Group items tagged

" Jon Skeet loves to hack .NET. He went spelunking into how the new await keyword (part of the new Async CTP) works with the Parallel Task Library in .NET 4.0 and came up with his own implementation of it. This is part one of at least a two-part series. "

"If you´ve read my previous posts about why I deem WCF more of a problem than a solution and how I think we should switch to asynchronous only communication in distributed application, you might be wondering, how this could be done in an easy way."

" Don Syme overviews some of the basic features of functional languages, presenting why and when they are useful for parallel programming: simplicity, composability, immutability, lightweight reaction, translations, data parallelism, using F# examples but addressing the larger spectrum of functional languages including Haskell, Erlang, Clojure and JavaScript. "

" Monitoring-Oriented Programming, abbreviated MOP, is a software development and analysis framework aiming at reducing the gap between formal specification and implementation by allowing them together to form a system. In MOP, runtime monitoring is supported and encouraged as a fundamental principle for building reliable software: monitors are automatically synthesized from specified properties and integrated into the original system to check its dynamic behaviors during execution. When a specification is violated or validated at runtime, user-defined actions will be triggered, which can be any code from information logging to runtime recovery. One can understand MOP from at least three perspectives: as a discipline allowing one to improve safety, reliability and dependability of a system by monitoring its requirements against its implementation at runtime; as an extension of programming languages with logics (one can add logical statements anywhere in the program, referring to past or future states); and as a lightweight formal method. "

" Dan North talks about the tendency developers-becoming-architects have to create bigger and more complex systems. Without trying to be simplistic, North argues for simplicity, offering strategies to extract the simple essence from complex situations. "

" Sadek Drobi talks about abstracting the control syntax (glue), giving examples from mainstream and FP languages: Null, propagating errors, events, asynchronous programming, lists, streams, channels, functors, monads, and custom abstractions. "

"We can query an application's state to find out the current state of the world, and this answers many questions. However there are times when we don't just want to see where we are, we also want to know how we got there."

"I'm passionate about Domain Driven Design (DDD). Like many experienced object modellers, I was practicing this long before Eric Evans coined that specific term, though I have sinced learned some useful specific patterns from his book. To me, DDD is about two things: focussing on the business functionality rather than on the technical implementation; and focussing on building a good model of the business domain rather than just on the specific immediate requirements. Like many others, I perceived that the key to this was to model the domain as behaviourally-complete domain objects: to actively resist the tendency to separate business functionality from the persistent domain entities."

"Pretotyping [pree-tuh-tahy-ping], verb: Testing the initial appeal and actual usage of a potential new product by simulating its core experience with the smallest possible investment of time and money. Less formally, pretotyping is a way to test a product idea quickly and inexpensively by creating extremely simplified versions of that product to help validate the premise that "If we build it, they will use it.""

"When people invent or improve significantly new services or technologies, they are in general focused on their domains (especially software vendors who are tempted to cater to their market first). Cloud computing is no exception. IBM, For example, defines the Rainmaker technology as software and hardware that work together to help enterprises create clouds. And, as usual, the devil lives in the details, and software and hardware will work together in a very proprietary way."

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" Martin Thompson and Michael Barker talk about building a HPC financial system handling over 100K tps at less than 1ms latency by having a new approach to infrastructure and software. Some of the tips include: understand the platform, model the domain, create a clear separation of concerns, choose data structures wisely, and run business logic on a single thread. "

" In this interview Ryan discusses Clojure with author Chris Houser. They cover Clojure's approach to classes, comparing and contrasting it with Java. Chris delves into they type of programming problem sets Clojure is best suited for, especially in relation to parallelism as the number of cores in computers increases and Clojure's applicability as or research language. "

" Billy Newport explains the fundamental differences between SQL and NoSQL, creating awareness that NoSQL is not suited for many cases, and people should make informed decisions before buying into it. "