Gojko Adzic

At the Oracle Coherence Special Interest Group meeting today in London, Tomas Nilsson, the product manager for JRockit RT and JRockit Mission Control spoke about the future plans for JRockit and especially plans for improved Coherence JRockit integration. Continue Reading »

In the last week of November, Dave de Florinier and I did a talk on Asynchronous .NET architectures and NServiceBus. The sound of the recording was not that good so some readers asked for a transcript. The following is a transcript of my introduction to the talk, encouraging developers to investigate messaging architectures for mid-size and smaller projects. I’ll try to get the rest of the talk published here soon as well.

Today, we use web and web-related services for content distribution, for remoting, for application partitioning and distribution. It seems that HTTP calls have become a default way to think about distributed systems. HTTP and Web services definitely have a lot to offer, but they are not the only way to do things and there are definitely cases where web is not the right choice. HTTP calls are synchronous, stateless (although there is a state simulation with cookie-based sessions) and generally not that reliable. They are also often one-way, which means that any kind of continuous notification always comes down to polling. When you need asynchronous actions, proper state and reliability or event driven behaviour, Web is not the right choice. Unfortunately, lots of people just stick with web services and hack on, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In cases such as these, a different distribution paradigm can save us quite a lot of time and effort both in development and later in maintenance. One of those different paradigms is messaging.

I’m not sure why, but I got the impression that lots of people think that messaging is only for huge systems in investment banks, not something that a small or a mid-size project should consider at all. This is false and now I’ll try to convince you. Continue Reading »

CloudCamp returned to London yesterday, organised with the help of Skills Matter at the Crypt on the Clarkenwell green. The main topics of this cloud/grid computing community meeting were service-level agreements, connecting private and public clouds and standardisation issues. Continue Reading »

I frequently get this question about unit or acceptance testing: If sending e-mail or some other sort of notifications is required by the business process, do we test this and how? This arrived again yesterday from a reader, in the following form:

…and one component of our application is email notifications (pretty straightforward stuff). This occurs on registration, forgot password, etc. I am having a tricky time thing about how to test to make sure these email notifications actually arrive. Is it common practice to use the same tool to login to a dummy email account on gmail to make sure the message makes it there?

This seems like a hack, and I’m curious if you’ve ever had to deal with a similiar situation.

First of all, I regard sending e-mail synchronously from the web request as a very bad practice. Continue Reading »

I attended CloudCamp last week in London. CloudCamp was a mini-conference for people interested in cloud computing, and turned out to be quite interesting. Continue Reading »