Archive for the 'GigaSpaces' Category

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Web Client/Server

February 12th, 2010

I’ve been working on a new project using GWT. Being the only developer of my team, I’ve started with prototyping the user interface interaction model and was looking for a framework that will help me go fast, without a need too change to many paradigms. As I’m building a SaaS product, it has to be web, so I was browsing for various alternatives for web development.

 

Basically, I had two options:

I have taken the second approach and used GWT as I’m familiar with Java and Eclipse so the ramp up was fast enough.

 

I came about using principles from Test Driven Development (TDD). I used a TODO list to make sure I’m focused on a single specific task without thinking about infrastructure layers at all. I had to make sure I’m not looking at the big picture while doing the little things, as I wasn’t interested at all in optimization and long-term thinking. Coming from an architecture mind-set, I had to control my tendency to think about the system while doing UI coding.

 

My working methodology was something like:

 

Step 1: Create a screen using GWT and make sure it looks right

Step 2: Add client-side, mock data to fill the tables and grids I’m using just to make sure the interaction model is what I’m looking for

Step 3: Data is encapsulated into some kind of Data Provider abstraction that is still static and within the client, however it is not part of the view anymore

Step 4: Data is moved to the server and as the Data Provider is enhanced with data loading capabilities

Step 5: Server starts to create dynamic data based on real data sources and instead of dummy data sets

 

Through this exercise I learned something which wasn’t clear to me prior

It simply struck me. I don’t consider myself the fastest developer, I’ve been privileged to manage some of the top talent out there, so I know where I stand. Still, the opportunity RIA, web enabled middleware services and the cloud presents something unseen before, as we are finally getting to the right level of abstraction in building internet applications.

 

From my perspective, the days of page-driven web development for applications, and super-complex packages such as JEE with tiered MVC are long gone. Although I’m telling a known secret here, those who are going to leverage fast cloud enablement technologies will gain tremendous advantage of those who don’t.

The Missing Piece in the Virtualization Stack (Part 1)

January 18th, 2010

This and the next post will discuss how virtualization and cloud computing, as we know it today, is only a small part of the solution for today’s IT inefficiencies. While new technologies and delivery models have made it much simpler…

Application Monitoring as a Service with New Relic and GigaSpaces

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Application monitoring has become a core component of IT infrastructure. It gives you a view of what’s happening to your applications at the higher level. With this information, you can detect anomalies and prevent failure before it happens, analyze trends…

Moving into Production Checklist

December 26th, 2009

You are about to complete your existing project , all the functionality is in place , all unit tests are passing , profiling done and there are no visible bottlenecks , benchmarks been executed and the system seems to scale and perform nicely: You (think you) are ready to move the system into production to [...]

The Common Principles Behind the NOSQL Alternatives

December 15th, 2009

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post describing the drive behind the demand for a new form of database alternatives, often referred to as NOSQL. A few weeks ago during my Qcon presentation, I went through the patterns of…

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