A discussion with Jon Kern and Corey Haines about Agile, Pair Programming, Software Craftsmanship, and more.

Show Notes:

1. Corey Haines - Pair Programming Tour - http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/
2. Jon Kern's web site, Technical Debt.  Here is a recent post on metrics (with links to Corey's video)  to measure quality July '09 http://technicaldebt.com/archives/2009_07.html
3. Software Craftsmanship - the movement website - http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/
4. Robert C. Martin - "Uncle Bob" - http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/category/uncle-bobs-blatherings
5. Interesting comment from JB Rainsberger on the law of Speed -vs- Quality http://www.jbrains.ca/permalink/218
6. On not needing defined requirements to enable good design http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/dont-need-def-for-good-design
7. Technical Debt - what is it?  http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TechnicalDebt
8. Kent Beck's "To Test or not to Test" blog entry (do read the comments) - http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=187 
9. The Liskov Substitution Principle http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LiskovSubstitutionPrinciple and the five principles of class design (SOLID), cohesion and coupling http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LiskovSubstitutionPrinciple 
10. Jamis Buck - Recovering from the Enterprise - RubyConf '08 presentation http://averyblog.com/ruby-rails/rubyconf-08-jamis-buck-recovering-from-the-enterprise/ - hey, you don't need a DI framework in Ruby, man!
11. Software Engineering - an oxymoron in your organization - http://technicaldebt.com/archives/2009_04.html#000867
12. Cucumber http://cukes.info/ RSpec http://rspec.info/ and BDD http://behaviour-driven.org/
13. Podcast with Arlo Belshee on Promiscuous Programming http://agiletoolkit.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=400364

Rob Harrop is the lead engineer on SpringSource dm Server, and is a key contributor at SpringSource.  He co-authored Pro Spring, a seminal work in helping developer understand how to best use the Spring Framework. 

In this podcast, I talk to Rob about OSGi and the Spring dm Server.  We discuss the state of OSGi development, how it differs from traditional web-based Spring application development, and recent advancements in the technology.

We also briefly discuss the recent merger announcement with VMWare corporation.  Point of disclosure: Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource development and training partner.

Show Notes:

1. The official OSGi R4 specification can be found here.
2. Information about the SpringSource dm Server can be found on the SpringSource Team Blog, and on the official site.
3. The RFC66 specification (standard OSGi web container) is not yet published, but Rob has a good post from May outlining how dm Server approaches implementing a draft version.
4. Lots of information about Spring dm Server can be found on the developer forums.

Coming in October is the SpringOne 2GX conference, and in November we will offer a one-day seminar on Grails, Spring's agile Groovy-based web development platform, with Jeff Brown of SpringSource.

Our interview with Alex Miller focused on his work on Java Concurrency and also on Terracotta, the clustering technology which replicates graphs of Java objects between multiple Java virtual machines.

Developers working in environments needing high concurrency should definitely review the most recent Java Concurrency API.

Here are links to some of the topics we spoke about:

1. Alex's DZone Core Java Concurrency Refcard is located here and is a good start for researching the Java 6 concurrency features. Of particular note is Table 1 on Page 1, which lists the key concepts that should be understood before delving into solving concurrency related problems.
2. Discussion of various thread management mechanisms, which include Task Executors
3. Discussion of Locks versus the traditional synchronized keywords, and ReadOnly and ReadWrite lock mechanisms
4. Concurrent Maps, CopyOnWriteArraySet and CopyOnWriteArrayList (among others) provide map, list and set semantics, but are optimized for highly concurrent access in reading and manipulating these collections
5. You can read Alex's blog postings on tech.puredanger.com
6. The Lambda Lounge is located in St. Louis, and is located at www.lambdalounge.org.
7. The Strange Loop Conference website is available at www.thestrangeloop.com.

Enjoy, and thanks, Alex!

Ken