open source

Open source and the search for ET

Andrew Glover — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 17:50:50 -0400

Ever watched the movie Contact or read the book? Interestingly enough, the organization behind those big “listening” telescopes featured in the aforementioned story recently open sourced a series of projects designed to help infer non-noise from noise.

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Gaelyk stories are easyb

Andrew Glover — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:21:01 -0400

On the heels of easyb’s newest release and the addition of a Google App Engine plugin for easyb comes another plugin: easyb-gaelyk. Briefly,

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App Engine stories are easy

Andrew Glover — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:07:17 -0400

With the release of easyb 0.9.8, a new plugin has hit the streets that enables easyb to more easily verify Google App Engine applications running locally.

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easyb team releases 0.9.8

Andrew Glover — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:39:27 -0400

The easyb team is proud to announce the release of easyb 0.9.8! easyb 0.9.8 includes a host of new features, many of which are available due to the reworking of story execution by Richard Vowles. easyb stories are now executed in logical order rather than sequential; thus, for example, after type clauses can be defined anywhere in a story. Shared stories now work across files too.

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MongoDB conversation

Andrew Glover — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:37:46 -0400

Not long ago, I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Eliot Horowitz, the CTO of 10gen (the commercial company behind MongoDB). In this podcast, Eliot talks about MongoDB, which is a scalable, high-performance, open source document database. Eliot does a wonderful job of describing how MongoDB can fit into your toolkit and how it differs from alternatives like CouchDB.

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Introduction to MongoDB

Andrew Glover — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:30:38 -0400

If you’re exploring the world of NoSQL databases, then MongoDB — sometimes billed as the NoSQL RDBMS — deserves a place on your list. In IBM developerWorks “MongoDB: A NoSQL datastore with (all the right) RDBMS moves“, you’ll learn all about MongoDB’s custom API, interactive shell, and support for RDBMS-style dynamic queries, as well as quick and easy MapReduce calculations.

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Groovy ETLs with Scriptella

Andrew Glover — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:16:36 -0400

The open source BI, reporting, and ETL space is bursting at the seams with capable tools. In fact, I recently had a conversation with Tim Berglund regarding open source business intelligence where he specifically mentions two highly regarded tools: Pentaho and Talend. These tools do everything under the sun when it comes to BI, including ETL.

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Open source business intelligence

Andrew Glover — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:15:23 -0400

I recently caught up with Tim Berglund and had a hip conversation with him regarding open source business intelligence. Tim points out that business intelligence tools have traditionally been a high-cost part of any enterprise’s software inventory (involving lots of golf and armies of consultants); however, options have emerged that allow teams to build credible business intelligence stacks out of entirely open-source components.

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MongoDB and CouchDB: vastly different queries

Andrew Glover — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:51:10 -0400

Both MongoDB and CouchDB are document-oriented datastores.

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Guidance on Git podcast

Andrew Glover — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 09:02:27 -0400

I’m excited to announce that IBM developerWorks has launched a new series of podcasts hosted by yours truly. These podcasts feature technical discussions with various (opinionated) luminaries on a diverse set of subjects ranging from Git to Clojure to Griffon and even .NET (just to name a few!).

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Leveraging JPA with Amazon’s SimpleDB

Andrew Glover — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:56:13 -0400

Modeling domain objects for almost any type of application is a breeze using a relational framework like Grails, but what about SimpleDB? This article published by IBM DeveloperWorks entitled “Cloud storage with Amazon’s SimpleDB, Part 2″ shows you how to use SimpleJPA, rather than the Amazon SDK, to persist objects in SimpleDB’s cloud storage.

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More GAE datastore resources

Andrew Glover — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:47:56 -0400

There’s an interesting interview with the creators of Twig, Objectify-Appengine, and SimpleDS, which are all ORM-like frameworks built for the GAE that facilitate working with the underlying datastore (an abstraction of Bigtable).

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In the clouds with Amazon’s SimpleDB

Andrew Glover — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:46:56 -0400

As part of the Amazon Web Services family, Amazon’s SimpleDB is a massively scalable and reliable key/value datastore, which is exposed via a web interface and can be accessed using any language you’d like — from Java to Ruby to Perl to C#. In fact, Amazon has recently released a standardized SDK for both the .NET and Java platforms.

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GAE datastore resources

Andrew Glover — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:35:49 -0400

While I’m a big fan of leveraging Google’s low-level API Entity class (as decorated by Gaelyk) for persisting data into GAE’s underlying datastore, there are some up-and-coming frameworks that are worth examining. Both frameworks note the challenges with JDO and like me, prefer to work with Entity types.

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A recent Java platform roundtable

Andrew Glover — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:01:38 -0400

I had the pleasure of joining a number of colleagues in a panel discussion regarding the Java platform recently. The resulting dialog can be found on IBM DeveloperWorks entitled “Java platform roundtable, Spring 2010” — in this discussion with the likes of Dan Allen, J.

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Concurrency with Kilim

Andrew Glover — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 08:47:28 -0400

The basic programming model of languages, like Java, is thread based and while multithreaded applications aren’t terribly hard to write, there are challenges to writing them correctly. What’s difficult about concurrent programming is thinking in terms of concurrency with threads. Alternate concurrency models have arisen along these lines — one that is particularly interesting, and gaining mindshare in the Java community, is the actor model.

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easyb 0.9.7 is on the streets

Andrew Glover — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:48:25 -0400

The easyb team has recently released version 0.9.7, which contains a scattering of features and fixes including one of my favorites: behavior tagging. Briefly, behavior tagging permits the isolation of behavior groups.

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Ex-Sun open source honcho: Sorry about that TCK license, Apache!

Josh Fruhlinger — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:20:04 -0400

Among the many high-level Sun people leaving the merged Oracle-Sun conglomerate is Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps, who announced his departure on his blog last week. (Side note: Is Chief X Officer the new Vice President? They sure seem to be proliferating!) It was the sort of expected combo of pride and wistful regrets, and (as is probably the intent) it's not that easy to tell whether he's leaving voluntarily or not.

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Actor style messaging and honey do lists

Andrew Glover — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:56:44 -0500

As I previously mentioned in “Free lunches, mousetraps and the Actor model“, Edward A.

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Paul Murphy predicts Java's long-term obsolescence

Josh Fruhlinger — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:43:12 -0500

Paul Murphy's one of those tech writers who's been around the industry forever, and while I don't always agree with him, I do find a lot of what he says thought-provoking. On Saturday he posted an interesting and kind of grim take on Java's place in the software ecosystem. If I can sum it up quickly, it goes something like this: Java's greatest advantage, historically, was that its virtual machine shielded developers from the irritating shifts at the OS level, mostly from Microsoft.

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ESDC 2010 resources

Andrew Glover — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:48:39 -0500

I recently had the opportunity to present four different talks at the Enterprise Software Development Conference (or ESDC) in San Mateo, California. In an effort to provide additional data points and information, I created individual resource pages for each talk. These pages (hosted at my company’s site — beacon50.com) provide links to articles, blog entries, tutorials, and a copy of each presentation.

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easyb will support behavior tagging

Andrew Glover — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:31:59 -0500

Back in the Age of Aquarius, I wrote an article entitled “Use test categorization for agile builds” in which I attempted to delineate various types of tests and then went on to suggest how to categorize these various tests so as to get the most out of a build run (i.e make it fast and effective at providing meaningful feedback). Back then (and to an extent now) my concern was with test execution; that is, I like to categorize tests as fast and slow.

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Introduction to easyb video

Andrew Glover — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:48:14 -0500

The easyb team is pleased to announce the posting of a hip introductory video that demonstrates both specifications and stories in action. In this 8 and 1/2 minute video, you’ll learn that easyb enables you to express human readable expectations that verify any Java application (or to be more precise, anything running on the JVM) and that you express those expectations in Groovy.

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Forrester’s outlook for 2010: less fat, more meat

Andrew Glover — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:56:10 -0500

SDTimes recently published an article entitled “Five changes for application development in 2010” in which they reference a newly released Forrester report.

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Development 2.0 concepts at ESDC

Andrew Glover — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:30:54 -0500

In March, I’ll have the distinct pleasure of joining a number of hip friends in speaking at the Enterprise Software Development Conference (or ESDC) in San Mateo, California.

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