Most development organizations of a significant size have some form of coding standards and best practices. Simply documenting these standards and keeping them up to date can be a significant challenge and enforcing them even harder. Our organization has found that enforcing coding standards and best practices in an automated fashion through our build process has been highly effective.
Many important challenges faced by a software architect for a large company have as much to do with the organization as technology. In a recent blog entry, Dan Greenblog drew parallels between the principals behind software architecture and effective organizational structures.
Ted Neward points us towards a solid piece by Bruce Wilson about increasing the power and usability of enterprise applications by using Microsoft Office as your client instead of a browser. And as Ted points out, this strategy can be a great option even if your backend is Java or any other Web Service aware platform.
A short article on developerWorks shows us how to reduce network traffic and server processing for Ajax/REST architectures, but the real jewel here is the way they effectively use the HTTP 304 status code instead of recommending more complicated solutions.
As we transition from component architectures to service oriented architectures, the balance between natural, efficient asset reuse and independent, decoupled systems is a real battleground. Neal Ford recently posted some thoughts about high coupling and it's unintended consequences, and we revisit a great InfoQ interview with Jim Webber about tight coupling as it applies to service architectures.
James Simmons posted on the Semantic Focus blog and Johannes la Poutré on the Squio blog had a web discussion on the differentiation between Microformats and RDF as they relate to the semantic web. While they both agree that RDF and Microformats are very different, they have a very different take on how that impacts their respective relevance to the semantic web.
Software visualization aims to provide a representation of artifacts at an intermediate level of abstraction, which provides enough information to be useful but is at a high enough level that you can perform broadly scoped analysis. In this interview Erik Doernenburg talks with InfoQ about different software visualization strategies using a combination of free tools and custom development.
A Gartner Report elaborates how emerging Event Driven Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture programming models, as well as the continued growth in adoption of key open source technologies (in particular Spring) have all combined to put significant pressure on traditional platform middleware vendors and may lead to disrupt the industry landscape.
In the past 18 months PHP seems to be gaining increased relevance in the Java community. We talked with both IBM (who is implementing PHP support in Project Zero) and Caucho (the maker of Resin and more recently Quercus, a PHP interpreter with native Java integration) to get their take on the emerging Java/PHP hybrid stack.
