Archive for Summaries

Articles I read today (eBay, JBoss, C++)

June 22, 2004 at 11:00 pm · Filed under Java, Summaries

  • Nuggets of Wisdom from eBay’s Architecture
    This blog posting recaps the statements of a former JavaOne session about eBay’s J2EE architecture, the motivations and experiences.
    The impressive part is that eBay had 380M page views a day with a site availability of 99.92%. In addition to that, nearly 30K lines of code changes per week. [...] The key nuggets of wisdom are a stateless design, the use of a flexible and highly tuned OR-mapping layer and the partitioning of servers based on use cases.

  • The Unofficial JBoss Performance Tuning Guide
    The articles show how to strip down JBoss, i.e. remove all services which are not neccessary for your application’s needs (Okay, I don’t use JBoss, but still good to know.)
    There isn’t a lot of consolidated information in this area, and the information presented here is through trial and errors and bits and pieces of information found on the JBoss forums and weblogs of JBoss developers. Comments and corrections are very much welcome.

  • Announcing The C++ Source
    Good to know that C++ still has an active development and community. Reading the article “C++ Reloaded” I really appreciate the “world dominance” of Java:
    As we speak, the C++ standards committee [...] and its members are adding powerful abstractions that at once increase the power and the ease of use of your favorite language. Hash tables, tuples, regular expressions, numerous useful smart pointers, more mathematical functions, and fewer syntax ambiguities are coming our way, and that’s only the beginning.

    I really liked C++ ten or so years ago and used it a lot. Today, I wonder how the C++ world and myself could live years without an API and general framework backing the core language. (Can someone please count the numerous String class implementations available in C++?)

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Articles I read today

June 21, 2004 at 6:08 pm · Filed under Java, Summaries

  • The Mythical Man-Month Revisited
    This is a developer’s view on the classic book (”Adding manpower to a late project makes it later”).
  • The unofficial A to Z of J2EE Stuff
    The A to Z of (roughly) J2EE relevent tools, technologies and ideas… Nice list, comes in handy for a quick survey.
  • How Microsoft Lost the API War
    From “Joel on Software”. Basically, the article says M$ wants rich clients (desktop applications) since they depend on their big cash cows Windows and Office. The Web as an application platform is the rival. That’s the reason they stopped IE development and they FUD again for Windows Longhorn (in 2006+) and its new desktop technologies like XAML and Avalon, WinFS etc. They lost the war to Web standards like HTML, CSS and Web Services, which gives developers and vendors a freedom of choice for their server platform. Not only this, but worse, they encouraged developers to switch to the Web platform by abandoning their Win32 API for the novel, but completely incompatible .NET framework. Not a safe place to develop either, since the upcoming Longhorn will again be all brand new and incompatible:
    And if you’re developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft’s “official” latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment, WinForms, you’re going to have to start over again in two years to support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely stillborn. Hope you haven’t invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a slide from Microsoft labelled “How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and Avalon?” and asks, “Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and Avalon?” A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer.

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