2008-08-23 Saturday

This morning I've submitted an item for publication in the 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know wiki (which will be published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.):

Architecture is about Choices - and Trade-Offs

Complex Event Processing and EDA?

Event-Driven Architecture Overview

2008-08-22 Friday: log4j links

Rod Waldhoff's Weblog - "Commons Logging was my fault"

Distance Debugging - The Theory (the DON'Ts)

Distance Debugging - The Theory (the DOs)

The evils of commons-logging.jar and its ilk

6 Logging levels:
* FATAL
* ERROR
* WARN
* INFO
* DEBUG
* TRACE

Write custom appenders for log4j (2004)

Instant logging: Harness the power of log4j with Jabber

The complete log4j manual (in PDF format)

Taxonomy of class loader problems encountered when using Jakarta Commons Logging

2008-08-22 Friday

The common perception of what SOA means has changed rapidly within the last few years. As an example, this article by Qusay H. Mahmoud, in April 2005, illustrates how SOA was originally imagined to be primarily a Web Services based approach...Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services: The Road to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).

I'm planning on attending QCon San Francisco 2008, November 17-21, 2008. Some of the speakers they have lined up include:

• Rod Johnson, Spring Creator

• Martin Fowler, Refactoring, Analysis Patterns

• Kent Beck, First software Patterns, XP, xUnit

• Joe Stump, Digg.com Lead Architect

• Dan Farino, MySpace.com Architect

• David Laribee, ALT.NET ring leader

• Eric Evans, Mr. Domain Driven Design

• Erik Meijer, Designed LINQ & Haskell98 languages

• Gregor Hohpe, EAI Patterns Author

• Steve Vinoski, Corba & Distributed System Guru

• Pollyanna Pixton, Author of "Fear, Trust, and the Bottom Line"

• John Musser, Programmableweb.com Founder

Craftsmanship - the Fifth Agile Manifesto Value?

10 Ways to Screw Up with Scrum and XP

SOA Governance: An Enterprise View

I.T. SOA vs Business SOA?

David Chappell: Introduction To Cloud Computing

2008-08-18 Monday

Open Source: An Open Question for Red Hat and Others

The Commercial Bear Hug Of Open Source

Linux kernel developer's guide published - (doc)

2008-08-13 Wednesday

Some former colleagues have launched a new consulting company: Withincompliance.com

Mission

"Withincompliance’s mission is to provide complete, strategic, and innovative information technology consulting to meet the changing business demands of private and public-sector organizations. We are inspired to be the best at everything we do and are proactive in developing more efficient and effective methodologies that bring unparalleled quality and value to our clients. Our values center around building long-term relationships with our clients, based on honesty, integrity and quality of service. In addition, we strive to foster and maintain an environment of trust in which our consultants demonstrate their best qualities and are enriched by their career experience. We place a high priority on cost control, teamwork, milestone achievement, and knowledge transfer, so that our clients become empowered by, instead of dependent on us."

They are looking for resources for client engagements.

2008-08-11 Monday: Linux Laptop Experiment

I'm in the process of configuring a new laptop - a Dell Studio 15 (4 GB RAM, 320 GB disk, dual CPU) running Windows Vista SP1.

My older machine is an HP Pavilion zv6000 (1GB RAM, 100GB disk) running Windows XP SP2. It has performed reliably and faithfully since 2005.

My first inclination was to simply install a Linux distribution and wipe out the Vista installation.

But my curiosity won - and I am spending some time learning more about Vista.

However, I am also pursuing my desire to migrate most of my consulting work to a Linux environment. I'm evaluating a VMWare Player configuration loaded with Fedora Core 8. Over the weekend I downloaded the latest Fedora Core 9 release - and will setup a disk partition so that I can experience the true performance of it without the overhead of Vista and VMWare. I suspect that I will be very pleased.

I also use a Western Digital external 1 TB USB drive (configured as 500 MB drive with RAID 1) as my primary repository and backup device. Sure the fan is a bit noisy at times (sort of like a 747 warming up for take-off - but I hardly notice it anymore).

2008-08-10 Sunday

Douglas Dooley reflects on the significance of JEE 6

JSR 316: JavaTM Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) Specification

Release Management with Atlassian Bamboo

TheServerSide.com 2008 Java Trends Survey

2008-08-05 Tuesday

What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1

Spring 2.5: New Features in Spring MVC

Book Review: Applied SOA

Eric Newcomer on the future of OSGi

Equinox: an implementation of the OSGi R4 core framework specification, a set of bundles that implement various optional OSGi services and other infrastructure for running OSGi-based systems. Equinox QuickStart Guide

Learn NHibernate with The Summer of NHibernate

jLibrary 1.2 has been released

jLibrary is a DMS (Document Management System), oriented for personal and enterprise use. This double approach make from jLibrary an unique product. With jLibrary, you can classify your documents, videos, or any other media type. You can export those contents to static web pages based on templates, search on those content, add comments, categorize it, etc.

Companies can find in jLibrary all the features present in most modern content management systems, including team work support, version management, offline document edition, document locking, security constraints based on roles, users and groups, easy web access, etc. jLibrary is multiplatform, so you can run the client and the server in both Windows and Linux. jLibrary is based on web services so it boosts interoperatility between platform and lenguages, being an ideal solution for heterogeneous environments.