BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Architecture Content on InfoQ

  • Does lines of code kill?

    Steve Yegge touched a nerve in the development community when he argued that keeping the code size to an absolute minimum is the most important thing when developing software. In his view, you may have to sacrifice some design patterns and avoid refactoring at times just to keep the lines of code down. And if your problem is large enough - you may have to switch to another programming language.

  • Interview: Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software

    Charles Simonyi, the President of Intentional Software and a recent space traveller presents his views on the future of software development. He talks about how to include domain experts in the development cycle by letting them express their intentions in domain specific languages, about Intentional's view on DSLs and Domain Driven Design and about what it was like to be a space tourist.

  • More on RPC in Adobe Flex Applications with AMF, BlazeDS, and/or GraniteDS

    Last week, Adobe made a major change to the Adobe Flex Platform with the announcement that much of LiveCycle Data Services is being open sourced in the BlazeDS project, including the AMF specification and code. This change should eliminate one of the final cost and licensing barriers for those considering adopting the Flex Platform.

  • Amazon's SimpleDB and IBM's Blue Cloud Continue the Rise of Cloud Computing

    Earlier this week Amazon introduced a beta of SimpleDB, a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. SimpleDB compliments Amazon's other computing services Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. The announcement comes roughly a month after IBM announced their Blue Cloud initiative.

  • Can architecture create a gap between developers and software they build?

    Many software project management and architecture approaches tend to parcel out work on a project in a way to create hierarchical layers. This helps simplify both developers’ work and management. However, the underlying information shielding among layers can potentially create a gap between developers and the software they are building, if their tasks are totally taken out of functional context.

  • Big Architecture Up Front - A Case of Premature Scalaculation?

    Taking a look at the reaction in the blogosphere to the idea of "premature scalaculation". The question is - when designing your application, how much time should you spend on building out for scalability?

  • A Look at the Buzzword Spell Checker Implementation

    In Buzzword’s September release, spell checking support was added to the online word processor built using the Adobe Flex Framework. This week, David Coletta from the Buzzword team is sharing details on this part of their implementation in his blog posting, "Buzzword Spell Checking Internals."

  • Presentation: Werner Vogels on The Amazon.com Technology Platform: Building Blocks for Innovation

    In a presentation recorded at QCon, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels explains how Amazon has become a platform provider, and how an increasing number of diverse businesses are built on this platform. Although Amazon.com's scale makes them seem an extreme case, lessons have been learnt that will be of use to every enterprise looking to provide services to or to consume services of business partners.

  • Article: Stefan Tilkov helps you get started with REST

    Representational State Transfer (REST), the architecture behind the web is quickly becoming a real alternative to be considered by architects developing distributed systems. In a recently released article, Stefan Tilkov delves into the ways of designing systems using REST and examines the similarities and differences between classic interface-based approaches.

  • Does Dependency Injection pay off?

    There has been an interesting discussion in the blogosphere about the benefits or lack of benefits from using Dependency Injection. The question is — does Dependency Injection really pay off?

  • Udi Dahan on increasing scalability by making things asynchronous

    Making things asynchronous is a proven way to increase scalability, and yet, many things seem to be naturally synchronous. But does that mean that these problems can't be solved in an asynchrounous way, or does it mean that we're simply stuck in our thinking? Udi Dahan challenges this thinking in the article 'Asynchronous, High-Performance Login for Web Farms'.

  • InfoQ Presentation: Eric Evans on DDD - Strategic Design

    In this talk, Eric Evans introduces two broad principles for strategic design. 'Context mapping' addresses the fact that different groups model differently and 'Core domain' distills a shared vision of the system's core domain and provides a systematic guide to when good enough is good enough versus when to push for excellence.

  • AntiSamy 1.0 Released - Protecting web applications from malicious HTML and CSS

    AntiSamy aims to provide an API for protecting HTML and CSS code from malicious content such as XSS attacks. Version 1.0 was recently released, providing a Java implementation, with .Net and PHP to follow.

  • Duck Typing and Protocols vs. Inheritance

    A recent debate on the RubyTalk list asked where to use is_a? vs respond_to? This highlights situations where objects respond to the same interface, but don't share any superclasses. We look at this debate and solutions in other languages such as Smalltalk, Erlang, and Scala.

  • Adobe AIR: Do we really need browser apps that run on the desktop?

    Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a platform that allows developers to use web technologies to build desktop applications. Danny-T is questioning the Adobe AIR paradigm on his blog posting, ‘Is breaking out of the browser the right next step?’

BT