Geoffrey Wiseman is a software generalist with an emphasis on Web, Java and Agile development. He's worked in professional services, and product development as a consultant, with partners, and for enterprises in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He tries not to specialize as little as possible, and is interested in just about everything.
Kevin Wittkopf talks about interoperability, focusing on .NET and Java, from web services to bridging techniques, message busses and hub approaches, and how those are helping to bring about the end of the platform wars.
For many developers, rule engines are buzzwords, or black boxes on an architectural diagram: something to be feared or admired from afar, but not understood. In this article, Geoffrey Wiseman shares his practical experience with rule engines and with Drools in particular to support in-market solutions for financial services.
Earlier this year, Google and SpringSource announced that they were co-operating on a standard set of annotations to be used for dependency injection which were proposed via JSR-330. These annotations didn't line up with those proposed for JSR-299, which generated controversy that has now been resolved, with JSR-299 adopting the JSR-330 annotations and both moving forward to be part of Java EE 6.
JUnit 4.7, which has just reached Release Candidate stage includes a significant new feature: Rules. Rules are, in essence, another extension mechanism for JUnit, which can be used to add functionality to JUnit on a per-test basis. Most examples of custom runners in earlier versions of JUnit can be replaced by Rules, and new capabilities have already been added.
Choosing the right features can make the difference between the success and failure of a software product. Mike Cohn presented 'Prioritizing your Project Backlog' at Agile 2008 on how a project backlog should be organized and prioritized and non-financial techniques for prioritization such as kano analysis, theme screening/scoring, relative weighting and analytic hierarchy process.
On September 1st, 2008, Google announced its new open source browser, Google Chrome. InfoQ has taken some time to compile some of the perspectives and analysis from the community, news media and blogosphere in order to assemble comprehensive coverage of the Google Chrome launch and its impact.
Rossen Stoyanchev of SpringSource wrote an article for InfoQ about the new features in Spring MVC that are part of Spring 2.5, notably the annotation-based approaches that are informally known as @MVC. These allow Spring MVC applications to be written with simpler annotated POJOs rather than xml-wired implementations of strict interfaces.
At Campfire One on April 7th, 2008, Google introduced Google App Engine as a way to simplify the job of creating, running and scaling web applications, to make it 'easy.' In essence, Google App Engine allows you to build web applications locally using and then deploy them on Google's infrastructure.
No software project is perfect, nor is the organization in which the project takes place. When your software project goes wrong, do your team members complain, or do they take corrective action? The Complaint Free World project encourages people to take notice of how often they complain, and reduce the frequency of the complaints, aiming for a goal of twenty-one complaint-free days.
