InfoQ Homepage News
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Behaviour Driven Development Is About Conversation Not Tooling
The single most important of Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) is the conversation, not the tooling, Liz Koegh states in a presentation about 10 years of doing BDD at the recent Cucumber conference. Liz believes we have made some big mistakes during these years of practicing BDD, but she is quite excited about some of the developments over the last few years.
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BitCoins Lost, MongoDB and Eventual Consistency
The recent theft from several BitCoin operators has sparked a debate whether eventually consistent databases are useful or not for banking.
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Microsoft's New OneNote Service API Backs Free Apps for Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android
Microsoft recently announced the initial release of the OneNote API, which enables programmatic integration of its free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration tool across different programming languages and platforms like Windows, Windows Phone, iOS, Mac OS, Android and the web.
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Agile Estimation for Release Planning
Estimations are used by agile teams and product owners for prioritizing work and to plan releases of products. They can be done on different levels and in various ways.
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REST Support for .NET Micro
During Build 2014, Microsoft renewed its commitment to the long ignored .NET Micro Framework. This very lightweight version of .NET can be found in for very small devices such as the open source electronics platform Netduino. But the .NET Micro is rather limited, even basic functionality such as accessing REST based resources requires help from people like Daniel Stegmaier of the mfRCF project.
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Testing PhoneGap Apps on Devices without SDK, Compilation or Code Signing
PhoneGap has released PhoneGap Developer App, a tool for testing apps during development, bypassing the whole SDK and the need for compiling or signing the code. LiveReload with GapReload can do the same thing.
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Microsoft Azure Web Sites Ready to Take on Public PaaS Leaders
With the software update announced last week, Microsoft nearly closed the gap between it and other leading Platform-as-a-Service offerings. With refined pricing, free SSL support, global DNS load balancing, and the introduction of Java support, Azure Web Sites appears to be a strong competitor for Heroku, Google App Engine, OpenShift Online, Cloud Bees, and Engine Yard.
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Express 4.0: Router improvements, Removes Bundled Middleware; But No Major Plans for Future
Express.JS, the Node.js web application framework, recently released version 4.0, with router improvements and removed bundled middleware,; but the team say they currently have "no major plans” for future releases.
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Andromeda Improves Networking for Google Cloud Platform
Google has announced that its Andromeda network virtualization stack is now live in two Google Compute Engine (GCE) zones (us-central1-b and europe-west1-a) with other zones being migrated in coming months. Andromeda offers significant performance improvements without requiring any reconfiguration by Google Cloud users.
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Heartbleed’s Aftermath: OpenBSD Developers Start Purifying OpenSSL
OpenSSL's Heartbleed vulnerability has brought the project under the intense scrutiny of the OpenBSD development team. The team began a massive cleanse and repair of the OpenSSL codebase last week with impressive results.
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To Have and Have Not StackMob- Part 2 of 2: The Road Ahead for Mobile Backend Services
The step-by-step app creation tools provided by backend services such as StackMob enable developers to create mobile apps that they would not otherwise be technically proficient enough to produce. With Stackmob gone, app developers may be searching for a replacement.Here's a look at some of the remaining options for those and other developers looking to find a mobile backend service provider.
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Reactive Streams with Akka Streams
Typesafe has announced the early preview of Akka Streams, an open source implementation of the Reactive Streams draft specification using an Actor-based implementation. Reactive Streams is an initiative to provide a standard for asynchronous stream processing with non-blocking back pressure on the JVM. Back pressure in needed to make sure the data producer doesn't overwhelm the data consumer.
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Continuous Development,is it our new maintenance reality?
The Internet of Things, Web APIs and Big Data will make continuous development a necessary reality and will tie developers down with maintenance work on completed applications, says Andrew Binstock of Dr. Dobbs. In that case, short sprints, continuous integration and deployment and modern programming practices are even more important to ensure a developer's time is better utilized.
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DBmaestro Brings DevOps for Database to Microsoft SQL Server
The database source control and deployment system DBmaestro now offers SQL Server support. This tool, which is also available for Oracle, is designed to be used in environments where multiple instances of a database exist in development, QA, and staging branches that need to be kept in sync with source code changes.
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DataBricks Announces Spark SQL for Manipulating Structured Data Using Spark
DataBricks, the company behind Apache Spark, has announced a new addition into the Spark ecosystem called Spark SQL. Spark SQL is separate from Shark, and does not use Hive under the hood. InfoQ reached out to Reynold Xin and Michael Armbrust, software engineers at DataBricks, to learn more about Spark SQL.