There has been a lot of conversation going on around the configuration of applications, and how to manage it. This article explores things people can do from within their code to make their lives, and the lives of anyone else who has to administer or maintain their application, easier. These patterns have been used a number of times on ThoughtWorks projects, and they have proven their worth.
On December 22nd, 1600 GMT, the Skype services started to become unavailable, in the beginning for a small part of the users, then for more and more, until the network was down for about 24 hours. A week later, Lars Rabbe, CIO at Skype, explained what happened in a post-mortem analysis of the outage.
Recently, InfoQ.com upgraded the backend database that we've used since launch. However, everything did not go according to plan, and even though the vast majority of the migration was smooth we encountered some unexpected issues along the way (which have now been resolved). This post will discuss what our plan was, what worked and what didn't, and how we detected and recovered from the errors.
The Linking Open Data Community Project has accomplished a global RESTful SOA giving access to over two billion interlinked statements (RDF triples) from some 50 distributed providers with one serious limitation: this stunning network provides read access only. The upcoming SPARQL Update language is going to overcome this.
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, urges all users to upgrade to 1.1.5 to benefit from a crucial security patch affecting all major prior versions.
