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The blog of Cedric Beust (author of TestNG and captured by Google) is always an interesting read.His last posting discusses the question if generic test features should be included into the language:http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000522.htmlHe mentioned an interesting D feature. Personally I think a tighter language integration is useful for small projects. Nevertheless it should be easy to

Since a few days it is official: The Subversion project has submitted to become an Apache project. It seems that the incubation phase will start soon. Now my question: Subversion is conceptually dead, so what difference does that make? Ok, let's discuss this a little more in detail:The thing is: most developers (even myself) meanwhile understand the concept of DSCM systems and all available

Dear Readers,als you are all interested in programming languages I would like to point your interest to this link which I was pointed at (lots of thanks to the source!):http://rapidred.com/blog/seven_languagesIt is from the blog of Bruce Tate we all know as one the Java Experts and his stunning books.As far as I know he started an interesting project because he was also interested by the polyglot

It looks like we are living in a fantastic time concerning programming languages. Creating a new language has never been easier then before. With the two great platforms Java and .Net it's not extremely difficult any more to generate intermediate code from the language you are dreaming of. And even the pragmatic bookshelf has a book in writing on "language patterns" to cover this topic.Thus I

Book Review: The passionate programmer and Pragmatic Thinking & LearningRecently I am getting more and more attracted by the books from "The Pragmatic Programmers / Bookshelf" (link). So I share my thoughts with a review of three books for you. Here I review:Chad Fowler, "The Passionate Programmer", 2009Andy Hunt, "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning", 2008So let's start:1) Chad Fowler is well known

I recently read the interesting paper by Brad Allenby and Jonathan Fink "Toward Inherently Secure and Resilient Societies" published in Science August 2005 Vol. 309 and surprisingly enough, free to download. This paper is apparently "inspired" by the attack to the World Trade Center, however discusses resilience of important systems our modern societies are depending on in a more general way.

Recently I stumbled over a smart blog entry about the 'technical debt' (link).The idea is quite nice: imagine everyone would have a 'perfect' software system in mind to be build. Well in fact we live in a 'real world' and a 100% perfect project is always a goal but not the current status. But of course we all strive for 100% as we strive for 100% test coverage.But the fact is that some companies

Now it finally happened: Oracle bought Sun for 7,4 billion dollar. It sure is a little bit surprising, as the deal with IBM seemed to be settled already. From a developers point of view, the Oracle deal might be better for the community, allthough it also has certain risks.For IBM Java is strategically very important, insofar Java would have been "save" with IBM. Additionally IBM has developed (

In a current ZDNet Blog Posting, Sam Diaz analyses the recent technical issues Twitter has (again). Twitter is growing dramatically in the last months and apparently the Twitter backbone is increasingly in trouble. The same happened already about a year ago.The analysis of Sam Diaz is of course correct, but in my opinion he still completely misses the point in discussing technical issues why

Netbooks are different from notebooks and desktops; they are used in other contexts, have smaller screens, not so powerful hardware, less diskspace and so on. Windows is hardly the best system for regular desktops and notebooks (in my opinion) and definitly only a temporary solution for the netbook market. Microsoft even had to reanimate Windows XP for that purpose. In effect, Windows is to fat,

"Hello World" programs are well known since at least 1978 and often a starting point to get to understand the most basic issues of a new computer language.Wolfram Roesler collected "Hello World" programs in 421 different computer languages!Particularly interesting for me was "Hello World" in Chef :-)

At IT-Conversations there is a recent interview with Jon Udell talking to Andy Singleton about "Managing Commercial Software Projects". This interview is highly recommended. Actually I figured that Singleton is following pretty much on the same track as I am. However he is making some bold statements; in projects he is using no phone-conferences ("the more phone conferences in a project the more

BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language and will be used to execute business processes. But there are other standards which can also be used to execute your business process. What about XPDL - XML Process Definition Language? Nevertheless, many BPM vendors adopt their workflow engine to BPEL in order to survive on the BPM market. It's a mistake. Most of the products provide a BPEL

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 easy accissible virtualisation tools like Virtual Box enable new applications in software engineering. An obvious usage pattern would be, to provide prepared systems for customers to evaluate that would require rather complex installations and setups.Not so apparent is the usage in automated testing. Tests of higher granularity like integration tests are sometimes difficult to automate as

There is now a new blog which takes his focus only on Mule, by providing technical tips, comments and breaking news around the Mule product line (ESB, Mule Galaxy,..). Blogger from this blog are only developers from Mule Source and members of the Mule Service Team, which means that you get the information from first hand. There are already posts, e.g. how to write custom transformers in Mule or

Recently two fresh books fell into my hands:The Productive Programmer, Neal Ford, 978-0596519780Clean Code, Robert C. Martin, 978-0132350884The first book is a very ambivalent one.Pros: It covers a wide range of areas how to be more productive. And so you can find topics like ACCERLERATION, FOCUS, AUTOMATION, Test-Diven Design, Code Analyse, up to very philosophical points. The real strong point

I am back from Indonesia, and what could be a more worthy topic to write as first blog after the travel? Exactly: Puppet. In Indonesia I listened to the IT Conversations talk with Luke Kanies about his project. Puppet is an open source system-administration framework for Unix-based operating systems. I believe, that puppet shows quite some innovations not easily to be found in other tools and has

In the recent IT-Conversations Steve Yegge from Google talks about developers and their attitude towards marketing. I would say, that many stories he tells are more or less well known, however, I think he raises an issue: the relation between development and marketing (in the "business world") or even more problematic: in Open Source projects.This starts with project-naming and includes license

Today I would like to point your interest on the project that Martin Fowler is currently working on. So if you look at his homepage, you can see that he is actually working on a book about Domain Specific Languages (DSL).The interesting thing in this is that he is writing in publicy and you can even trace his work with an RSS feed he is providing. His motivation was partially that there is much