Most interesting links of May ’12

This was a rich month, bringing some hope for ORM, providing a peep-hole into the bright and awesome future with in-browser video and other cool web-stuff presented at WebRebels 2012 and IDEs providing immediate feedback and visualisation. There were valuable articles about simplicity and quality in software and good talks about the lean startup (i.e. enabling innovation) and other topics.

Recommended Readings

• M.Fowler: ORM Hate – Why ORM is actually a good solution – a very valuable article where Fowler opposes the popular trend of criticising Object-Relational Mappers such as Hibernate. Yes, using an ORM is difficult and a leaky abstraction – but that’s because the problem of mapping from a rich in-memory object model to a relational store is inherently difficult (and you need to do it with or w/o an ORM tool) and because those last 10-20% of DB access require human intelligence. If you can avoid the need for ORM by using the relational model also in memory or by using a NoSQL database with a data model that fits your in-memory model then it’s great to do so but often you can’t and then using ORM is the best solution. You certainly don’t want to code your own “lightweight” ORM.
• Alan Quayle on WebRTC, the HTML5 standard for in-browser video/text communication – intro & status – this is an exciting technology coming to our browsers. Some quotes: “WebRTC enables applications such as voice calls, video chat, file sharing, messaging, white-boarding, gaming, human computer interaction, etc. without any client or plug-in download to run from a browser using simple HTML and JavaScript APIs.  Real time communications becomes pervasive on the internet. … Essentially any browser becomes a SIP end point, a telephone, an ‘open’ Skype client, an end point for any real-time communication and control. … Likely by the end of this year we’ll see Chrome and Firefox running WebRTC.“
• Communicating Sequential Processes: Theory for reasoning about concurrent, interacting processes – an inspirational reading about a much better way to do concurrency than Java threads; “… [CSP] is a language for describing patterns of interaction between concurrent objects. It is supported by an elegant, mathematical theory, a set of proof tools, and an extensive literature.” The beauty is that thanks to the theory behind, you can actually reason about the interactions and verify their correctness, contrary to the feared mess of Java threads. CSP is broadly similar to the popular Actors model and is implemented in Occam while it also influenced Erlang’s concurrency model and Go. The library JSCP brings it to Java. I guess we’re better of using Actors due to their popularity and maturity though the mathematical backing of CSP with the potential of formal proofs of correctness is indeed attractive. Any of the two is better than using threads directly because:
  

  The monitor-threads model provided by Java, whilst easy to understand, proves very difficult to apply safely in any system above a modest level of complexity. One problem is that monitor methods are tightly interdependent, so that their semantics compose in non-trivial ways [...]

• Rich Hickey introduces the Reducers library: simplicity in practice – a beautiful example of simplifying something by taking appart all the unrelated but mingled concerns and focus only on those really needed. Whether you’re interested in Clojure or not, you should read the beginning of the post where Hickey explains how the current collection functions based on first (returns 1st element) and rest (returns the remaining ones) mix too many things (ordering, output representation, etc.) and how this “new super-generalized and minimal abstraction for collections” avoids that and thus provides e.g. for doing things in parallel and composing transformation without producing intermediate collections. Beautiful! (PS: I’ve blogged about more examples of pursuing simplicity & gaining power.)
• M. Fowler: Cannot Measure Productivity – a thoughful discussion of why the productivity of programmers is hard/impossible to measure (i.e. you should concentrate on measuring other, more useful metrics) “[..] false measures only make things worse.”
• Gojko Adzic: Redefining software quality – an obligatory read that introduces a holistic view of SW quality and the quality pyramid. The key idea is that there are multiple, vertically organized facets of quality and once a more basic facet is saturated, you should move and and concentrate on the next facet and level of quality. The quality pyramid: Deployable & functionally OK > Performant & secure > Usable > Useful > Successful. Once a particular level is satisfied, it is wasteful to put more effort into it and you’ll bring much more value to the customer by focusing on the next higher level. Gojko: “Yet from what I see most software teams invest, build and test only at the lowest two levels, gold-plating things without a way to explain why that is bad.”
• Is Pair Programming for Me? – the author, who claims to have taught pair programming to 200+500 people, points out that pair programming is a skill that must be (consciously) learned, or actually a number of inter-personal skills. He also describes the cycle people go through when learning it, including a temporary downswing in productivity and negative view of pairing (therefore people should do it at least for 3-4 weeks to overcome the problems and gain the benefits).

Videos

• Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle (55 min, see at least the first 5 min) – very inspiring! Victor firmly believes that “creators need an immediate connection to what they create” and demonstrates how this can be achieve when coding image rendering, a game, an algorithm, when designing a circuit. After watching it for few minutes you will think: How could we have been working with such crappy tools without realizing how limited they are? Fortunately people started to apply the idea of an immediate connection between code and the result, f.ex. in LightTable and Bikeshed‘s IDE. On the other hand, there is an evidence that this may be too hard with the current programming languages.
• Eric Ries: Evangelizing for the Lean Startup – entertaining and enriching introduction into an approach for bringing innovation to life – f.ex. in startups – withou failing unnecessary, demonstrated on the example of the author’s failed and successful startup. Many innovators fail because they don’t realize that their key challenge is that they don’t now neither the problem (who are our customers and what they need) nor the solution (the product to satisfy the need) and thus what they need to do is to experiment and learn in the shortest cycles possible. If you wander what the buzz about lean startup is or how to build innovations, this is the ultimite source you should watch. The video has 1h but the first 20-30 min will give you a sufficient overview. The key points summarized by the Iterate lean guru Anders Haugeto:
  dd

  - There is only one way to measure progress: Progress == The amount of things you have learned from your real customers
  - Hence, you need to work a continuous loop to build, measure and learn as fast as possible. Typical iterations, like sprints, are too long, hence inefficient
  - Until you have an established product, even recognized engineering practices like TDD, sprints, refactoring, and all the XP-stuff are less important than this feedback cycle
  - Even the perfect agile method is nothing, if you’re using it to build the wrong product: How can you know you are heading in the right direction?

• WebRebels 2012 conference talks – I’d especially recommend the awakening talk by Zed Shaw pointing out that we’re building amazing things – but on top of crapy technologies without realizing anymore that the technologies are crappy and could/should be much better. Erlend Oftedal’s talk about webapp security was an (scary) eye-opener for me. If you’re considering offline webapps with HTML5′s webapp cache and/or local storage then you must listen to Jake Archibald’s painful story of various pitfalls hidden there. Christian Johansen’s Pure, functional JavaScript is a pleasure to listen to. Check out the program.

Links to Keep

• E. King: Maximizing the Value of Your Stand-up – interesting techniques to try out at your stand-ups – Speed Scrum, Pass-the-Conch Scrum (passing a token randomly to define the order), Time-Box Scrum, Challenge Scrum (the team may ask 1 question each presenter), Impediments-Only Scrum, Award Scrum (reward for best articulation of his/her information), Business Value-Focused Scrum, No-Board Scrum, Whiteboard Scrum, Buddy Scrum (report for sb. else)

Useful Tools

• puppet-lint – check code style of your Puppet files
• Guard – cross-platform tool that can watch for file changes and execute actions (“guards”) when a file is changed, useful e.g. to execute tests/style checks only on the files being modified. Includes support for many testing/checking tools and multiple notification means such as Growl.
• ThreadLogic – Thread dump analyzer that understands common patterns found in application servers and enabling the definition of custom patterns. Supports Sun, IBM, and JRockit.
• Dumbster – mock SMTP server for unit testing (start in @Before, get sent messages in the test, stop afterwards)

Quotes

Kai Thomas Gilb, in a talk proposal for JavaZone 2012:

Accurate estimation is impossible for complex technical projects, but keeping to agreed budgets, and deadlines is achievable by using feedback and change.

Clojure Corner

• StackOverflow: Clojure Performance Benchmarks – links to various discussions and benchmarks (beware that older results and facts are likely to be outdated). And of course you must keep in mind that 1) benchmark only measure what they measure, e.g. the outcomes cannot be generalized and that 2) benchmark results aren’t relevant for your problem unless you’re doing exactly the kind of operations being benchmarked (e.g. who cares that X is 100 ms slower if your code spends 1s waiting for a XML file download?) (Craig Andera had a pretty good experience report from webapp performance testing including what (not) to do)
• A good wrapup of the EuroClojure conference by Deon Garrett. Such a pity I missed it!
• Goldberg (at GitHub) – Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations in Overtone by @ctford; using Overtone and Clojure to build up mathematical and functional definitions of canons. Deon Garrett: “Go right now and download the code from Chris’ talk. If you don’t know Clojure, use this as an excuse to learn it – it’s that good.”

Rich Hickey interviewed by M. Fogus:

Reducing incidental complexity is a primary focus of Clojure, and you could dig into how it does that in every area.

…

In particular, the use of objects to represent simple informational data is almost criminal in its generation of per-piece-of-information micro-languages, i.e. the class methods, versus far more powerful, declarative, and generic methods like relational algebra. Inventing a class with its own interface to hold a piece of information is like inventing a new language to write every short story. This is anti-reuse, and, I think, results in an explosion of code in typical OO applications.

Beautiful Code: Simplicity Yields Power

In Simple Made Easy argues Rich Hickey that mixing orthogonal concerns introduces unnecessary complexity and that we should keep them separate. This mixing sometimes occurs on such a basic level that we believe that there is no other way to do it, an example being the interleaving of polymorphism and hierarchical namespacing represented by OO class hierarchies. Taking those “complected” concerns apart and dealing with them separately yields cleaner, simpler solutions and sometimes also more powerful ones because you are free to combine them as you need and not as the author decided.

Most interesting links of February ’12

Recommended Readings

• List of open source projects at Twitter including e.g. their scala_school – Lessons in the Fundamentals of Scala and effectivescala – Twitter’s Effective Scala Guide
• M. Fowler & P. Sadalage: Introduction into NoSQL and Polyglot Persistence (pdf, 11 slides) – what RDBMS offer and why it sometimes isn’t enough, what the different NoSQL incarnations offer, how and on which projects to mix and match them
• Two phase release planning – the best way to plan something somehow reliably is to just start doing it, i.e. just start the project with the objective of answering “Can this team produce a respectable implementation of that system by that date?” in as short time as possible (i.e. few weeks). Then: “Phase 2: At this point, there’s a commitment: a respectable product will be released on a particular date. Now those paying for the product have to accept a brute fact: they will not know, until close to that date, just what that product will look like (its feature list). What they do know is that it will be the best product this development team can produce by that date.” Final words: “My success selling this approach has been mixed. People really like the feeling of certainty, even if it’s based on nothing more than a grand collective pretending.”
• Tumblr Architecture – 15 Billion Page Views A Month And Harder To Scale Than Twitter – what SW (Scala, Finagle, heavily partitioned MySQL, …) and HW they use, the architecture (Firehose – event bus, cell design), lessons learned (incl. “MySQL (plus sharding) scales, apps don’t.”
• Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Compatible Opinions on Software – about teams and opinion conflicts – there are some areas where no opinion is really right (e.g. powerful language vs. powerful IDE) yet people may have very strong feeling about them. Be aware of what your opinions are and how strong they are – and compose teams so that they include more less people with compatible (not same!) opinions – because if you team people with strong opposing opinions, they’ll loose lot of productivity. Quotes: “I also believe that you can have two technically excellent people who have vastly different opinions on the most effective way to deliver software.” “I suggest that you do your best to avoid working with someone who has both an opposing view and is as inflexible as you are on the subject. The more central the subject is to the project, the more likely it is that productivity will be lost.”
• Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Lessons Learned while Introducing a New Programming Language (namely Clojure) – introducing a new language and winning the hearts of (sufficient subset of) the people is difficult and requires lot of extra effort. This is both an experience report and a pretty good guide for doing it.
• Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Life After Pair Programming – a proponent of pair-programming comes to the conclusion that in some contexts pairing may not be beneficial, i.e. the benefits of pair-programming don’t overweight the costs (for a small team, small software, …)
• The Why Monitoring Sucks (and what we’re doing about it) – the #monitoringsucks initiative- what tools there are, why they suck, what to do, new tools, what metrics to collect, blogs, …
  • Related: Getting started with the Sensu monitoring framework
• JBoss Byteman 2.0.0: Bytecode Manipulation, Testing, Fault Injection, Logging – a Java agent which helps testing, tracing, and monitoring code, code is injected based on simple scripts (rules) in the event-condition-action form (the conditions may use counters, timers etc.). Contrary to AOP, there is no need to create classes or compile code. “Byteman is also simpler to use and easier to change, especially for testing and ad hoc logging purposes.” “Byteman was invented primarily to support automation of tests for multi-threaded and multi-JVM Java applications using a technique called fault injection.” It was used e.g. to orchestrate the timing of activities performed by independent threads, for monitoring and statistics gathering, for application testing via fault injection. Contains a JUnit4 Runner for easily instrumenting the code under test, it can automatically load a rule before a test and unload it afterwards:

  @Test
  @BMRule(name="throw IOException at 1st call",
  targetClass = "TextLineProcessor",
  targetMethod = "processPipeline",
  action = "throw new java.io.IOException()")
  public void testErrorInPipeline() throws Exception { ... }

• How should code search work? – a thought-provoking article about how much better code completion could be if it profited more from patterns of usage in existing source codes – and how to achieve that. Intermediate results available in the Code Recommenders Eclipse plugin.

REST

• What Makes Jersey Interesting: Parameter Classes (by Coda Hale, 5/2009) – brief yet rich and very practical introduction into Jersey (the reference implementation of JAX-RS. i.e. REST, for Java) including error handling, parameter classes (automatic wrapping of primitive values). The following article, What Makes Jersey Interesting: Injection Providers, might be of interest too.
• How to GET a Cup of Coffee, 10/2008 – good introduction into creating applications based on REST, explained on an example of building REST workflow for the ordering process in Starbucks – a “self-describing state machine”. The advantage of this article is that it presents the whole REST workflow with GET, OPTIONS, POST, PUT and “advanced” features such as the use of If-Unmodified-Since/If-Match, Precondition Failed, Conflict. The workflow steps are connected via the Location header and a custom <next> link tag with rel and uri. Other keywords: etag, microformats, HATEOS (-> derive the next resource to access from the links in the previous one), Atom and AtomPub, caching (web trades latency for scaleability; if 1+s latency isn’t acceptable than web isn’t the right platform), URI templates (-> more coupling than links in responses), evolution (-> links from responses, new transitions), idempotency. “The Web is a robust framework for integrating systems at local, enterprise, and Internet scale.”

Links to Keep

Tools, Libraries etc.

• ClusterSSH – whatever commands you execute in the master SSH session are also execute in the slave sessions – useful if you often need to execute the same thing on multiple machines (requires Perl); to install on Mac: “brew install csshx”
• HTML5 Boilerplate (H5BP) – customizable initial HTML5 project template for a website; can be combined e.g. with Bootstrap, the HTML/JS/CSS toolkit (there is even a script to set them both up). Includes server configs for optimal performance, “delivers best practices, standard elements”.
• High performance libraries in Java – disruptor, Java Chronicle (ultra-fast in-memory db), Colt Matrix library (scientific computations), Javolution (RT Java), Trove collections for primitives, MG4J (free full-text search engine for large document collections), some serialization & other banchmarks links.
• Twitter Finagle – “library to implement asynchronous Remote Procedure Call (RPC) clients and servers. Finagle is flexible enough to support a variety of RPC styles, including request-response, streaming, and pipelining; for example, HTTP pipelining and Redis pipelining. It also makes it easy to work with stateful RPC styles; for example, RPCs that require authentication and those that support transactions.” Supports also failover/retry, service discovery, multiple protocol (e.g. http, thrift). Build on Netty, Java NIO. See the overview and architecture.
• Eclipse Code Recommenders – interesting plugin in incubation that tries to bring more more intelligent completion based more on context and the wisdom of the crowds (i.e. patterns of usage in existing source codes) to Eclipse

Clojure Corner

• Clojure/huh? – Clojure’s Governance and How It Got That Way – an interesting description how the development of Clojure and inclusion of new libraries is managed. “Rich is extremely conservative about adding features to the language, and he has impressed this view on Clojure/core for the purpose of screening tickets.” E.g. it took two years to get support for named arguments – but the result is a much better and cleaner way of doing it.
• Clojure Monads Series – comprehensive explanations of monads starting with Monads In Clojure

Quotes

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing-

 - Alan Perlis

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

Eric S. Raymond, “How to Become a Hacker”

Most interesting links of January ’12

Recommended Readings

• Jeff Sutherland: Powerful Strategy for Defect Prevention: Improve the Quality of Your Product – “A classic paper from IBM shows how they systematically reduced defects by analyzing root cause. The cost of implementing this practice is less than the cost of fixing defects that you will have if you do not implement it so it should always be implemented.” – categorize defects by type, severity, component, when introduced; 80% of them will originate in 20% of the code; apply prioritized automated testing (solve always the largest problem first). “In three months, one of our venture companies cut a 4-6 week deployment cycle to 2 weeks with only 120 tests.”
• Ebook draft: Beheading the Software Beast – Relentless restructurings with The Mikado Method (foreword by T. Poppendieck) – the book introduces the Mikado Method for organized, always-staying-green (large-scale) refactorings, especially useful for legacy systems, shows it on a real-world example (30 pages!), discusses various application restructuring techniques, provides practical guidelines for dealing with different sizes of refactorings and teams, discusses in depth technical debt and more. To sum it up in three words: Check it out!
• Daily Routine of a 4 Hour Programmer (well, it’s actually about 4h of focused programming + some hours of the rest) – a very interesting reading with some inspiring ideas. We should all find some time to follow up the field, to reflect on our day and learn from it (kaizen)
• The Agile Testing Quadrants – understanding the different types of tests, their purpose and relation by slicing them by the axis “business facing x technology facing” and the axis “supporting the team x critiquing the product” => unit tests x functional tests x exploratory testing x performance testing (and other). It helps to understand what should be automated, what needs to be manual and helps not to forget all the dimensions of testing.
• Adam Bien: Can stateful Java EE apps scale? – What does “stateless” really mean? “Stateless only means, that the entire state is stored in the database and has to synchronized on every request.” “I start the development of non-trivial (>CRUD) applications with Gateway / PDOs [JH: stateful EJBs exposing JPA entities] and measure the performance and memory consumption continuously.” Some general tips: Don’t split your web server and servlet container, don’t use session replication.
• Brian Tarbox: Just-In-Time Logging – How to remove 90% of worthless logs while still getting detailed logs for cases that matters – the solution is to (1) only add logs for a particular “transaction” with the system into a runtime structure and (2) flush it to the log only if the transaction fails or st. else significant happens with it. The blog also proposes a possible implementation in detail.
• DZone’s Top 10 NoSQL Articles of 2011
• DZone’s Top 5 DevOps Articles of 2011
• Test Driven Infrastructure with Vagrant, Puppet and Guard – this is interesting for me for I’m using Vagrant and Puppet on my project to create and share development environments or their parts and applying test-first approach to it seems interesting as do also the tools, rspec-puppet, cucumber-puppet and Guard (events triggered by file changes) and referenced articels.
• 5+1 Sonar Plugins you must not miss (2012 version) – Timeline Plugin (with Google Visualization Annotated TimeLine), Useless Code Plugin, SIG Maintainability Model Plugin (metrics Analysability, Changeability, Stability, Testability), Quality Index Plugin (1-number health indicator), Technical Debt Plugin

Links to Keep

• Niklas Schlimm: Java EE 6 vs. Spring Framework: A technology decision making process – key factors to consider when deciding between Java EE and Spring (or a mixed application of both) – value of standards, independence/flexibility, production-readiness, downwards compatibility …

Clojure Corner

• ClojureScript One Guide – “ClojureScript One shows you how to use ClojureScript to build single-page, single-language applications in a productive, effective and fun way.”
• Asynchronous workflows in Clojure - true asynchronous (non-blocking) network access in Clojure with Netty/the Lamina project.
• Clojure 2011 Year in Review – a list with important events in the Clojure sphere with links to details – C. 1.3.0, ClojureScript, logic programming with core.logic, clojure-contrib restructuring, birth of 4Clojure and Avout.
• Clojure Atlas – interesting project (alpha version) presenting Clojure documentation in the form of interactive graph of related concepts and functions; it’s far from perfection but I like the concept and consider paying those ~ $25 for the 1.3.0 version when its out (however, the demo is free and it might become open-sourced in 2012)

Most interesting links of December

Recommended Readings

• The Netflix Chaos Monkey – how to test your preparedness for dealing with a system failure so that you won’t experience nasty wakeup when something really fails in Sunday 3 am? Release a wild, armed monkey into your datacenter. Watch carefuly what happens as it randoly kills your instances. This is exactly what Netflix does with their with their cloud infrastructure – also a great inspiration for my recent project. Do you need to be always available? Than consider employing the chaos monkey – or a whole army of monkeys!
  (PS: There is also a post with a picture of the scary monky.)

Links to Keep

• BDD: Write specifications, not scripts (from the Concordion site) – relatively brief yet very enriching practical description of how to do behavior-driven development a.k.a. Specification by Example right, the key point here being “Write specifications, not scripts.” It says why not (for scripts overspecify -> are brittle, specs should be stable) and how to do it (decouple the stable spec and the volatile system via fixture code, expose minimal stuff to the spec, perhaps evolve a DSL between the fixture and the system). It also lists common “smells” of BDD done wrong. If it still isn’t clear to you, read the Script to Specification Makeover example (or perhaps read it anyway). BTW, Concordion is a new tool for doing BDD based on JUnit and HTML, which was created as a response to the weaknesses of Fit[Nesse], i.e. exactly the tendency to do scripting instead of specifications. It looks very promissing to me!

SW Utilities

• (Linux/Mac) Autojump – superfast navigation between favorite directories in the command line (via Jake McCrary) – it keeps track of how much time you spend in each directory and when you execute j <substring of directory path/name>, it jumps into the most frequently used one matching the substring. It awesome! (You can also run jumpstat to see the statistics.)
• (Linux) Tcpkill – service/network outage testing (via Jake McCrary) – kill connections to or from a particular host, network, port, or combination of all – useful e.g. when you want to test that your software is resilient to the outage of a particular service or server – less brutal than actually killing the database etc. instances. We need to test that our application recoveres properly when one of our MongoDB nodes dies so this may be quite useful.
• Manik Hot Deploy Plugin for Maven Projects (v1.0.2 in 5/2011; older version in the Marketplace) – plugin that can do hot and incremental deployment to any app server (simply by copying to its hotdeploy directory or the directory of an installed webapp) whenever you run mvn install or automatically whenever sources change, multi-module support

Clojure Corner

• Jake McCrary: Continuous Testing With Clojure and Expectations – continuous test runner lein-autoexpect for Clojure tests written using the library expectations by Jay Field.
• Jake McCrary: Quickly Starting a Powerful Clojure REPL – Clojure REPL only two steps away: 1) Run Emacs, 2) Execute M-x clojure-swank (no more need to open an existing Leinigen project) – the trick is to install the Leinigen plugin swank-clojure and use Jake’s elisp function clojure-swank that automatically starts the swank-clojure server. (I had to hack the function for the clojure-swank output contained “null” instead of “localhost”, likely due to incorrect DNS setup.)

Most interesting links of November

Recommended Readings

• Recommended Reading by Poppendiecks – an excellent selection, starting with Lean from Trenches, Management 3.0, Specification by Example, The Lean Startup etc.
• Eric Allman says that Programming Isn’t Fun Any More  because problem solving has been replaced with learning, configuring, and integrating tons of libraries, frameworks, and tools and many people agree with that (as discussion on reddit proves). In other words we tend to go for any benefit we can have without considering the costs and for “easy” solutions without considering the true enemy: complexity. Perhaps we should always listen to the Rich Hickey’s Simple Made Easy talk before we add a lib/tool/framework?
• Dean Wampler claims that functional programming can bring the joy back – “[..] a functional language, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, etc. will greatly reduce the amount of code you create. That won’t solve the problem of trying to integrate with too many libraries, but you’ll be less tempted. I also believe those libraries will be less bulky, etc.“
• Few quotes from a related article by M. Taylor: To put it another way, libraries make excellent servants, but terrible masters. | [..] frameworks [..] do keep their promise of making things very quick and easy … so long as you do things in exactly the way the framework author intended | On libraries: [..] we all assume (I know I do) that “plug in solutions X1 and X3″ is going to be trivial. But it never is — it’s a tedious exercise in impedance-matching, requiring lots of time spent grubbing around in poorly-written manuals [..] | On the effect of language choice: [..] different languages, with their different expressive power and especially their different culture, yield very different experiences.
• To sum it up: Choose your tools and libraries wisely and always mind the global complexity. More usually means worse.
• Java Magazine – Adam Bien: Stress Testing Java EE 6 Applications (page 41+) – do developer stress testing! Using: JMeter, VisualVM to find out resource consumption and behavior in the application, VisualVM’s Sampler profiling tool [cca 20% overhead], a webapp to extract metrics from GF (STM)
• Java Magazine – Polyglot Programming on the JVM (page 50; excerpt from The Well-Grounded Java Developer) – why you should consider polyglot programming and how to decide whether to use it and what languages to pick, f.ex.: “These [Java's] qualities make the language a great choice for implementing functionality in the stable layer [of the polyglot programming pyramid]. However, these same attributes become a burden in the middle and upper [lower, DSL, on the linked image] tiers of the pyramid; for example: Recompilation is laborious; Static typing can be inflexible and lead to long refactoring times; Deployment is a heavyweight process; Java’s syntax is not a natural fit for producing DSLs.” “There is a wide range of natural use cases for *alternative languages*. [after identifying such a UC] You *now need to evaluate* whether using an alternative language is appropriate.”
• Intrusion Detection for Web Apps – Detection Points – If security is a concern of your web application then you should build intrusion detection into the application f.ex. leveraging the  OWASP AppSensor project. The key is to detect malicious/unexpected behavior and proactively do something such as locking the user out or alerting the admins. The page linked above lists some common suspicious behaviors such as the use of multiple usernames, unexpected HTTP command/method, additional/duplicated data in request. Worth checking out!
• Yammer Moving From Scala to Java- Scala is a cool language but sometimes its cost is higher than the benefits. Snippets from the post: “…the friction and complexity that
  comes with using Scala instead of Java isn’t offset by enough productivity benefit or reduction of maintenance burden …”. “Scala, as a language, has some profoundly interesting ideas in it. [...] But it’s also a very complex language. The number of concepts I had to explain to new members of our team for even the simplest usage of a collection was surprising: implicit parameters, builder typeclasses, ‘operator overloading’, return type inference, etc. etc.” (It’s claimed that only library authors need to know some of that but if it’s a part of library APIs, the users need to understand it too.) Notice that the author isn’t saying “Scala is bad” but only that Scala isn’t the best balance of their needs at this time, as Alex Miller put it*.
  Important note: The text wasn’t intended for publication and it is a private opinion of a Yammer developer, not the company itself. You should read the official Yammer’s position where Coda puts it into the right context.

Refactoring

• Opportunistic Refactoring by Martin Fowler – refactor on the go – how & why
• Michael Feathers: Getting Empirical about Refactoring – gather information that helps us understand the impact of our refactoring decisions using data from a SCM, namely File Churn (frequency of changes, i.e. commits) vs. Complexity – files with both high really need refactoring. Summary: “If we refactor as we make changes to our code, we end up working in progressively better code. Sometimes, however, it’s nice to take a high-level view of a code base so that we can discover where the dragons are. I’ve been finding that this churn-vs.-complexity view helps me find good refactoring candidates and also gives me a good snapshot view of the design, commit, and refactoring styles of a team.“

UIs and Web Frameworks

• Devoxx 2011 - WWW: World Wide Wait? A Performance Comparison of Java Web Frameworks (slides) – the authors did extensive performance testing of some of the most popular web frameworks. Of course it’s always hard to guess how general their results are, if/how they apply to one’s particular situation, and if they aren’t distorted in some way but it’s worth for their approach alone (AWS with its CloudWatch monitoring, WebDriver, additional measurement of page load with HAR and a browser plugin). In their particular tests GWT scored best, followed by Spring MVC, with JSF and Wicket lagging far behind (especially the MyFaces implementation). Conclusion: A web framework may have strong impact on performance and scalability, if they are important for you then do test the performance early with as realistic code and load as possible.
• JSF2 – Benchmark datatable by N. Labrot, 2/2011 – performance comparison of PrimeFaces 2.2.1, IceFaces 2.0, Richfaces 4.0.0M4 on a simple page with Ajax. I do not trust any benchmark that I don’t fake myself (for there are always too many factors that influence the conclusions to be drawn) but it’s interesting anyway – and perhaps a good thing to do before you decide for a JSF component library.
• Alex MacCaw: Asynchronous UIs – the future of web user interfaces and the Spine framework – users in 2011 shouldn’t anymore wait for pages to load and operations to complete, we should build asynchronous UIs where changes to the UI are performed immediately while a request to the server is sent in the background, similarly to sending e-mail in GMail, which returns at once displaying a non-intrusive “Sending…” notification. As a user I very much agree with Alex.
• Matt Raible’s 20 criteria for evaluating web frameworks, 2010 (detailed description, here’s a brief list) – Matt’s results are disputable and as he himself says you should always do your own evaluation and spikes but the criteria are pretty useful: Developer Productivity, Developer Perception, Learning Curve, Project Health, Developer Availability, Job Trends, Templating, Components, Ajax, Plugins or Add-Ons, Scalability, Testing, i18n and l10n, Validation, Multi-language Support (Groovy / Scala), Quality of Documentation/Tutorials, Books Published, REST Support (client and server), Mobile / iPhone Support, Degree of Risk.

NoSql

• Don’t use MongoDB via @nicolaiarocci – a (fake?!) bad experience with MongoDB – the text is not credible (the author is anonymous, s/he doesn’t explicitely state which version of MongoDB they used, the 10gen CTO can’t find a matching client and any evidence for some of the issues mentioned) but it  gives context for the read-worthy response from the 10gen CTO, and a post that nicely explains how to correctly design for MongoDB. A comment about MongoDB experience at Forsquare: “Currently we have dozens of MongoDB instances across several different data clusters storing over a TB of data and handling 10s of thousands of requests per second (mostly reads but the write load is reasonably high as well).Have we run into problems with MongoDB along the way? Yes, of course we have. It is a new technology and problems happen.Have they been problematic enough to seriously threaten our data? No they have not.“
• Martin Fowler on Polyglot Persistence – the are when will be choosing persistence solution with respect to our needs instead of mindlessly picking RDBMS is coming. Applications will combine multiple, specific solutions, f.ex. we could pick Redis (key-value) for caching, MongoDB (document DB) for product catalog, Neo4J (graph DB) for recommendations, RDBMS for financial data and reporting… (of course not all in one project!). Polyglot persistence will come at a cost (complexity, learning) – but it will come because the benefits are worth it – performance, data storage model and behavior more aligned with the business logic (NoSql databases ofer various models and tradeoffs and thus we can find a much better fit than with general-purpose RDBMs).

Talks & Video

• Adam Bien’s JavaOne talk Java EE 6: The Cool Parts (1h) – absolutely worth the time – a very practical fly through the cool features of Java EE (eventing, ..), most of the time is spent actually coding. Don’t forget to check also the interesting discussion below the video (JEE and other frameworks, Java FX and JSF 2, …).
• Jurgen Appelo’s keynote How to Change the World at Smidig 2011 is well done and highly useful. We all strive to change the world around us – as consultants we want to make our clients more agile, as team members we want to make our Scrum teams more self-organizing, as employees we want to help building knowledge-sharing and open culture, … . However it isn’t easy to influence or change people and culture and if we aren’t aware of all the dimensions of a change (system, individuals, interactions, environment) and how to work along each of them, we are much less likely to succeed. The knowledge and experience that Jurgen shares with us can help us a lot in having an impact. You can also download the slides and change management questions.
• Project X: What is being a programmer like? (5min) If ever again a non-geek asks you what you as a developer are doing, just show him this short and extremely funny video (created by my ex-employer – perhaps they estimated how much time and energy developers loose trying to explain it to normal people and decided to prevent this great waste )
• RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (10 min) – entertaining and enlightening; once we’ve enough money to cover our needs, it’s autonomy (self-direction), mastery, and purpose what motivates us (money actually decrease our performance). Now this is a great evidence for lean/agile – for they’re based on making people self-directing and encourage mastery (as in continous integration and top quality to enable steady pace). Autonomy enables engagement as does a higher purpose (“make the world a better place”) – Steve Jobs with his visions was able to provide such a purpose. Atlassian’s FedEx Days are a good example of what engagement and benefits autonomy brings.
• Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action (18 min, subtitles in 37 languages) – do you want to succeed, to change the world around you for the better, to start a new company? Then you must start by communicating “why” you do what you do, not “what” – like M. L. King, bro Wrights, and Apple. Very inspiring! (More in his Why book.)

Links to Keep

• Beyond jQuery: JavaScript tools for the HTML5 generation – three dozen JavaScript libraries tuned for mobile devices, Canvas-based animation, HTML5 video, local databases, server interaction, charting, geolocation, and more
• Best Practices for Securing Apache Tomcat 7

Favorite Quotes

Refactoring is like advertising: it doesn’t cost, it pays.
- Mary & Tom Poppendiecks, Implementing Lean Software Development, p.166

Clojure Corner

• Real World Clojure – email status tracking – using mulimethods to implement a state machine
• Slides from the Clojure/conj 2011 conference
• Conway’s Life in Clojure visualized via Processing

Most interesting links of October

Recommended Readings

• Steve Yegge’s Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns – I guess you’ve already read this one but if not – it is a well-written and amusing post about why not having functions as first class citizens in Java causes developers to suffer. Highly recommended.
• Reply to Comparing Java Web Frameworks – a very nice and objective response to a recent blog summarizing a JavaOne presentation about the “top 4″ web frameworks. The author argues that based on number of resources such as job trends, StackOverflow questions etc. (however data from each of them on its own is biased in a way) JSF is a very popular framework – and rightly so for even though JSF 1 sucked, JSF 2 is really good (and still improving). Interesting links too (such as What’s new in JSF 2.2?). Corresponds to my belief that GWT and JSF are some of the best frameworks available.
• Using @Nullable – use javax.annotation.Nullable with Guava’s checkNotNull to fail fast when an unexpected null appeares in method arguments
• JavaOne 2011: Migrating Spring Applications to Java EE 6 (slides) – nice (and visually attractive) comparison of JavaEE and Spring and proposal of a migration path. It’s fun and worthy to see.
• xUnitPatterns – one of the elementary sources that anybody interested in testing should read through. Not only it explains all the basic concepts (mocks, stubs, fakes,…) but also many pitfalls to avoid (various test smells such as fragile tests due to Data Sensitivity, Behavior Sensitivity, Overspecified Software [due to mocks] etc.), various strategies (such as for fixture setup), and general testing principles. The materials on the site were turned into the book xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code (2007), which is more up-to-date and thus a better source.
• Eclipse tip: Automatically insert at correct position: Semicolon, Braces – in “while(|)” type “true {” to get ”while(true) {|” i.e. the ‘{‘ is moved to the end where it belongs, the same works for ‘;’
• Google Test Analytics – Now in Open Source – introduces Google’s Attributes-Components-Capabilities (ACC) application intended to replace laborous and write&forget test plans with something much more usable and quicker to set up, it’s both a methodology for determining what needs to be tested and a tool for doing so and tracking the progress and high-risk areas (based not just on estimates but also actual data such as test coverage and bug count). The article is a good and brief introduction, you may also want to check a live hosted version and a little more detailed explanation on the project’s wiki.
• JSF and Facelets: build-time vs. render-time (component) tags (2007) – avoid mixing them incorrectly
• StackOverflow: What are the main disadvantages of Java Server Faces 2.0? Answer: The negative image of JSF comes from 1.x, JSF 2 is very good (and 2.2 is expected to be just perfect ). Nice summary and JSF history review.
• Ola Bini: JavaScript in the small – best practices for projects using partly JavaScript – the module pattern (code in the body of an immediately executed function not to polute the global var namespace), handling module dependencies with st. like RequireJS, keeping JS out of HTML, functions generating functions for more readable code, use of many anonymous functions e.g. as a kind of named parameters, testing, open questions.

Talks

• Kent Beck’s JavaZone talk Software G Forces: The Effects of Acceleration is absolutely worth the 1h time. Kent describes how the development process, practices and partly the whole organization have to change as you go from annual to monthly to weekly, daily, hourly deployments. What is a best practice for one of these speeds becomes an impediment for another one – so know where you are. You can get an older version of the slides and there is also a detailed summary of the talk from another event.
• Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy - Rich, the author of Clojure, argues very well that we should primarily care for our tools, constructs and artifacts to be “simple”, i.e. with minimal complexity, rather than “easy” i.e. not far from our current understanding and skill set. Simple means minimal interleaving – one concept, one task, one role, minimal mixing of who, what, how, when, where, why. While easy tools may make us start faster, only simplicity will make it possible to keep going fast because (growing) comlexity is the main cause of slowness.  And simplicity is a choice – we can create the same programs we do today with the tools of complexity with drastically simpler tools. Rich of course explains what, according to him, are complex tools and their simple(r) alternatives – see below. The start of the 1h talk is little slow but it is worth the time. I agree with him that we should much more thing about the simplicity/complexity of the things we use and create rather than easiness (think ORM).
  Read also Uncle Bob’s affirmative reaction (“All too often we do what’s easy, at the expense of what’s simple. And so we make a mess. [...] doing what is simple as opposed to what is easy is one of the defining characteristics of a software craftsman.”).

Random Notes from Rich’s Simple Made Easy Talk:

There are also better notes by Alex Baranosky and you may want to check a follow-up discussion with some Rich’s answers.

The complex vs. simple toolkit (around 0:31):

COMPLEXITY                             SIMPLICITY
State, objects                            Values
Methods                                   Functions, namespaces
vars                                          Managed refs
Inheritance, switch, matching  Polymorphism a la carte
Syntax                                      Data
Imperative loops, fold              Set functions
Actors                                      Queues
ORM                                         Declarative data manipulation
Conditionals                             Rules
Inconsistency                            Consistency

What each of the complexity constructs mixes (complects) together

CONSTRUCT                        COMPLECTS (MIXES)
State, objects – everything that touches it (for state complects time and value)
Methods – function and state, namespaces (2 classes, same m. name)
Syntax – Meaning, order
Inheritance – Types (ancestors, child)
Switch/matching – Multiple who/what pairs (1.decide who, 2.do what ?)
var(iable)s – Value, time
Imperative loops, fold – what/how (fold – order)
Actors – what/who
ORM – OMG
Conditionals – Why, rest of program (rules what program does are intertw. with the structure and order of the program, distributed all over it)

HE SIMPLICITY TOOLKIT (around 0:44)
CONSTRUCT            GET IT IVA…
Values – Final, persistent collections
Functions – a.k.a. stateless methods
Namespaces – Language support
Data – Maps, arrays, sets, XML, JSON etc.
Polymorphism a la carte – Protocols, Haskell type classes
Managed refs – Clojure/Haskell refs (compose time and value , not mix)
Set functions – Libraries
Queues – Libraries
Declarative data manipulation – SQL/LINQ/Datalog
Rules – Libraries, Prolog
Consistency – Transactions, values

True abstraction isn’t hiding complexity but drawing things away – along one of the dimensions of who, what, when, where, why [policy&rules of the app.], how.
Abstraction => there are things I don’t need – and don’t want – to know.
Why – do explore rules and declarative logic systems.
When, where – when obj. A communicates with obj. B. => put a queue in between them so that A doesn’t need to know where B is; you should use Qs extensively.

Links to Keep

• Incredibly Useful CSS Snippets -  “a list of CSS snippets that will help you minimize headaches, frustration and save your time while writing css” – few float resets, targetting specific browsers & browser hacks, cross-rowser transparency/min height/drop shadow, Google Font API, link styled by file type,

DevOps: Tools and libraries for system monitoring and (time series) data plotting

• Hyperic SIGAR API – open-source library that unifies collection of system-related metrics such as memory, CPU load, processes, file system metrics across most common operating systems
• rrd4j – Java clone of the famous RRDTool, which stores, aggregates and plots time-series data (RRD = round-robin database, i.e. keeps only a given number of samples and thus has a fixed size)
• JRDS “is performance collector, much like cacti or munins”, uses rrd4j. The documentation could be better and it seems to be just a one man project but it might be interesting to look at it.

Clojure Corner

• Alex Miller: Real world Clojure – a summary of experiences with using Clojure in enterprise data integration and analytics products at Revelytix, since early 2011 with a team of 5-10 devs. Some observations: Clojure code is 1-2 order of magnitude smaller than Java. It might take more time to learn than Java but not much. Clojure tooling is acceptable, Emacs is still the best. Debugging tools are unsurprisingly quite inferior to those for Java. Java profiling tools work but it may be hard to interpret the results. “[..]  I’ve come to appreciate the data-centric approach to building software.” Performance has been generally good so far.
• Article series Real World Clojure at World Singles – the series focuses on various aspects of using Clojure and how it was used to solve particular problems at a large dating site that starting to migrate to it in 2010. Very interesting. F. ex. XML generation, multi-environment configuration, tooling (“If Eclipse is your drug of choice, CCW [Counter ClockWise] will be a good way to work with Clojure.”, “Clojure tooling is still pretty young [..]  - but given how much simpler Clojure is than most languages, you may not miss various features as much as you might expect!”)
• StackOverflow: Comparing Clojure books – Programming Clojure, Clojure in Action, The Joy of Clojure, Practical Clojure – which one to pick? A pretty good comparison.
• Clojure is a Get Stuff Done Language – experience report – “For all that people think of Clojure as a “hard” “propeller-head” language, it’s actually designed right from the start not for intellectual purity, but developer productivity.”

Most interesting links of September

Recommended Readings

• J. Yip: It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings - it isn’t easy to make stand-up meetings short, focused, energizing, and centered around continuous improvements and team spirit. This description of an example good standup, the meeting’s goals, and especially the “patterns” and “bad smells” can be pretty useful to get and keep on the track towards a brighter future. TBD: standup goals: GIFTs, team spirit, appreciation where we go and are.
• M. Poppendieck: Don’t Separate Design from Implementation – according to Mary, (detailed) requirements – being it in the form of (backlog) user stories or any other – represent actually a design of the system, which shouldn’t be done by the amateur product owner/business analyst but by professionals, meaning the developers, based on high-level goals and clear specification of the desired business value. She writes about a project that her factory outsourced and which she could have designed but didn’t – yet it succeeded even though there were no detailed requirements. I’ve also read and unfortunately lost an interesting answer where the author argues that that is only possible if the developers are really experienced in the field. I tend to agree more with Mary though it is of course a question what “high” and “low” level goals/requirements are. But undeniably users/analysts tend to propose solutions disguised as requirements while often missing the technical insight to see possible other and better solutions. We also cannot expect the developers to produce a great SW if the true goals, needs, and business values behind the requested “features” aren’t clearly communicated to them. (The best example – lost source again – is where a developer proposes to the client a simple process change that will solve the problem without writing a single line of code.)
• Mike Cohn: The Forgotten Layer of the Test Automation Pyramid – three levels of testing with increasing number of tests: UI/Service/Unit (or end-to-end instead of UI), each requiring a different approach. Unit tests are best because a failure points directly to its source (with higher level tests you don’t immediately know the cause). The higher in the pyramid, the less tests we should have (e.g. because of their redundancy). It’s important not to forget the middle, service layer – unit tests are too low-level, UI tests too difficult and brittle. Also Gojko in Specification by Examples says that acceptance/BDD tests should run mainly at the service layer because of the UI level issues.
  “Although automated unit testing is wonderful, it can cover only so much of an application’s testing needs. Without service-level testing to fill the gap between unit and user interface testing, all other testing ends up being performed through the user interface, resulting in tests that are expensive to run, expensive to write, and brittle.” [Emphasis JH.]
• Technical Debt and the Lean Startup – Paul Dyson remarks that while quality is an essential concern for projects in established environments, in the case of lean startups the primary goal is to find out whether a product is viable and what it should be like and thus it’s reasonable to accept much higher technical debt by not spending too much time on ensuring scalability, de-duplication etc. – only when the product proves viable should we start to care for its long-evity by emphasizing the quality. But one thing can never miss and that is good test suite because this is the crucial factor that makes letter payment of the technical debt possible without ruining oneself.
• Coding dojo – Real time coding competition with Extreme Startup – an inspiring report about a coding dojo lead by Johannes Brodwall in Bergen’s JUG, the task being the implementation of a server that can respond to questions send over HTTP (that’s all participants know at the beginning – they learn the rest during the iterations)
• Using Code Katas to Improve Programming Skills – why to use code katas + links to different proposed katas
• Kent Beck: Don’t Cross the Beams: Avoiding Interference Between Horizontal and Vertical Refactorings - when to do depth-first (more exploratory) refactoring and when to extend it into breadth (i.e. apply it to several similar objects)

Learning Clojure (maybe not so interesting for those not learning the language)

• Phil Calçado: My Experience With TDD In Clojure (via planetclojure) – nice example of how to decompose a task in functional programming to make it easy to test (via Midje), including useful testing-related links and a discussion of side-effect isolation and the building blocks of functional programs, i.e. function composition using combinators (i.e. functions producing functions)
• How to learn Clojure effectively (via planetclojure) – a very good description of how the task at  4Clojure (though I prefer Clojure koans) should be solved to benefit one’s learning the most plus some general tips on functional thinking
• Clojure open source projects for learning how to code it

Most interesting links of October

Few of my favourite themes this month – TDD, performance, build tools/Maven. Plus a usefel JS library, news from the Java community x Oracle world etc.

• About dying JCP and too silent Oracle (or mostly silent) – a summary of the latest issues and hot topics in the Java community that cause lot of rumor but still no reaction from Oracle including the criticism of JCP and its proclaimed decline. Update 11/1: The article about IBM, Oracle and OpenJDK has links to many related resources and a section on JCP future.
• A fair evaluation of TDD – Test driven development at Transloadit (“honest assessment of the beauty and pain of tdd” – Kent Beck) – according to the author, TDD requires a lot of discipline and is a pain to do but it really pays off if your risks are high, basically it’s something like an insurance – there are people living without it but to some it can save life. I miss there a thing I find essential about good test coverage – namely that it forces you to write a better code (more modular, following the single responsibility principle etc.).
• Dear Javascript Guru: Please Stop Using The Hash Symbol For No-Op HREFs – don’t use href=”#” for it modifies the browsing history and makes the browser scroll to the top. Prefer <a href=”javascript:void(0);” … > or just use the javascript: protocol for a function call that returns false (you can force it like this: <a href=”javascript:doSomething(); void(0);”>).
• Why Hibernate 4 switches to Gradle instead of Maven 3 – “a means to describe the issues and frustrations I have seen in my 2.5+ years of using Maven for Hibernate builds; in many cases the cause is simply an assumption or concept in Maven itself which did not line up cleanly with how I wanted to do build stuff in Hibernate.” The main issues were that Hibernate is a very specific project, which doesn’t line up very well with the Maven philosophy and, at the same time, Maven is very strict at forcing it and not really flexible to accommodate to unusual needs (and if Maven is, its plugin often aren’t). For example Hibernate is composed of modules that depend on each other while Maven really supports only an aggregation of independent projects. Also, “the release plugin is completely worthless”. On the other hand, Gradle is very flexible and – among others – offers powerful scripting, doesn’t enforce its way of doing things at all cost (i.e. directory structure), let you also define dependencies on tasks, modules, directories, etc.
• Flot – JavaScript plotting library for jQuery, which has replaced Flash at WordPress.com (so it must be really good!) for blog statistics visualization. Main points: simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming and mouse tracking. Really nice one! Check Flot examples.
• String Concatenation Performance vs. String Builder/Buffer and how Liferay 6 achieved a speedup by not using S.B. [that much] – StringBuilder/Buffer has lot of overhead and thus String.concat or custom code can be faster sometimes. Also see the linked ticket, esp. the comment ‘most javac will try to translate “+” to StringBuilder whenever possible. So if you do need to use String.concate(), you’d better use it explicitly.’
• Paul Graham – Beating the Averages – why it’s good to learn Lisp. (Because it makes you able to see the limitations of you current language as it’s most likely superior to it – among others thanks to Lisp macros.) A really good essay on the power of programming languages, which has persuaded me about some year ago, when I’ve originally read it, to learn Clojure (a modern Lisp dialect running on the JVM).