From Java EE to Google App Engine to GigaSpaces, the idea of developing against a middleware or "infrastructure" API is well established in the Java world. But these are fixed environments. With the (re-)advent of virtualization, it is now becoming feasible to package and rapidly provision your own environment, custom-designed to meet your application's needs. As the [...]

In a recent post, XebiaLabs' CTO Vincent Partington discussed some important organizational topics you will want to address while introducing deployment automation using Deployit. Preparing your organization is, of course, crucial to getting maximum possible benefits from deployment automation. A few technical considerations also apply when introducing Deployit, and here we'd like to go into these [...]

Short blog on how git changes the way of working from a classic java developers point of view.

Last month XebiaLabs released the Personal Edition of Deployit. Now that people have been able to experience in a simple environment how Deployit can work for them, you might wonder how to start using Deployit for real in your development and operations environments. In this blog and its sequel we will go over the things [...]

We've already been talking about Deployit, XebiaLabs' deployment automation product, for some time. Now we are proud to announce that you can try Deployit for yourself by downloading the Personal Edition of Deployit! If you don't know what Deployit is yet, have a look at the movie below! To summarize; Deployit will automate your Java EE application [...]

I was asked by one of my clients to give a short introduction into Agile. As we did not have an appropriate presentation for this kind of audience and knowledge level I decided to create a new presentation. And while I was thinking of a good metaphor to compare traditional waterfall against agile methodologies the [...]

Previous time I blogged about the last step of the seven steps, step 7: Share the responsibility for the whole chain, a non-technical but rather a communication and behavior thing which I found crucial for success. We now have reached the end of this series and I'll sum up the topics we've dealt with and [...]

We as Agilists are extremely result driven: delivering value to the customer as soon as possible is the axle around which our work and vision revolve. This can help us but also hamper us in the process of bringing Agile to a non-Agile environment. Being aware of this may already help us be more effective [...]

Recently, I put together a Spring demonstration for jclouds, the Java cloud library. This quickly turned into unexpected multi-dimensional experiment in integrating Guice, Google App Engine and Spring, but after much trial-and-error I finally came across a configuration that does the trick - or at least works1 as well as seems possible on GAE. The tweetstore [...]

Last year, before the Christmas holidays , I described how we do middleware integration testing at XebiaLabs and I described the way we deploy test servlets by wrapping them in WAR and EAR files that get generated on the fly. There is only one thing left to explain; how do we integrate these tests [...]

Introduction Currently I am working at a big Enterprise where they use Tivoli Access Manager as authorization and authentication source for a lot of there applications. This Enterprise is using JBoss as open source application server platform and is using this more and more. When they began using JBoss they got a TAM plug-in for JBoss from [...]

I'm going to start a series on the future of deployment. How and what do we deploy in, say 5 years or so. Of-course this is my opinion and please add your own ideas in the comments below. To start this series off i'm going to talk about the current state of things, or at least [...]

Last week I started migrating an application that used Spring for DI to Google Guice when I stumbled on multibinding. Since Google Guice 2.0 we can use Multibinding which allows us to bind multiple objects to a collection. But the one thing I missed in the current release is the ability to bind objects with a specific [...]

Last week I wrote about the approach we use at XebiaLabs to test the integrations with the different middleware products our Java EE deployment automation product Deployit supports. The blog finished with the promise that I would discuss how to test that an application can really use the configurations that our middleware integrations (a.k.a. steps) create. [...]

For a web application i develop we had a problem with the performance. After a small investigation we found out that it had relations with the amount of requests to the server that were done. The application is running in a browser (currently IE7) and browsers are generally limited to do not more then 2 parallel [...]

For Deployit, XebiaLabs' automated deployment product for Java EE applications, we are always building and modifying integrations with middleware systems such as IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic and the JBoss application server. These integrations are small enough so that they can be rearranged to get many different deployment scenarios. A typical step, as we call these [...]

Static calls, final classes, objects created in test code: there are few things some of the current mocking frameworks cannot handle. Using powerful approaches like bytecode instrumentation or custom class loaders, these libraries make code that was previously a 'no go' area amenable to unit testing. This, moreover, in an elegant and convenient manner that [...]

One of the things I like about CQRS is that many of the infrastructure components become simpler, at least compared to the classical ORM approach. However, some of these components have not seen widespread use in existing enterprise applications and will be new to most people. One such component is the Event Store that is [...]

Ever since attending Greg Young's Unshackle Your Domain talk at QCon '08 in San Francisco and a later two-day training course given by Greg Young I've wanted to build a sample application that made use of the principles of Command-Query Responsibility Separation (CQRS). However, other interesting things intervened and I never got around to doing this. But [...]

It is very easy to create JMS consuming services in the Oracle Service Bus (previously known as BEA AquaLogic Service Bus or ALSB), but one of the things that you may want to control is the number of connections that is used to poll a JMS server. This blog describes the background to JMS listeners [...]