db4o Developer Community

For a couple of years now, I've been going around the world and giving a talk entitled ''Pragmatic Architecture'', talking both about what architecture is (and what architects really do), and ending the talk with my own ''catalog'' of architectural elements and ideas, in an attempt to take some of the mystery and ''cloud'' nature of ...

It amazes me how insular and inward-facing the software industry is. And how the ''agile'' movement is reaping the benefits of a very simple characteristic. For example, consider Jeff Palermo's essay on ''The Myth of Self-Organizing Teams''. Now, nothing against Jeff, or his post, per se, but it amazes me how our industry believes that ...

Roy Fielding has weighed in on the recent ''buzzwordiness'' (hey, if Colbert can make up ''truthiness'', then I can make up ''buzzwordiness'') of calling everything a ''REST API'', a tactic that has become more en vogue of late as vendors discover that the general programming population is finding the WSDL-based XML services stack too ...

The full list is here. It's a pretty prestigious group--and I'm totally floored that I'm there next to some pretty big names. In homage to Ms. Sally Fields, of so many years ago... ''You like me, you really like me''. Having somebody come up to me at a conference and tell me how much they like my blog is second on my list of ''fun ...

Another DZone newsletter crosses my Inbox, and again I feel compelled to comment. Not so much in the uber-aggressive style of my previous attempt, since I find myself more on the fence on this one, but because I think it's a worthwhile debate and worth calling out. The article in question is ''5 Reasons Why You Don't Want A ...

Apparently, I'm drawing enough of an audience through this blog that various folks have started to send me press releases and notifications and requests for... well, I dunno exactly, but I'm assuming some blogging love of some kind. I'm always a little leery about that particular subject, because it always has this dangerous potential to ...

A couple of people have asked me over the last few weeks, so it's probably worth saying out loud: No, I don't work for a large company, so yes, I'm available for consulting and research projects. If you've got one of those burning questions like, ''How would our company/project/department/whatever make use of JRuby-and-Rails, and what ...

This is, without a doubt, the most accurate quote ever about the ''fun'' of writing a book: Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill ...

This is not a title I convey lightly, but Michael Nygard's Release It! deserves the honor. It's the first book I've ever seen that addresses the issues of building software that's Production-friendly and sysadmin-approachable. He describes a series of antipatterns describing a variety of software failures, and offers up a series of solutions ...

At a No Fluff Just Stuff conference not that long ago, Brian Goetz and I were hosting a BOF on ''Java Internals'' (I think it was), and he tossed off a one-liner that just floored me; I forget the exact phrasology, but it went something like: Remember that part about premature optimization being the root of all ...