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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

I am using Mercurial a lot recently (and love it); I really do wonder, why I struggled so long with Subversion. When I first heard the GIT presentation from Linus Torvalds (which is, hm, very entertaining) the whole distributed SCM thing sounded very esotheric for me. However I decided to give it a try, also motivated by the great Chaosradio Express 130 Podcast (German). Yet, I decided to go with

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

Andy Singleton from Assembla wrote a nice blog entry about success-factors in distributed agile development. He focusses on 6 factors:Fix-schedules for releasesContinuous BuildTicketingDaily Report and ChatTeam-Activity StreamsRecruitementI am missing automated testing and QS though, which I believe is a cornerstone in distributed development, particularly in combination with a continuous build/

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

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

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

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

The combination of a process engine and an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is one interesting aspect of modern service oriented architectures (SOA). Both, an ESB and process engines provide similar concepts and software architects often have problems to find the right solution. Therefor I and Bernd Rücker wrote an article in the German Java Magazin about it. To have a practical showcase the

Today I was invited to hold the keynote speach at IDCs SOA conference in Vienna. I was talking about building agile business processes from "decoupled" services. I discussed three different views on aggregation: A "formal" top-down approach using Standards like BPEL or SCA; this approach typically is process drivenEvent-driven architectures, which is a rather bottom-up approach (and a very agile

Gregor Hohpe, author of Enterprise Integration Patterns talks (May 2007) about developing in service oriented world, while focusing on developers perspective, and what does it mean for developers work on SOA. The first part of the talk gives an introduction to Service Oriented Architecture, where does it come from, including there main drivers, such as:Distributed component

I am just reading the book from Thomas Friedman "The World is Flat", definitly a recommended read. Friedman explains (with a quotation from Carly Fiorina, the former HP CEO):"The dot-com boom and bust were just 'the end of the beginning'. The last 25 years in technology, said Fiorina, have been just the 'warm-up act'. Now we are going into the main event, she said, 'and by the main event, I mean

Currently the International Conference on E-Business Engineering (ICEBE) is taking place in Hong Kong. I am presenting a paper dealing with agile business process management, a joint work with Josef Schiefer.The core consideration is, that business strategies that were successful in the 80s and 90s are not necessarily successful in todays fast changing and connected economy. We seem to be moving

From June 4-6 the 1st Software and Systems Essentials Conference 2007 took place in Munich, Germany. An important goal of the conference is bringing together people from business, industry, and academia who are working in software engineering and information technology with its various aspects. Discussions and exchange of experiences between users in public and industrial contexts and vendors of

From August 5 to 7 the European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC) 2008 took place in Croatia, Dubrovnik. An important feature of the conference, besides presentation and discussion of academic papers, were "state of the art" presentations on research topics that are particularly relevant for industry and Best Software Engineering Practices (Slides are online). In this Blog article I review

Ok, today is the day of micro-postings, however, this might be interesting and good news for some developers. Apache Maven got a new online-book. Maven is a great tool for build-automation, a deployment tool, a dependency management tool, a documentation generator and reporting framework and is implementing build-lifecyle-best-practices and propagates the convention over configuration idea and so

After some work and some delays, we are proud to finally present a "brother/sister" project to this Blog, the "Best-Practice-Software-Engineering" Samples and Documentation project: please check out this link:http://best-practice-software-engineering.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/This project will support our teaching in various courses, but should also be a foundation for other "educational" efforts. We

Two weeks ago I had two talks at the 8th Asian Open Source Software Symposium. It was quite interesting for me to watch this conference, as it showed a significant trend for Asian countries (not only Indonesia) to try to follow a strong Open Source policy. Interesting was the statement of a representative of a big American GIS company with strong Microsoft background: they ran into significant