recently conducted a survey to find out the use of such tools in the Agile space.

Where Does IE Spend Most Time When Loading a Page?

Community
.NET
Topics
Javascript

Jason Weber, Lead Program Manager responsible for Internet Explorer Performance, has released some internal data showing where IE 8 spends most of its time while preparing a page then rendering it, suggesting what websites should be focusing on.

CloudBees introduces Hudson-as-a-Service

Community
Java,
Agile
Topics
Cloud Computing

CloudBees introduces it's fist PaaS offering, Haas (Husdon-as-a-Service), that liberates the continuous building and testing of projects into the cloud where the IT-free setup, configuration, and elastic resource allocations can be taken advantage by anyone.

Roundup of String to Java Object Conversion Libraries

Community
Java
Topics
Programming

Stephen Colebourne, of Joda Time fame, ignited a small debate when he released Joda Convert: a Java library to convert basic Objects to and from Strings using annotations. InfoQ surveys the options when transforming from one format to another.

VMware's Cloud Application Platform Vision

Community
Architecture
Topics
Platforms,
Cloud Computing

Rod Johnson details VMWare's new Cloud Application Platform Vision, vFabric. It is based on all SpringSource assets and VMware's virtualization technology. Now that nearly all major actors of the Cloud are aiming at PaaS, it may be time to ask whether IaaS is "dead"? and whether PaaS will be able get mindshare of most IT organizations?

JBoss Benchmark Claims HornetQ is the Performance Leader of Enterprise Messaging Systems

Community
Java
Topics
Messaging,
Open Source

JBoss has published the results of messaging throughput benchmarks against the leading enterprise messaging servers on the market that implement the Java Message Service (JMS) API.  In these results HornetQ demonstrates superior performance compared to the other products.

Agile 2010 - Make Stuff People Can Use

Community
Agile
Topics
User Experience

There were a number of sessions at Agile 2010 focused on usability and user experience. Samantha Starmer from REI presented a session titled "Make stuff people can use" that provided practical advice and pragmatic ideas on bringing usability into agile projects, even when there isn't a usability expert as a member of the team.

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More news Titles

Educational Content

Obscured by Clouds

Russ Miles and Toby Hobson outline many factors to be considered when adopting a cloud solution, creating a wider view of the cloud from the development and business perspective.

The Power of Visibility: Driving a Lean-Agile Transition

Kelley Horton discusses the reasons why her organization transitioned to Lean-Agile, the approach used and the visual tools helping them minimize WIP, concluding that visibility leads to success.

Panel: Modular Java

Alex Blewitt, Kevin Seal and Alex Buckley answer Java modularity-related questions: when is modularity needed, how to address it, and what are the improvements in OSGi-based development.

Whither the Smartphone? Future Directions in Smartphones and Mobile Development

Adam Blum discusses the current trends in mobile development and smartphones, trying to predict what will happen in this area over the next 5 years so a developer would know what to expect.

Cogs in the Machine: Testing Code Embedded in an Impenetrable Framework

Roy Osherove discusses the difficulties met when trying to test code embedded in a framework (cog), presenting several solutions to create unit tests for cogs, using Silverlight code as example.

Confessions of A New Agile Developer

This short article is a first-person case history of someone taking up Agility for the first time. It covers the problems and reactions that are common to most teams and most developers.

Scott Chacon on Git and GitHub

Scott Chacon talks about the technologies that power GitHub (Erlang, Redis,...), and the benefits of Git as a version control and as a storage system. Also: ShowOff, a JS-based presentation tool.

Reformulating the Product Delivery Process

Israel Gat, Erik Huddleston and Stephen Chin present how Inovis realized a higher product throughput by using three unconventional Kanban practices and a Lean Release Management tool called APROPOS.