News

So…. you’ve been developing serious Java applications for quite a few years now, and while it was fun and enjoyable to discover the best practices, the misc. tools, how the messy fragmented ecosystem of frameworks and libraries  hardly wonderfully integrates thanks to amazing JEE-whatever integration stacks (Spring, no pun intended), you now feel that the […]

What is the maximum number of developers you can ever imagine working _efficiently_ on a project ? 5 ? 7 ? 10 ? 20 ?

Who wrote 2.6.33 reminds us how much the open source world (and in particular the linux kernel community) excels in this area. For the single 2.6.33 release that was developed in […]

Looks  like go is attracting some attention.

“”Open source does not mean anarchy. Somebody has to have a vision and the perseverance to see that through. The open source community can then create their own versions if they wish, but it is best if there is a main line, stable version with a consistent architecture with […]

The Scala 2.8 beta 1 announcement gives hope regarding the availability of a decent IDE for editing Scala code. We will see what Scala 2.8 final looks like but if the eclipse IDE support features basic Class and Method renaming I will most likely make Scala my main programming language for writing open source code […]

In many situations, open Source software developers need to deal with the maintenance of patches. Examples include :

Unofficial versions of the linux kernel, where specific patches are applied (e.g. Xen kernel, openvz kernel, ..) and need to be constantly forward-ported to the latest kernel when it is released

Distribution-specific changes (e.g. Ubuntu-specific changes to debian packages).

Maintaining […]

Cumulative Flow Chart in Kanban attracted my attention as I consider it a nice example of using branching efficiently.

IMHO, it is simply wrong to assume that every single task can be split into small fragments that are then iteratively incorporated into the mainline. The author calls this kind of task a “technically complex story”, and […]

why can’t programmers…. program is definitely worth reading… Yes, this is disturbing….

The worst question interview ever describes… well, just read the post and you will quickly figure out what it is about. I simply LOVE Gavin King’s comment :

Heh, and I’ll continue to be an ass in all future responses to “John Smith”s who tell talented guys who worked on my projects for years that they […]

EJB 3.1, a compelling evolution describes the new features available in EJB 3.1. It looks like EJBs are finally getting the features they miss..

However, there are still a few things bugging me :

Why insist on keeping the neat features (IoC, ..) server-side only ? Why can’t I just use the same mechanisms for in-container server-side […]

These days, it looks like there is a lot of hype around the NoSQL movement.

These data storage systems have a number of features in common:

•   a call level interface (in contrast to a SQL binding)

•   fast indexes on large amounts of data,

•   ability to horizontally scale throughput over many servers, and

•   ability to dynamically define […]