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  • The "Consulting" Contract

    Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can play a "consultant" role, and should think about developing consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not about the exchange of money, but to help create stellar results for the client while working in a manner that adheres to their own values and preferences.

  • Aspects of Domain Model Management

    Using a domain model is rarely as easy as just creating the actual domain model classes and then using them. Soon enough one discovers that sizable amounts of infrastructure code will also be required in support of the domain model. In this article, Mats Helander explains how to use Domain Model Management to handle this complexity in a simple way.

  • Talking Rails 2.0 with David Heinemeier Hansson

    Ruby on Rails 2.0 is the next version of the premier web application framework for the Ruby language, after almost a full year in development. Rails 2.0 is full of great new features, bug fixes and lots of the polish expected from the team. InfoQ had the opportunity to talk with the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, to learn what it's like to get this release out the door.

  • An Introduction to the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools

    The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project is an open source software project that provides reporting and business intelligence capabilities for JEE and Java applications. This introduction dives into it various features such as the report designer, chart wizards, and web viewer. Future articles will dive into practical applications of BIRT in JEE and desktop applications.

  • Book Excerpt and Review: Release It!

    'Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software' by Michael Nygard, which is nominated for a 2008 Jolt Award, discusses what it takes to make production-ready software and explains how this differs from feature-complete software. InfoQ spoke with Nygard about the areas that the book covers and some questions around how the book's philosophy fits in with concepts such as Agile.

  • A Brief Introduction to REST

    In this article, Stefan Tilkov provides a pragmatic introduction to REST (REpresentational State Transfer), the architecture behind the World Wide Web, and covers the key principles: Identifiable resources, links and hypermedia, standard methods, multiple representations and stateless communication.

  • Using singleton classes for object metadata

    So you have a bunch of objects - let's call it an object graph - provided by some API. Now you want to to process the objects - which requires some intermediate data, for instance: the process creates some metadata that needs to be stored with the objects. The problem: where to store the metadata? We'll show how to use Ruby singleton classes to handle this problem.

  • The Seven Fallacies of Business Process Execution

    After 8+ years of intense research, the promises of BPM have not materialized: we are still far from having the ability to use the business process models designed by business analysts to create complete executable solutions. Some argue that we need to re-engineer BPM standards. In this paper we explore a new architecture blueprint for BPMSs that offers a cleaner alignment between SOA and BPM.

  • Asynchronous, High-Performance Login for Web Farms

    Often during my consulting engagements I run into people who say, "some things just can't be made asynchronous" even after they agree about the inherent scalability that asynchronous communications pattern bring. One often-cited example is user authentication - taking a username and password combo and authenticating it against some back-end store.

  • A Detailed look at Overriding the Equality Operator

    It is surprisingly easy to make a mistake when overriding the equality operator. Not only does the equality operator bring along with it a lot of baggage, there is a lot of flawed guidance out there, even on the MSDN website. So we are going to try to clear the air by presenting a systematic breakdown of both a reference type and a value type that supports equality.

  • Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon San Francisco 2007

    This article presents the main takeway points as seen by the many attendees who blogged about QCon. Comments are organized by tracks and sessions: Keynotes, Architectures you've always wondered about, Architecture Quality, How much REST do we need?, Java in Action, Architecting for Performance & Scalability, Java Emerging Technologies, Challenges in Agile, Bleeding Edge .NET, The Rise of Ruby.

  • A Leaner Start: Reducing Team Setup Times

    How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.

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