The key to distributed – and enterprise – computing is boundary management. Even worse, it’s not conceptual boundary management – it’s real boundary management, which is a lot harder to figure out. A boundary is a barrier between things or…
Category: programming
From online again, names concealed to protect the guilty: I'm trying to figure out the shortest way to do this: if (anotherString != null) s = anotherString; Now, if you'll pardon the stream of consciousness, through discussion it turns out…
From online: Is there any benefit of using byte intead of int? I have a case where the range of possible values is between 0..100, so an int would be way to much for this, a byte is also more…
The Pragmatic Programmers suggest learning a new language every year (The Pragmatic Programmer, page 14). I think they're right, but I think their blanket statement needs clarification. Here's the actual quote: Different languages solve the same problems in different ways.…
Warning: anecdotal conclusions coming. I think the crucial flaw in every Java v. language is that they always focus on, you know, specific code. "Here's a fibonacci routine using recursion... in Java, it's X, and in C++, it's Y! Wow!" Every…
Ah, TSS... so much potential, unused. I had big plans for TheServerSide. I'd like to let you in on some of them, because I don't have time to make them happen all by my lonesome, and I hate the idea…
As editor for TSS, I had a specific audience and specific goals in mind. The audience was the tech industry, primarily enterprise Java developers. The goals were to impart knowledge to the audience that otherwise might involve investments of time…
I found a reference this morning on OSGi's "buddy classloading" in reference to Spring, OSGi, and GigaSpaces. In addition to being, like, informative (thanks, Steve), it also had a reference to something Steve called "non-docs": To press button B, click…
Terracotta DSO is a package for distributing references in a heap across virtual machines. (Thus: Java. I thought it included C#, but Geert Bevin reminded me that I'm an idiot.) That means that if you have a Map, for example,…
Someone on IRC asked about JDO (Java Data Objects) this morning: "Why isn't JDO all that widespread?" Well... that's a good question. JDO was supposed to be such a great technology that it really should have done much better than…