Franz Garsombke

Sometimes, the easiest and most rewarding part of development is the actual coding. Managers and developers often dismiss the building, deploying, testing, and metrics-gathering aspects of the software life cycle. Continuous integration is the concept of automating the build cycle so that code is built and tested many times during the day. This allows developers to integrate their code into the build daily or hourly, thus lowering the chances of integration problems. In this article, I introduce an Ant-based build and integration system called BigBrother that leverages XP (Extreme Programming) principles. BigBrother combines several open-source tools into a "continuous integration" system. I also offer a real-world scenario in which BigBrother was used to successfully manage a continuous build process. The concept of continuous integration has been around for a long ... (more)

Java J2EE Hibernate Extreme Makeover: Architecture Edition

In the past few years there has been a proliferation of frameworks that allow for lighter, faster, and loosely coupled Java projects. These frameworks not only let you decouple your Java project from the application server for unit testing, they also allow for more agile refactoring, testing, and design techniques. This article will focus on telling the story of a large-scale refactoring effort implementing Spring and Hibernate as the underlying infrastructure tools. For those living under an abacus Spring is a J2EE framework built to handle many of the plumbing issues on a typic... (more)

Constructing Services with SOA & Open Source Java

The Jedi mind trick is a Force power that can influence the actions of weak-minded sentient beings. Vendors will often try to apply the Jedi mind trick in selling silver-bullet software solutions that solve global warming and stop celebrity feuding while enabling service-based architecture development. Let's quickly put on our aluminum foil caps and repel the Jedi mind trick by turning to open source solutions. Service-based architectures are being touted as the next step in reaching programming nirvana. With these marching orders it's often difficult to build a framework that al... (more)

Repel the Jedi Mind Trick by Turning to Enterprise Open Source Solutions

The Jedi mind trick is a Force power that can influence the actions of weak-minded sentient beings. Vendors will often try to apply the Jedi mind trick in selling silver-bullet software solutions that solve global warming and stop celebrity feuding while enabling service-based architecture development. Let's quickly put on our aluminum foil caps and repel the Jedi mind trick by turning to open source solutions. Service-based architectures are being touted as the next step in reaching programming nirvana. With these marching orders it's often difficult to build a framework that al... (more)