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Book Excerpt and Review: Smart (Enough) Systems

Smart (enough) Systems is a book about Enterprise Decision Management. To make your systems smart enough, your core problem is knowing what's the right decision to make and how to make it when required. EDM is becoming a strategic area in IT as many organizations have found a gap between gaining insights from business intelligence and taking action to exploit that insight in operational decisions.

Jean-Jacques Dubray
on Sep 19, 2007
Book Excerpt and Review: Filthy Rich Clients - Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications

Desktop Java developers have long lacked resources on pushing the graphical appearance of their applications. The new book Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications attempts to fill this void. InfoQ is privileged to provide both a review and an excerpt of Chapter 14 detailing the Timing Framework library that makes Java animation easier.

Andy Roberts
on Sep 17, 2007
Yahoo's Doug Cutting on MapReduce and the Future of Hadoop

InfoQ's lead Java editor, Scott Delap, recently caught up with Hadoop project lead Doug Cutting. Hadoop is an open source distributed computing platform that includes implementations of MapReduce and a distributed file system. In this special InfoQ interview Cutting discusses how Hadoop is used at Yahoo, the challenges of its development, and the future direction of the project.

Scott Delap
on Sep 12, 2007
Book Review: The Responsibility Virus Helps Fear Undermine Collaboration

Do "empowered" organizations outperform their command-and-control competitors? Business school dean Roger Martin saw this promising approach fail too frequently. His diagnosis: he calls it the Responsibility Virus, and offers tools to help those who would treat the Virus in their own workplace. Reviewer Deborah Hartmann found this book a good explanation of why process is not enough.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss
on Sep 10, 2007
SOA Governance - Long-Term SOA Implementation and Management

In this article, Wolfgang Keller explores the challenges in SOA adoption and discusses the commonalities and differences of SOA governance to overall IT governance. He discusses why SOA initiatives frequently get bogged down, and how the anchoring of SOA in an IT governance can help make SOA a success.

Wolfgang Keller
on Sep 10, 2007
Interview: Dino Chiesa on Microsoft's SOA strategy

Microsoft has intensified its marketing efforts on SOA with the launch of a new web site, a series of webinars, an ebook, “SOA in the Real World” and the “SOA & Business Process Conference 2007”. In the next couple of months Microsoft will also be releasing .Net 3.5 and an ESB Guidance. InfoQ talked to Dino Chiesa, Director of Marketing for .Net to better understand Microsoft's SOA strategy.

Jean-Jacques Dubray
on Sep 04, 2007
An Introduction to Apache ODE

In this new InfoQ article, Paul Brown introduces Apache ODE, an open source implementation of the WS-BPEL 2.0 standard. ODE differs from other BPEL engines in that it is delivered as a component rather than a framework for developers looking to add orchestration functionality to their systems. Paul introduces ODE's features by showing how to deploy and execute a simple process.

Paul Brown
on Sep 03, 2007
Book Excerpt and Review: Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server

With SQL Server 2000's hitting its end of life date next April, many shops that have been delaying the upgrade to SQL Server 2005 need to start looking at it seriously. This is why we have chosen to review the seventh edition of William Vaughn's Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server.

Jonathan Allen
on Aug 27, 2007
"Code First" Web Services Reconsidered

In this article, Dennis Sosnoski questions the conventional wisdom that a contract-first approach to web services development, i.e. starting from WSDL, is superior to starting from code. He shows how the JiBX framework can be used to practice start-from-code development without incurring the disadvantages, specifically without coupling implementation and interface too tightly.

Dennis Sosnoski
on Aug 27, 2007
Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards

In the spirit of "information radiators and “big visible charts” Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to organize three viewpoints (Time, Task, and Team) so the whole team understands the current status of the project and can work in an autonomous, motivated and collaborative manner.

Kenji Hiranabe
on Aug 27, 2007
AgileAdvert Video Winners Announced

At Agile2007's Google reception, the audience voted to make the (very sad) clip "Developer Abuse" the number 1 video, thereby making "Matthew" (name changed to protect the innocent) this year's AgileAdvert famous Agilist. Five more videos were also recognized, sporting singing, dancing, a beating, "outside the box" thinking, expletives (deleted), and charming children (not all in one video!)

Deborah Hartmann Preuss
on Aug 20, 2007
The Secret Sauce of Highly Productive Software Development

When Agile teams get stuck in the just-average Norming stage, rather than continuting to the exciting, high Performing stage of teamwork, sometimes they're suffering from an invisible "learning bottleneck" that stunts team performance. Agile practices require us to take time to reflect and learn - and a team that learns quickly succeeds.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss Amr Elssamadisy
on Aug 14, 2007