InfoQ Homepage Development Content on InfoQ
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Firefox Developer Edition Brings 64-bit Windows Builds
64-bit builds for Firefox Developer Edition are now available for the first time on Windows. Plans for the builds were announced back in November 2014, when Mozilla first released details of their developer edition browser. Firefox Developer Edition 38 also brings fresh support for Ruby, with CSS Ruby enabled by default, and support of HTML5 ruby tags.
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Basic NCache is Now Open Source
Alachisoft has offered a heavily stripped down version of their NCache product under the Apache 2 open source license. This version only supports .NET clients; unlike the full version while also has support for Java.
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Microservices Are Conceptually Too Big
Microservices are conceptually too big; they conflate optimizing for organisational and technical factors, but solutions to problems of each type may not fit together very well, Phil Wills, senior architect at The Guardian, explained in a presentation at the QCon London conference promoting thinking about independent services and single responsibility applications, rather than microservices.
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Peter Lawrey Describes Petabyte JVMs
It’s not unusual in financial service systems to have problems that requires significant vertical, as opposed to horizontal, scaling. During his talk at QCon London Peter Lawrey described the particular problems that occur when you scale a Java application beyond 32GB.
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How Twitter Answers Handles Five Billion Sessions a Day
Twitter's Answers is an analytics service for mobile apps that has come to see five billion sessions per day. Ed Solovey, software engineer at Twitter, has described how their system works to provide "reliable, real-time, and actionable" data based on hundreds of millions of mobile devices sending millions of events every second.
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Pooled Memory Streams for .NET
Like most languages that rely on a mark-and-sweep garbage collector, C# can run into performance problems when allocating memory too often or when making large allocations. Ben Watson, a Senior SDE at Microsoft working on Bing, ran into just that problem with the MemoryStream class.
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Microservices and the Goal of Software Development
The goal of software is to sustainably minimize lead time to positive business impact, everything else is detail, Dan North claimed in a presentation at the QCon London conference describing ways of reasoning about code and how this leads him into an architecture style that may fit microservices.
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DevOps Needed for Operating Microservices
At the last QCon London, Michael Brunton-Spall, Technical Architect at the UK's Government Digital Service, expressed his views on how DevOps patterns are crucial to successfully operate microservices. Brunton-Spall identified the key ingredients to identify a microservice, explained how to build your first microservice and the necessary tools and practices to manage an ecosystem of microservices.
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Dave Farley on the Rationale for Continuous Delivery
At QCon London 2015, Dave Farley proposed that although the state of software development has been suboptimal in the past, studies are revealing that the implementation of continuous delivery leads to considerable improvement. Farley stated that continuous delivery changes the economies of software development, and provides more rapid business idea validation and reduced defect rates.
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Building Halo 4, a Video Game, Using the Actor Model
When designing and building Halo 4, the next version in a video game series, a new solution was created based on the Actor model implemented by the Orleans framework. Caitie McCaffrey told in a presentation at the QCon London conference talking about the work designing and building the services supporting the new game.
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Your Code as a Crime Scene
Measuring software complexity is a popular and common activity among the software development community, judging by the number of tools built over the years and the literature around the subject. Drawing from his blend of engineering and psychology backgrounds, Adam Tornhill proposed to its audience at QCon London to treat their code as a crime scene, with the help of version control tools.
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DevOps at the UK Government
Anna Shipman, technical architect at UK's Government Digital Service (GDS), revealed to the QCon London attendees how DevOps permeates their culture. GDS aims to lead the digital transformation of UK's government, "mak[ing] digital services and information simpler, clearer and faster". Its most well known site is GOV.UK, which provides government information and services.
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Creating Mobile Native Apps in JavaScript with NativeScript
Telerik has opened for public access NativeScript, a framework for creating native cross-platform applications for Android, iOS and Windows Universal.
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Microservices and Evolutionary Architecture
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) made us think about breaking up monolithic systems into individual services but also encouraged building producer driven monster services with centralised control. With microservices we are going back to the underlying notions of why SOA made sense, Rebecca Parsons claimed in a presentation at the QCon London conference.
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An Architect's World View: A Guide to Values, Principles and Practices
At QCon London 2015, Colin Garlick presented “An Architect’s World View”, which provided a set of values, principles and practices to act as guidance for a software architect. The core values included people, the big picture, teamwork and integrity. Garlick proposed that these values are essentially characteristics that can be prioritised in order to work as a successful software architect.