InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Communicating Intent through Idiom and Paradigm Selection
What about using idioms and programming conventions as signals to achieve more readability and expressiveness? This is what Reg Braithwaite advocates for, suggesting that syntax or even paradigm choices can be a means to communicate the intent.
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Apache Wicket 1.3.1 Release Supports Transparent Clustering
The Wicket team has announced Wicket 1.3.1, the first maintenance release of Wicket 1.3. 1.3.1 adds transparent clustering support out-of-the-box.
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Using ParseTree for LINQ-style queries and extracting metadata
Whether it's LISP macros or LINQ's expression trees - access to the AST of code is a powerful tool. We look at how ParseTree allows this in Ruby - and how it's being used in libraries like Ambition, Sequel and the web framework Merb.
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Interview: Charles Nutter discusses JRuby
JRuby project lead Charles Nutter discusses how he got involved with JRuby, Sun's involvement with JRuby, how JRuby fits into enterprise-level web applications, the possibility of a friendly fork of the OpenJDK source code, reasons for switching to JRuby, the future of JRuby, Spring and JRuby, and the Ruby community as a whole.
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Does "Done" Mean "Shippable"?
There has been a lot of discussion on various agile forums and blogs about the difference between 'Done' and 'Shippable'. It might sound like both mean the same, however discussions on the lists and various blogs suggest that these are still widely misunderstood, mis-used terms. Here's a roundup of recommendations about how to handle "Done."
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TDD/BDD Leading To Incomplete Unit Tests?
Peter Ritchie raised concern about TDD and BDD keeping practitioners from writing good unit tests. He cites an over-reliance on “interaction testing", a core mantra and essence of TDD and BDD, as a driver with tendency to result in incomplete unit testing.
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Review Board - Online Code Review Tool
Recently there has been a resurgence in interest in code reviews. InfoQ looks at Review Board, an open source application that helps facilitate the code review process, that has been gathering momentum in the open source community.
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IntelliJ IDEA's Dependency Structure Matrix Tool Visualizes Architecture
JetBrains includes a Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM) tool in its recently released version 7. DSM tools generate a representation of a codebase's dependencies in an appealing martix visualization. This article looks at how DSM can improve project structure and how IDEA's DSM tool compares with alternatives.
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Responsibility, Personal Agility, and Other Touchy-Feely Ideas
Successful Agile teams are predominantly characterized by their culture and not their practices. This sentiment rings true to many (if not most) in the Agile field. Christopher Avery, who has made his name in the world of organizational transformations, has taken his work on Responsibility and focused it directly on Agile practices. Is Personal Agility the key to successful Agile adoption?
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InfoQ Presentation: Selecting the Right Methodology and Steering it to Success
It's easy to agree with "anything more than 'barely sufficient' in is waste," but it's more complicated when we actually need to customize a process for a particular project. At Agile2006 Todd Little shared a model to help leaders choose the right flavour of Agile based on project and team attributes, and he emphasised the need to actively steer projects as development progresses.
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Article: Process Component Models: The Next Generation In Workflow?
Tom Baeyens wrote a summary of the state of Workflow & BPM standards and tools. After a detailed look at BPEL, BPMN, and other technologies such as choreography, XPDL, BPDM, jPDL, Tom takes the stance that it is time to abandon the idea that non-technical business analysts can draw production-ready software in diagrams and separate the analysis process models and executable process models.
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Opinion: Programming Languages Shouldn't Enforce Style, Teams Should
Some believe that, if you write a large enough cookbook, there will always be a simple recipe to solve our programming problems. Taking it to an extreme, some want programming languages to limit developers to safe constructs and clean style. Reg Braithwaite skewers this idea, and challenges teams not to give up accountability for style, asking "Whatever happened to code reviews?"
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Does Continuous Production Lead To Extreme Agility?
The idea of continuous production has been around for some time, with Cal Henderson revealing in 2005 that Flickr releases code to production about every 30 minutes. InfoQ investigates continuous production and explores the effects it has on the product lifecycle, and in turn the host organisation.
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Sun SPOTs: Programmable Devices for Java Developers
Sun Microsystems has released the Sun SPOT platform under the GPL license. Sun SPOTs are programmable battery-powered devices controllable with Java technology.
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Agile2008 Reminder: Registration Discounts, Submission Deadline
Agile2008 is scheduled for August 4th-8th 2008, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the Sheraton Centre Hotel. The Agile Alliance issued a call for participation in December and reminds us to submit by February 25th. Another way to attend for less is to nab one of the limited number of discounted super-early-bird registrations.