Blogs

A modest set of principles guides today's expert programmers to produce effective results quickly and reliably. Christopher Diggins has produced an excellent concise summary of these, which is reproduced here.

Can decision-makers realistically steer their development projects from Java to Scala yet, or is it too early? Clearly, such a transition is not without risk. Have the benefits now stacked up to outweigh the risks?

A significant part of the lines of code in any enterprise Java application are devoted to plain old java objects (pojos) that carry data. Although they are simple, they represent a non-trivial effort in development and testing. And they make an application resistant to change because often a small change requires alteration of code in several places. Pojos written in Scala are so simple that the value of mixing Scala into Java development becomes worth the extra startup effort.

A Java logging framework should be effective but low fuss. There are many to choose from - some would say too many perhaps. What is needed is something that is simple, productive, reliable and with good performance. SLF4J is a façade for logging in Java that achieves best-of-breed capability and plays nicely with pre-existing frameworks.

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. It is also fully interoperable with Java. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

Hudson is a continuous-integration build server which is easy to install and works well. This article discusses how Hudson operates with source code stored in a Subversion repository.

Google's Go language combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. It is not like Java and it doesn't aim to be like Java. Rather, think of it as C++ for the 21st century. No ... correct that - it's a bit more than C++ but yet rather a lot less than C++. Maybe better to think of it as C done right. Its headline claims are that it is fast, safe, concurrent, fun and open source.

Cruise Control is a well-established continuous integration (CI) server and is doing a good job. So why would we even consider using something else – and all the upheaval of changing? The author was fortunate to operate the two systems side-by-side for a while for a busy development team. This review presents a comparison with Hudson and will attempt to provide some answers.