Little Architecture Huddle

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In this interview from the Erlang Factory event in London, three creators of modern functional languages -- Martin Odersky, creator of Scala; Joe Armstrong, a creator of Erlang; and Don Syme, creator of F# -- discuss the similarities and differences of their creations. They also discuss their languages' common thread -- that they integrate object-oriented features in functional languages. "

"There are some attractive Adobe Flash based solutions for this type of UI component, and while JavaScript versions exist (see this and this), the commercial Flash products tend to have better aesthetics and polish. To redress the balance in JavaScript's favour, I have created this jQuery carousel plugin."

"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. "

" Guy L. Steele Jr. believes that it should not be the programmer's job to think about parallelism, but languages should provide ways to transparently run tasks in parallel. This requires a new approach in building languages supporting algorithms built on independence and build-and-conquer principles rather than on linear decomposition of problems. "

"SourceMaking - is the best information source on the Web on such software development topics as design patterns, refactoring and UML. A lot of information freely available through the site's pages, so feel free to use bookmarklet to leave interesting chapters for further reading. You may start browsing the site by following one of these topics:"

"The purpose of this post is to provide an introduction to the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. While I've participated in lots of discussions online about MVVM, it occurred to me that beginners who are learning the pattern have very little to go on and a lot of conflicting resources to wade through in order to try to implement it in their own code. I am not trying to introduce dogma but wanted to pull together key concepts in a single post to make it easy and straightforward to understand the value of the pattern and how it can be implemented. MVVM is really far simpler than people make it out to be. "

"The purpose of this post is to provide an introduction to the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. While I've participated in lots of discussions online about MVVM, it occurred to me that beginners who are learning the pattern have very little to go on and a lot of conflicting resources to wade through in order to try to implement it in their own code. I am not trying to introduce dogma but wanted to pull together key concepts in a single post to make it easy and straightforward to understand the value of the pattern and how it can be implemented. MVVM is really far simpler than people make it out to be. "

"After I graduated from the HIO Enschede (B.Sc level) in '94 I have worked with a lot of different platforms and environments: from 4GL's like System Builder, uniVerse and Magic to C++ on AIX to Java to Perl on Linux to C# on .NET. All these platforms and environments had one thing in common: their creators were convinced their platform was the best and greatest and easiest to write software with. To some extend, each and every one of them were decent platforms and it was perfectly possible to write software with them though I'll leave the classification whether they were / are the greatest and easiest to the reader. I'll try to make clear below why this dull intro is important. "

"If you have been following my blog, my company or my twitter page then you probably know that my startup - yonkly - was built with ASP.NET MVC. In this post, I will talk about how I scale deploy Yonkly very easily."

" Ian Robinson considers that programming for the web requires a different architectural approach than for applications: clients are interested only in URIs, clients are responsible for the integrity of a sequence of requests, and one should implement application protocols as protocol resources , not domain resources. "

"Summary: The recent emphasis on regulatory compliance, SOA, and mergers and acquisitions has made the creating and maintaining of accurate and complete master data a business imperative. This paper covers the reasons for adopting master-data management, the process of developing a solution, and several options for the technological implementation of the solution. (12 printed pages)"

" Object-oriented programming was supposed to unify the perspectives of the programmer and the end user in computer code: a boon both to usability and program comprehension. While objects capture structure well, they fail to capture system action. DCI is a vision to capture the end user cognitive model of roles and interactions between them. "

" 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. "

"Jason Baragry from the Norvegian Computing Center asked me to comment on the relationship bettween MOP and DCI. I originally threw a few comments here. I wanted to go back and comment some more after watching James Coplien's latest video from QCon. James really ticked me off. He embodies -like so many self-proclaimed gurus- what is so wrong with our industry."