InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Survey: The State of Agile in Practice
In March Scott Ambler surveyed over 4,200 people to discover the actual rate of Agile process adoption and effectiveness. His conclusion: Agile is not only growing in popularity, it's working so well that adopting an Agile approach appears to be an incredibly low-risk choice. Ambler recently published not only his conclusions but also the raw data he collected.
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Debates flare on the right level of abstraction over ORM and JDBC
A heated debate started a few weeks ago initiated by members of the Hibernate team, arguing that using an abstraction framework on top of an ORM is a bad idea, citing Spring's HibernateTemplate as a specific example. Along the theme of levels of abstraction, Brian McCalister also surveyed various convenience frameworks over JDBC.
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Testing and Debugging Ruby on Rails
Well-known Railer Rabble launches a companion blog to his upcoming O'Reilly book covering the important topics of testing and debugging Ruby on Rails.
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Industry Use of OSGi Continues to Increase
OSGi is specification of a Java-based framework targeted for use by systems that require long running times, dynamic updates, and minimal disruptions to the running environment. The Eclipse Equinox provides one of many available implementations. Numerous server and desktop applications are also starting to make use of OSGi.
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SOAP Attachment State of the Art
Colin Adam from WebServices.org provides a helpful review of what technology is available to attach non-text data in SOAP messages.
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The Creeping Featuritis Chart
Creeping Featuritis is an insidious sort of product rot, reducing useful software into heaps of expensive widgets and aggravating help features. Peter Abilla brings us a chart by Kathy Sierra, capturing what it looks like from the customer's point of view, and reminds us to "focus on the customer and abandon the competitor-focused strategy all-together."
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InfoQ Article: Simplifying Enterprise Apps with Spring 2 and AspectJ
Adrian Colyer, AspectJ lead and Chief Scientist at Interface21 has contributed an excellent article which shows how to use Spring 2's new AspectJ integration features followed by a roadmap for the adoption of Aspect Oriented Programming on an enterprise project, with lots of specific examples of how and where to apply Aspects.
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Measuring Performance in the Adaptive Enterprise
Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts that force managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, despite the fact that many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. As Agility increases the futility of this exercise becomes apparent. Thought-leader Jim Highsmith proposes a helpful alternative more harmonious with Agile values.
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Naked Agile and Naked Skydiving
Prompted by recent discussions on the ScrumDevelopment list, Alistair Cockburn and Jeff Patton sound a call to focus on the basics: "Listening, Designing, Coding, Testing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something."
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Meet 9 Top Rails Gurus At "The Rails Edge"
The Pragmatic Programmers announce a series of 3-day workshops for developers, managers, and enthusiasts to get up to date with the latest Ruby and Rails technologies.
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Tackling Misconceptions About Spring
Spring has transitioned from a bleeding edge project to widely used component of enterprise applications written in Java today. As with any popular project misconceptions start to arise. Steve Anglin recently blogged on oreillynet.com about 10 common misconceptions developers have about Spring.
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Tech Stories Need to Include People and Technology
Brian Marick, reflecting on conversations heard at Agile2006, blogged about his concern that some of us are telling stories from the purely human or social viewpoint, while other are telling technology-only stories, noting that that XP isn't a story you can tell well without talking about both of these. Marick encourages us to include both when we communicate in and about projects.
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Agile, Orthodoxy and a Message From God
A long and complex thread on the ScrumDevelopment list, set off by the phrase "Agile 2.0," has been exploring the past and future of Agile methodologies (for good or ill) including so-called "next generations" approaches like AUP, MSF Agile, and AMDD. Ron Jeffries, Ken Schwaber and Scott Ambler are just a few of the serious agilists who participated in this lively conversation.
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Easier Database Development with JDBC 4.0
Java 6.0 will include a number of Java Database Connectivity enhancements collectively known as JDBC 4.0. One of the main goals of JDBC 4.0 was to try and reduce the amount of boilerplate JDBC code a developer had to write.
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Hanselminutes Podcast on Scrum Project Management
Scott Hanselman, a Certified Scrum Master at Corillian, has posted a podcast on the Scrum project management methodology. He uses Scrum in his own projects and feels that Scrum makes Agile approachable and easy to grasp. He goes over just-in-time task-level estimation, velocity, how burndown charts help forecast delivery dates, and the concept of when a feature can be considered really "done".