InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Scaling the Stack Overflow Monolithic App by Obsessing Over Performance
At QCon New York 2015, David Fullerton presented a deep-dive into the monolithic C# / MS SQL architecture that powers the Stack Overflow website, which handles over 4 billion requests per month. Fullerton argued that by focusing on performance, scalability was included ‘almost for free’; and that by minimising the number of external application services, the need to pay ‘SOA tax’ has been avoided.
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Monitoring Microservices and Containers: A Challenge by Adrian Cockcroft
At GlueCon 2015, Adrian Cockcroft presented a list of rules for monitoring microservice and container-based applications. In addition to these guidelines, Cockcroft also highlighted a series of challenges for monitoring cloud-native container-based systems, and introduced his ‘Spigo/simianviz’ microservice simulation and visualisation tool.
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Deploying Scrum and SAFe at Philips Lighting
InfoQ interviewed Frank Penning, PMO manager from Philips Lighting, about the main challenges that Philips Lighting is facing in product development, why Scrum is not enough, how they apply SAFe, and the benefits that they have gained from deploying agile methods for product development.
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Jetty 9.3 Celebrates 20th Anniversary, adds HTTP/2 Support
On June 12, 2015, the Jetty Project released version 9.3 of their flagship open source embedded application server, that day being the 20th anniversary of the project's beginning. Features of the release include HTTP/2 server (and client) support, Java 8 as a minimum, more Java NIO integration and an overhauled scheduler. They also removed SPDY networking support and fixed over 400 bugs.
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Parse Got a Tenfold Reliability Improvement Moving from Ruby to Go
In order to improve scalability, Parse moved part of their services, including their API, from Ruby on Rails to Go, Charity Majors, Engineer at Parse, recounts. In doing so, both their reliability and deployment times benefited greatly.
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Microsoft Classifies Older Versions of Ask Toolbar as Malware
Microsoft is now classifying as malware and blocking the installation of older versions of the Ask Toolbar, currently bundled within the Java installer; however, the latest version of the toolbar will still work with no problems. The decision aligns with Microsoft recent’s policy to classify as malware any search protection code: code that prevents the user from changing the default search engine.
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WebAssembly: A Universal Binary and Text Format for the Web
Mozilla, Google, Microsoft and Apple have decided to develop a binary format for the web. Called WebAssembly, this format could be a compilation target for any programming language, enabling applications to run in the browser or other agents.
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Protocol-Oriented Programming in Swift
At WWDC 2015, Dave Abrahams, of C++/Boost fame and now lead of the Swift Standard Library group at Apple, introduced Swift as a Protocol-oriented language, and showed how protocols can be used to improve your code.
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SQL Server 2016: Dynamic Data Masking
Data masking is a necessary, but error prone process. You only need to forget the mask one time to leak sensitive data. SQL Server 2016 attempts to address this with a feature called Dynamic Data Masking.
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Password Manager LastPass Suffers Hacking Attack
The web-based LastPass password management service has been hacked according to the company, and the result is that some user data, including email addresses and authentication hashes were obtained by unknown assailants. The breach highlights the risks users take by storing all of their passwords in a centralized location.
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SQL Server 2016: Row-Level Security
A common criticism for SQL Server’s security model is that it only understands tables and columns. If you want to apply security rules on a row-by-row basis, you have to simulate it using stored procedures or table value functions, and then find a way to make sure there is no way to bypass them. With SQL Server 2016, that is no longer a problem.
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How to Improve Android App Performance
Performance is key to mobile apps. Google provides a lot of training material to improve performance in Android apps. A brief overview of tips and techniques.
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SQL Server 2016: Always Encrypted
SQL Server 2016 seeks to make encryption easier via its new Always Encrypted feature. This feature offers a way to ensure that the database never sees unencrypted values without the need to rewrite the application.
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DDD and Living Documentation
Creating documentation is boring, it's often obsolete and misleading but with a new mindset both your documentation and code can improve, Cyrille Martraire explained in a presentation showing how to create living documentation when working with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) at this year’s DDD Exchange conference in London.
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SQL Server 2016: Temporal Tables
SQL Server 2016’s new Temporal Table feature makes it easy to work with data that needs to be versioned.