InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Citrix Changes the Virtualization Market by Giving XenServer for Free
After buying XenSource 18 months ago for half a billion USD, Citrix offers their last version of the XenServer “free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment”. This move will certainly have a significant impact on the virtualization market in the cloud computing era that has begun.
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SOA & The Tarpit of Irrelevancy
A new three-part post by Neil Ford discusses both the rationale behind SOA implementations and the role large vendors play in distracting them.
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How to Ensure Early Death of a Distributed Agile Project?
Challenges of Agile adoption and execution get amplified when working in a distributed mode. Distributed Agile brings its own share of challenges in terms of geographical separation, varied timezone, cultural differences etc. Killing a distributed Agile project is not very difficult.
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Moneta: An Interface to Key-Value Stores like Tokyo Cabinet, Memcache
Key-value stores are a viable alternative to relational databases. We take a look at Tokyo Cabinet and how different key-value stores can be unified behind a common interface with Moneta.
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Code Contracts for .NET Is Available for Download
Code Contracts is the .NET implementation of the Design by Contract concept. While it was supposed to be delivered with .NET 4.0, Code Contracts is already available for download from DevLabs. Contracts impose certain restrictions on using APIs, making programming safer, having more validations and resulting in fewer unexpected errors during runtime.
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Opinion: It is Time for a New Paradigm Shift in Business-IT Alignment
Fred Cummins, an EDS fellow, offers his vision on how SOA is changing business-IT alignment. He dismisses some proposal which recommend fusing and diffusing IT with and within the business and explains how Services boundaries offer a natural boundary to foster collaboration between the business and IT.
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Skyway Builder Community Edition Supports Code Generation For Spring Applications
The latest version of Skyway Builder Community Edition (CE) offers an open-source code generation framework for Spring based web applications. The community edition can be used to generate the code required in data, service and web layers of a Spring application. Skyway Software recently announced the general availability (GA) of Skyway Builder 6.1 version.
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Article: Why Do We Need Distributed OSGi?
Recently, an early release draft of a Distributed OSGi requirements and design document has been published, along with a reference implementation as part of Apache CXF. In a new article, Eric Newcomer writes about the current status of distributed OSGi and explains the reasons for standardizing it in the first place, and its significance to the OSGi specification and community.
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Information Radiators: Is low tech really better?
The Extreme Programming Yahoo Group has been discussing the pros and cons of low tech information radiators, such as task boards, compared to high tech tools. The original poster preferred a physical task board to a spreadsheet, but found himself unable to explain why to his boss. The ensuing discussion uncovered a variety of reasons to choose simple physical means of reporting information.
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Merapi Project : A Bridge Between AIR and Java
Adobe Flex and AIR have strong ties to Java in their history, yet Adobe AIR has no native way to use Java on the client. The community has offered its own solution in the Merapi Project.
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Article: Amazing Charts In Rails
This article is an introduction to creating Flash charts using the FusionCharts Free library from Ruby, complete with a feature comparison of other charting libraries.
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Is the Relational Database Not an Option in Cloud Computing?
Recent focus on Cloud Computing has increased the use of key/value databases. The most common theme for this is scalability. Though scalability is a key factor, cloud computing has other advantages that makes it attractive for vendors that do not need to deliver highly scalable applications or services.
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Presentation: Open APIs: State of the Market
In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, John Musser talked about Open APIs, their history, their current status and trends. He also talked about what makes an Open API successful, the business models behind them and some related technological details.
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Presentation: Social Programming A Pyramid
In this presentation filmed during OOPSLA 2008, Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist, talked about ancient Egyptian cultures as seen through the discoveries made on the Giza Plateau and made some connections with software engineering.
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Requirements Come Second - What Comes First?
Allan Kelly sites an article from MIT's Sloan Management Review about why it is important to get a team's technical competence and ability improved before focusing on business-IT alignment. This, he claims, is one of the reasons Agile software development has been so successful. Allan's point indirectly touches on a recent community debate about successful, valuable, Agile adoption.