Articles

Learning Ruby on Rails with Michael Hartl

Learning a new programming language can be a daunting task and at times difficult to know where to start. Now try to learn a new web framework at the same time and you have a recipe for confusion. We had the opportunity to talk with Michael Hartl about his approach to teaching people Ruby on Rails, his book the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial, and the excellent video series with the same title.

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!

Joint Forces: From Multithreaded Programming to GPU Computing

In this IEEE article, authors Frank Feinbube, Peter Troger and Andreas Polze discuss two major hardware trends in the desktop parallel programming space, multi-core CPU architectures and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). They also talk about the best practices for GPU code optimization like algorithm design, memory transfer, control flow, instructions and precision.

Guardian.co.uk Switching from Java to Scala

Citing a need to be able to respond faster to events, and disappointment in the feature set and timeframe for Java 7, the team behind guardian.co.uk is using Scala as an alternative to Java for their new projects. InfoQ spoke to Web Platform Development Team Lead Graham Tackley about their current stack, the reasons behind the move, and the experience of using Scala in large-scale development.

Interview and Book Excerpt: Dan Haywood's Domain-Driven Design Using Naked Objects

Domain-Driven Design Using Naked Objects book, by author Dan Haywood, covers the Domain-Driven Design topic using the open-source Java framework Naked Objects framework (which is now part of the Apache Isis incubator project). InfoQ spoke with Dan about the book, Naked Objects framework and its recent submission to be an Apache project.

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.

Pieter van Zyl on Benchmarking ORM Tools and Object Databases

OO7J is a Java version of the original OO7 benchmark (written in C++). This project includes benchmarking Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools. Currently there are implementations for Hibernate on PostgreSQL, MySQL, db4o and Versant databases. InfoQ and Roberto V. Zicari from ODBMS.ORG recently interviewed Pieter van Zyl, creator of the OO7J benchmark.

Large-Scale Agile Design & Architecture: Ways of Working

During my 2011 QCon London keynote on "Scaling Lean & Agile: Large, Multisite or Offshore Delivery", I mentioned — as an aside — that, "Architecture is a bad metaphor. We don't construct our software like a building, we grow it like a garden." This prompted many a tweet, and some people were interested in clarification or elaboration.

The Art of Creating Whole Teams: how agile has changed the way we work with our customers

Angela Martin earned her PhD examining how agile methods work in practice and what is different about this way of working. She shares some of the key practices which organisations can implement to increase their likelihood of successful cultural change through creating Whole Teams - truly cross functional collaborative teams working well together to deliver products which meet customer's needs