Articles

Cloud Computing Roundtable

In this IEEE panel discussion article, guest editors Ivan Arce and Anup Ghosh facilitated the discussion on cloud computing security risks. The panelists are Eric Grosse (Google Security), John Howie (Microsoft), James Ransome (Cisco), Jim Reavis (Cloud Security Alliance) and Stephen Schmidt (Amazon Web Services).

Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon London 2011

This article presents the main takeway points as seen by the many attendees who blogged or tweeted about QCon. Comments are organized by tracks and sessions: Keynotes, Tutorials, Architectures You've Always Wondered About, Building Systems With REST, Design and Objects 2011, Enterprise Agile Transformation, Functional Web, HTML5, the Platform, iOS4 and Android, NoSQL: Where and How, and many more!

How ALM Drives Business/IT Alignment, Competitive Advantage

ALM and Business Processes

Architectural Decisions as Reusable Design Assets

Service-Oriented Architecture Decision Modeling (SOAD) framework helps to capture the recurring architectural decisions and use them to guide design in related projects. In this IEEE article, author Olaf Zimmermann discusses this decision-centric approach to guiding the design work. He also talks about the two model types in SOAD metamodel, the guidance models and the decision models.

Meet the Goliath of Ruby Application Servers

PostRank Labs released an open source version of their Ruby web server framework powering PostRank. Goliath, is an asynchronous server designed for speed, leveraging key features of Ruby 1.9+. Goliath creates fast web and data services not unlike node.js but sticking with what Ruby developers know..Ruby. Discover how easy it can be to create manageable server-side services with Ruby.

The Top Five Challenges of Building Software Platforms in the Agile World

When scaling Agile to the enterprise new concerns arise that require revisiting the values and practices of Agile software development. One such concern relates to a common strategy to achieve reuse at the enterprise level - building software platforms. This article lists the top five challenges that an Agile organization should expect to face when deciding to adopt a software platform strategy.

Concurrency Controls in Data Replication

Learn about leading concurrency control mechanisms used for data replication in distributed environments, comparing synchronous and asynchronous implementations with/without locking - techniques used by Oracle RAC, TimesTen, and GigaSpaces and NoSQL databases. Explore tradeoffs among performance, consistency, deadlocks, and conflicting updates in the context of a sample distributed application.

Implementation Decision Rationales – Program Comprehension in Agile

Given the fact that the bulk of a developer's work is maintaining and enhancing existing code, Fabian Kiss makes the case for a lightweight approach to documenting the rationale and decision process behind design decisions to help later developers tie the source code syntax to its meaning in the application domain. Using simple tags and clearly thought out rationale to provide just-enough value.

Concrete: Rich, Customizable DSL Editors for the Browser

Text-based DSLs are useful, an custom editor for the DSL is even better. Concrete allows to build customized editors for JSON-based DSLs/Models. InfoQ talks to Concrete's creator Martin Thiede.

The Azul Garbage Collector

Azul's recently announced Zing product brings their Garbage Collector, which achieves both pauseless garbage collection and a high tolerance to the factors which typically impact collection and application responsiveness, to Java programs running on Intel and AMD based servers. This article takes a detailed look at how Azul has been able to achieve these design goals.

Agile Contracts

The traditional Waterfall model fits nicely with the way companies buy things: requirements are drawn up, a supplier quotes a price, and everyone signs a legally binding agreement. Contracts written this way seldom offer the freedom to work using an Agile approach. This article examines four separate models available to suppliers and customers for establishing contracts for Agile work.