Studio Press

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

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

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

If you develop applications, which consumes web services from other applications or integration platforms, debugging can often be very deflating. If you don't use the correct debugging tools, you don't see the generated SOAP messages which are delivered between the parties.A very useful tool is the Open Source SOAP monitoring tool from predic8. The tool does the same as the TCP monitor from Axis,

As I think, I already mentioned here, I believe, that Cloud Computing (and Software as a Service, but this is a slightly different topic) are true game changers in our understanding of software infrastructure and development/deployment. Currently things are still quite rough around the edges, but I believe, that in like 3-5 years the default option of application deployment will be in one cloud

JUnit is a testing-framework well known to every Java developer (according ports to other languages exist). Kent Beck and Erich Gamma were the core-developers of JUnit, which was published around 2000 as Open-Source framework. It is fair to say, that JUnit and its ports had a huge influence on quality assurance and can be found in nearly every modern software project.Now Kent Beck announced a new

At thte last Maven Meetup Jason van Zyl talked about the future of Maven and important milestones of Maven 3, including:Support of incremental buildingsChanges about the Plugin-APIBetter Multilanguage supportand moreThe video and slides about the presentation are available here.

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

As I nagged yesterday about the fact, that AppEngine has no proper Maven-build system, already today the guys at Sonatype reacted ;-)They describe preliminary attempts in how to "Mavenize" AppEngine projects; hope they will be able to fix also the last issues!

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,

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,

Finally hsqldb 1.9 (alpha, though) is released. This release was announced for, I believe, nearly one year. It seemed to me already that hsqldb is a rather dead projects. I am glad they made the next round, because in a way I still like that system a lot. Sure, Apache Derby is most likely the superior system, and H2 looks very promising too (but is still, as I understand it, a "one man show"

XML processing is an important part in present software systems, especially when communicate with other software components in the IT infrastructure. Pretty often you must provide your object data as XML. The Open Source market provides a wide range of XML tools, above all XML mapping tools, like Castor, JAXB and others. A very intersting and compact tool, existing since 2004 is XStream hosted on

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

I recently informed myself about the (Sun) Glassfish J2EE server. I never took it as a serious competitor in the field, as I had the impression it is just a reference implementation that is from Sun... However, I had to change my opinion. In the recent years it seems, that the Glassfish community worked hard on their baby and currently it seems to be a solid competitor in the field.The Glassfish

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.

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

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