SOA adoption reported to be accelerating

I was interested to read this interview with Jason English, the VP of Corporate Marketing for iTKO. It shows that Service Oriented Architecture is coming of age when vendors are offering viable testing and virtualisation solutions.

It also previews the virtual conference SOA in Action, coming on November 19th, 2008, for which it looks as if it is free to sign up. "SOA in Action will feature keynotes by Gartner's Yefim Natis and Forrester's Randy Heffner, as well as a panel discussion led by ebizQ's Joe McKendrick and featuring Phil Wainewright of ZDNet and Dr. Chris Harding of The Open Group."

Java Native Access

Every Java programmer knows about JNI, but what about JNA?

I'm pretty impressed with this. The documentation seems pretty comprehensive and the examples are well constructed. The software seems very stable. Obviously you can kill the VM if you dereference invalid pointers etc., but after a short period of familiarisation, I found that I could knock together a Java API for a subset of an existing C/C++ DLL (kernel32), using just the published API documentation to guide me, in very little time. I wrote a little test program that gets the compressed and uncompressed size of arbitrary files, and prints proper error messages for files it cannot open.

I make no claim that the example code is particularly elegant, but it shows what you can do. One great advantage is that you don't need to install a separate C/C++ development environment if a DLL already exists that gives you the needed native functionality.

Note that JNI is built for raw speed - some applications use it for example to perform graphics manipulations thousands of times a second. Using JNA, because it uses inspection and all kinds of clever tricks, you need to budget about ten times as much execution time per transition from Java to native machine code and back again. For many applications, that's irrelevant because native code is only called infrequently (up to a few hundred times a second).

Myths and Realities about Virtualisation

I just came across an excellent article by Amrit Williams entitled Myths, Misconceptions, Half-Truths and Lies about Virtualization. Read it especially for the discussion thread that follows it.

New Test-Driven Development training course

I have just completed work on a training course in test-driven development, intended for delivery over two days or self-study, which uses the development of a dating service as a worked example. Along the way, students will learn to use data access objects (DAO), Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) using Hibernate, Spring, jMock and Canoo WebTest. These tools will, I hope, provide them with good insights into the way that test-driven approaches alter the way in which software architectures grow, leading to more robust yet flexible designs.

My thanks to Adam Shimali, who developed the material initially. He and I aim to present a five-hour "taster" of this course on the Sunday afternoon at SPA2009.

Improving team dynamics

Interested in making your team more effective? I found the following list of useful links just now after reconnecting to a former colleague on Plaxo Pulse.

And of course, my own company Zühlke Engineering offers tools, coaching and training to agile teams.