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I've found a realy good resource for german audience about software architecture hosted on MSDN. On the MSDN Architecture Center you'll find:Actual news and trends about software architectureBasic information about software architecture (concepts, styles, etc.)PodcastsTool PreviewsA free english architecture journalForum and Knowledge BaseTips and TricksAdvance your architecture skills by looking

Following up a question I received via Twitter, and the fact, that a significant part of the developer-community is using Macs, I thought this might be a good opportunity to discuss some "UML Options" for the Mac. Now, this article is not meant as a definitive answer, I would hope for some follow-ups by readers in the comments.Ok lets start: First there is heavy weight stuff, most notable Visual

In the current issue of the Java Magazin I published a tutorial to develop loose coupled systems with Mule. The tutorial illustrates the usage of an Enterprise Service Bus in an airport domain, where different airport systems communicate with each other over the ESB. In the example I use a set of important Enterprise Integration Patterns and show how these patterns are implemented in Mule. Some

Some interesting news from the Open Source ESB Mule. The first milestone from the third version of Mule is out and comes with a major important feature: Hot DeploymentWhat is the meaning of hot deployment?Hot deployment is a process of deploying/redeploying service components without having restart your application container. This is very useful in a production environment when you have multiple

In this blog of sonatype there is a useful list of best practices with Maven, including:Why putting repositories in your pom is a bad ideaBest Practices for releasing with 3rd party snapshot dependenciesMaven Continuous Integration Best PracticesHow to detect if you have a snapshot versionOptimal Maven Plugin configurationAdding additional source folders to your maven buildMisused maven terms

AppEngine is a rather recent new service from Google. It is probably Google's answer to Amazon's cloud-computing platform, yet targets a very different market. Where Amazon offers a a broad range of services and high flexibility (with the disadvantage of higher administration effort) Google targets web-developers that want to publish web-applications. AppEngine started with a Python environment,

Since a few month I am following the world of architecture tools much more and there are interesting things on the way:hello2morrow has changed the evaluation mode for one of it's product: SonarJ (Community Edition) is now free for trial if you have less then 500 classes. I strongly recommend to use a tool like this at least for every new project start. Quality metrics and architecture

I published a german on article on JAXCenter about data transformation in Service Oriented Architecture. When different applications talk to each other, you must find a suitable data format which all applications can interpret. For the most cases XML is the first choice, because there is a wide range of tool support and additional standards, like Schema Editors, XPath and the like.In this article

Some days ago the recommended .NET Expert Ralf Westphal (with Stefan Lieser) has published in his blog (which is always worth reading) about a new Software Engineering Website called Clean Code Developer (written in german).The websites name is a little related to the book clean code from Robert Martin I recently reviewed here.To me this website is stunning in many ways. It is the approach to

The architecture and design of software applications should be technical neutral. The Application Architecture Guide from Microsoft guides developers through the design of applicataions based on the .NET platform. In my opinion, this architecture guide not only focus on the .NET platform and is a really good cookbook for Software Architects. As we present in our Best Practice Project, design

A few months ago I read a very good article series by Pavlo Baron about Software Architecture in the Java Magazin. Software architecture is an important component in software projects and you will find a lot of resources (books, web sites, blogs) which focus on this topic. He titled the series with Archi-Zack!-ture.What does a Software Architect do? The role of a software architect in a software

The architectural style REST has gained some popularity and is often brought up against SOAP for interoperable web services. REST stands for Representational State Transfer and has some characteristics that distinct itself from other architectural styles:Resources such as a person, an order, or a collection of the ten most recent stock quotes are identified by a (not necessary unique)

Scalability, Performance, Fault Tolerance are classical non functional requirements when building enterprise applications. Setting up the application in a clustered environment is a very popular approach and is often used in practice.When building process based applications you usually deal with long and short running processes. For example a order process may take one week, whereas a save

REST ist an architectural style on how to let distributed applications communicate. It is considered as an alternative approach to XML:RPC or SOAP webservices. I generally like that Google Talks introduction to REST:I would also recommend additional resources to get a more complete picture on REST, check out this link.

The last couple of years major Open Source ESBs, including MuleSource and ServiceMix, have been expanded and are used in critical business solutions. Tijs Rademakers and Jos Dirksen offer a book which gives an overview about Open Source ESBs and which combination of Open Source technologies with ESBs are used. The main open source solutions covered in this book are Mule and ServiceMix. Therefore

Andreas Pieber and Jakob Spoerk wrote a thorough and very good thesis about software components and Java-based component frameworks. The authors introduce component-based software development, derive criteria to compare frameworks and eventually discuss OSGi, Spring, J2EE, SCA, and JBI on an individual basis and in connection with each other as some problems require the combination of several

In a recent series Jos Dirksen and Tijs Rademakers describe "pattern based development" on the basis of Open Source Middleware (ESBs). Specifically their first article describes how to implement and integrate applications using Mule and the second article gives a good introduction into the Java Business Integration standard (JBI) and the implementation ServiceMix plus a Message broker.

The Waterfall RequirementI find this really interesting: In talking with many people who actually do make Software in the last years (not only talk about it *g*) I think I detected that many have a growing problem with the term "requirement". Martin Fowler sums it up greatly in his recent blog post. He makes a strong point in saying that the understanding that many people have about "requirements

Cloud computing is the fashion right now and Google is positioning it's AppEngine against services like Amazon EC2. However similar on the first glance, the two approaches are rather different in detail: Amazon's service is more a virtual server hosting (where you have all freedoms, however are responsible about administration too) plus a set of webservices (like the storage services S3 and

It is interesting for me to observe: relational databases have been attacked several times in the last decades, e.g. with object-oriented databases (gone) or XML databases (gone). Now recently a new trend in data-management seems to appear: databases or better data storage/management mechanisms that follow a much looser paradigm than relational databases often using a lightweigt (often REST or