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Category Archives: architecture

High-performance system design by declarative specification

“I want to get from London to New York in 12 minutes.” “Ok, we will have to design and build some sort of ICBM or buy one, that will cost a lot of money. Also, I’m not even sure you can get an ICBM that’s fast enough for that distance. And have we thought about [...]

The Frustrated Architect

An interesting set of slides by Simon Brown from a talk he gave about the role of the architect. A PDF is attached to the linked post or you can view the slides online. Wish I had heard the talk (see below). The Frustrated Architect: Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of [...]

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog): You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in [...]

blog link: world–

world– by Robert Merkel at Larvatus Prodeo. Published October 14, 2011 at 09:02AM The technology world has just lost another giant, though one without the towering public persona of Steve Jobs. If you’re not actually a programmer, you’ve probably never heard of Dennis Ritchie. But the vast majority of software you use was built using [...]

Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

“Jobs’ genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday.” via Dennis Ritchie: The [...]

Spring, JPA/JTA, and multiple persistence units, with view transactions

I have grappled with this topic before. Tonight, after 13 hours of struggle, I finally got my web app perfected in this regard. It all started when I needed to start the Transaction out in the view, i.e. as soon as the resource is opened on the HTTP side (rather than when the database service [...]

UNIX timezone database shut down

The UNIX time zone database has been shut down because of copyright complaints! Overthrow the DCMA! http://blog.joda.org/2011/10/today-time-zone-database-was-closed.html

REST-based architectural style, a big winner

Recently been deeply stuck in building software (apart from starting my PhD part-time). A long time ago I wrote about dynamically loading Spring contexts and component discovery – this system I’ve been building is an evolution of that one. We decided to adopt an most REST-based style to integrate between our components. Now, “run-time” discovery [...]

Broken Weblogic JMS “clustering”

I’ve ranted before that Weblogic 11g clustering/distribution technology of its messaging is fundamentally broken. Despite what Oracle claims, JMS in Weblogic is not clustered. Load balanced is a better description. It’s architectural – if any other technology (e.g. SOA Suite, EDN, etc) uses Weblogic JMS as its underlying messaging implementation, it will be broken too. [...]

Come back Gavin King, all is forgiven (Spring is the new EJB 2.1)

I’ve just spent the past two days trying to make Spring transaction management work with JPA-annotated Hibernate-backed persistence classes that need to have multiple persistence units with transaction propagation REQUIRES_NEW between the two. For a start, the documentation is merely a series of outlines of brief hints. One measly section.The laughably short Spring 3 doco [...]