InfoQ Homepage Articles
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Agile, Architecture and the 5am Production Problem
Can refactoring and unit testing really create robust “working software” that survives the real world? In this story adapted from his book Release It! Michael Nygard contends that "abstractions leak": we need to attend to architecture, even in Agile projects, to guard ourselves against the 5AM failures that occur when foundational abstractions misbehave.
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Aaron Erickson on LINQ and i4o
Aaron Erickson introduces his new LINQ extension Indexes for Objects (i4o). Indexes for Objects allows for fast lookup against in-memory collections while retaining the LINQ syntax and semantics. He also discusses how expression trees interact with LINQ and how they can be leveraged in other scenarios.
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Service Firewall Pattern
How can you protect a service against detect malicious incoming messages and prevent information disclosure on outgoing messages? In this sample chapter from Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz' in-progress book SOA Patterns, Arnon explains how to use a Service Firewall to intercept incoming and outgoing messages and inspect them in a dedicated software component or hardware.
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Book Excerpt and Review: Groovy in Action
The Groovy language is bringing many of the features that have become popular in Ruby to Java and the JVM. Groovy in Action by Dierk Koenig, Andrew Glover, Paul King, Guillaume Laforge and Jon Skeet provides a guided tour to learning the language and places it can be put to use. . InfoQ is excited to present an excerpt of the book of along with a review by Grails team member Jason Rudolph.
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Service Oriented Architecture Governance: The Basics
In this article, MomentumSI's Ed Vazquez explains the basics of SOA governance, with an explicit focus on the need for a holistic SOA governance model, shared governance principles and the difference between (and the need for both) tactical and strategic efforts.
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Unit-Testing XML
There are many occasions where software creates XML output: XML documents are used for data interchange between different applications, web application create (X)HTML output or respond to AJAX requests with XML, and this has to be tested as much as anything else. In this article, Stefan Bodewig explains how to perform those tests with the XMLUnit framework he has co-authored.
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"Real Options" Underlie Agile Practices
Whether we realise it or not, "freedom to choose" is a principle underlying many Agile practices. By avoiding early commitments, we gain flexibility in the choices we make later. In this article, Chris Matts and Olav Maassen propose that an understanding of "Real Options" allows us to develop and refine new agile practices and take agile in directions it hasn't gone before.
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Interview: Jezz Santos about Software Factories
InfoQ had a chance to talk to Jezz Santos, a trusted expert advisor for the Web Service Software Factory and the creator of one of the world’s first implementations of a software factory (the EFx Factory), which demonstrates some of the advanced features of a future generation of software factories to come from Microsoft. We questioned him on his view of the Microsoft Software Factory Initiative.
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Using Java to Crack Office 2007
Office file manipulation used to be difficult, but since Office 2007, Word, Excel and Powerpoint files can be read and written without anything more complicated than the native JDK itself because Office 2007 documents are now nothing more than ZIP files of XML documents. Ted Neward demonstrates this in action.
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Interview and Book Excerpt: RESTful Web Services
Today, InfoQ publishes a sample chapter from RESTful Web Services, a book authored by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. The book covers the principles of the REST style, and explains how to build RESTful applications using Java, Ruby, and Python. InfoQ's Stefan Tilkov had a chance to talk to the authors about their motivations for writing this book and their views on REST and Web services.
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How To: Live and Learn with Retrospectives
Traditional SDLCs say how interactions within a team and between teams should happen; a prescription that doesn't always fit or isn't followed consistently. Rachel Davies explains how retrospectives allow teams to improve their processes by reviewing past events and brainstorming new ideas, and shows how to facilitate a retrospective for your team.
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Implementing Exceptions in SOA
In this InfoQ article, Boris Lublinsky highlights the problems with exception handling in SOA, and suggests a SOA-based solution: a logging service that accepts all logging requests, stores and forwards them to an exception resolution service, which is responsible for enforcing rules about exception resolution, a notification service, an exceptions/logging portal, and service management.