Agile Practise

You've probably seen "Agile Mythbusting" in one form or another but it can't be overrated ;-)

Hilarious

The real Web 2.0 definition.

The J2EE backlash continues ...

Now that RoR provided the valve to let the steam out of the Java web application pot we are seeing similar phenomena in the Java Enterprise pot.

WS-* is an easy target in this respect. I hardly know a (Java) developer who mastered the WS arena. Not because providing web services wouldn't be useful but because it's just so complex, confusing and certainly _not_ fun.

In my experience there's one magical turning point for enterprise architecture: the deadline. I've seen more than one project throwing corporate strategy overboard when faced with the decision: delay the deadline or use working code now but without the full might of the corporate architecture. And I'm not talking about flushing the entire design of an application. It was more along the line: company policy: "you've got to use J2EE application server xyz"; state at the deadline: "we've got a working version on this servlet container but deployment on J2EE container xyz shows a couple of obscure anomalies."; solution: "take the working version in production now, we'll abide the company policy later."; of course it was never deployed on the company J2EE container.

Right now the backlash is developer-driven but before too long it'll be customer-driven.

C# and Java comparison

This article is a bit dated (Aug 2000) and it particularly shows in the description of now current Java features (I'm pretty sure it's the same for the C# side). Nevertheless it's a nice and swift head start into C# for someone coming from a Java background like me ;-)

Integrating AJAX into JSF

AJAX and JSF doesn't seem to be such a perfect blend yet.

The logging saga

If you thought logging in Java is an easily solved and uncontroversial problem think again after reading these links.  Attila Szegedi hunts down a memory leak with commons-logging. Ceki Gülcü of log4j fame gives a comprehensive analysis of the commons-logging problems. Simon Kitching of commons-logging and commons-beanutils fame replies to the critics. One possibility implemented for 1.1 is e.g. to allow the disabling of the ThreadContextClassLoader (TCCL). Already confused ? Remember it next time a Java developer just brushes over the "trivial" logging part of your app.

Project Management

If you are doing any kind of software project management this is a must read.