InfoQ Homepage News
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Software Katas - Practice in Public Makes Perfect
Thought leaders in the agile community are talking about software katas - where one practices specific exercises until they are memorized. Robert Martin has calls them "performance art". Lately there has been an increase in blog posts and sites devoted to katas. The latest addition: weekly screencasts at katas.softwarecraftsmanship.org.
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Easily Accessing Azure Cloud Services with AppFabric
Microsoft Windows Azure Platform AppFabric is a set of technologies helpful to connect on-premises applications with Azure cloud services and resources and eases interoperability between users belonging to different domains. The main components are the Service Bus and the Access Control Service.
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System/Acceptance Testing with Time and Dates
Unit Testing Time and Dates is an often talked about problem with relatively simple solutions. More difficult is the acceptance/system testing with Time. What strategies are used?
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JDK 7 Milestone 5 Includes Concurrency and Performance Updates, But Is Not Feature Complete
Sun's Java SE team recently released the Milestone 5 build of JDK 7. This was expected to be a feature complete release of Java 7 but is some way short of that. InfoQ takes a look at what has been added and some of the major features still missing.
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IE and Firefox Will Be Using DirectX for Rendering
Both IE and Mozilla teams are currently working on using DirectX/GPU for page rendering while Google is considering it.
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A Reference Architecture Foundation for SOA Draft Was Submitted to Public Review
A new OASIS Reference Architecture for SOA builds on the concepts and relationships defined in the OASIS Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture and follows the recommended practice of describing an architecture in terms of models, views, and viewpoints. While it remains abstract in nature, it describes one possible template upon which an SOA concrete architecture can be built.
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Mark Reinhold on Closures for Java
Following on from last week's surprise announcement at Devoxx that Sun would be adding closures to Java, Mark Reinhold has published a blog entry providing more background to the decision.
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JRuby's New IR Paves the Way for Future Performance Improvements
A new intermediate representation (IR) for JRuby code enables many optimizations and could bring the next performance boost. InfoQ talked to Subbu Sastry who works on the IR.
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Evented I/O for Javascript with Google V8-based Node.js
Node.js allows scalable ѕtandalone Javascript server programs by bundling Google's V8 with libraries for event-based I/O. InfoQ takes a look at what makes Node.js tick.
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Refactor or Rewrite?
The goal of refactoring and rewriting is to improve the sanity of the system by improving the code readability, structure and clarity. A clean code would be easier to maintain and enhance. However, on many occasions Agile teams have a tough time deciding between the two.
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Hyper-communication in Silverlight 4
For better bi-directional communication, a new communication protocol, Net.TCP, was introduced since .NET Framework 3.0 as part of WCF. Net.TCP is now available in the coming Silverlight 4 improving the throughput and the number of connections many times compared to HTTP Polling Duplex.
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MagLev Ruby VM Now Available, Brings GemStone's Persistence to Ruby
The long awaited MagLev Ruby implementation, based on GemStone Smalltalk, is now available in a public alpha release. While not quite ready to run Rails, it does support frameworks like Rack and Sinatra. MagLev comes with full support for GemStone's mature distribution and persistence features.
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Ruby VM Roundup: MacRuby 0.5 Beta 2 Adds AOT Tooling, Rubinius 0.13 Released
Beta 2 of MacRuby 0.5 improves compatibility and adds new tools for Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation and building standalone applications. Rubinius 0.13 was released with improved performance using LLVM, a JIT and a new compiler.
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Details of the Now Available Google Chrome OS
Google has open sourced Chrome OS a year before the planned launch which is to happen some time before winter holidays in 2010. Google is working with manufacturers on a new reference hardware to accommodate their speed and security requirements which are key features of their new operating system.
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Why .NET Micro Really Went Open Source
A few months ago Microsoft announced their plans to release the .NET Micro Framework as an open source project. Since then there has been rumors that Microsoft is using open source as an excuse to abandon the project. The truth is the exact opposite, Microsoft is actually using open source to drive the adoption of .NET Micro.