Christian Posta

Field CTO at solo.io, author Istio in Action and Microservices for Java Developers, open-source enthusiast, cloud application development, committer @ Apache, Serverless, Cloud, Integration, Kubernetes, Docker, Istio, Envoy #blogger

All Posts

2024

Don't get hit with the pendulum: DevOps shifted too far left

You probably wouldn’t be surprised if I told you modern networking based on open source projects like Istio, SPIFFE, Cilium and others (See my paper about th...

Does Platform Engineering Solve the People Problem

Platform engineering has emerged recently in part because organizations recognize the value in improving developer experience and the need to improve app dev...

2021

Understanding Istio Telemetry v2

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, and just like other posts in the past, this one is meant as a way to dig into something and for me to catalog my own th...

2020

Diving Into Istio 1.6 Certificate Rotation

Istio is a powerful service mesh built on Envoy Proxy that solves the problem of connecting services deployed in cloud infrastructure (like Kubernetes) and d...

Do I Need an API Gateway if I Use a Service Mesh?

This post may not be able to break through the noise around API Gateways and Service Mesh. However, it’s 2020 and there is still abundant confusion around th...

Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices

I’ve been pretty invested in helping organizations with their cloud-native journeys for the last five years. Modernizing and improving a team (and eventually...

2019

Challenges of Adopting Service Mesh in Enterprise Organizations

Recently I wrote a piece for DZone and their Migrating to Microservices Report on the challenges of adopting service mesh in an enterprise organization. One ...

Moving the Service-mesh Community Forward

Service mesh is an important set of capabilities that solve some difficult service-to-service communication challenges when operating a services-style archit...

Guidance for Building a Control Plane for Envoy Part 5 - Deployment Tradeoffs

This is part 5 of a series that explores building a control plane for Envoy Proxy. Follow along @christianposta and @soloio_inc for more!.

Guidance for Building a Control Plane for Envoy Part 4 - Build for Extensibility

This is part 4 of a series that explores building a control plane for Envoy Proxy. Follow along @christianposta and @soloio_inc for the next part coming out ...

Guidance for Building a Control Plane for Envoy Part 3 - Domain Specific Configuration API

This is part 3 of a series that explores building a control plane for Envoy Proxy.

Guidance for Building a Control Plane for Envoy Part 2 - Identify Components

This is part 2 of a series that explores building a control plane for Envoy Proxy.

Guidance for Building a Control Plane to Manage Envoy Proxy at the edge, as a gateway, or in a mesh

Envoy has become a popular networking component as of late. Matt Klein wrote a blog a couple years back talking about Envoy’s dynamic configuration API and h...

Exposing microservices running in AWS EKS with a microservices/API gateway like Solo Gloo

So you’ve decided to run your Kubernetes workloads in AWS. As we’ve seen before setting up AWS EKS requires a lot of patience and headache. You may be able t...

API Gateways Are Going Through an Identity Crisis

API Gateways are going through a bit of an identity crisis these days.

New Adventure Starts at solo.io

In 2019, I’m joining solo.io as Field CTO to build and grow a company that creates developer tools and infrastructure to help organizations build their softw...

2018

Moving on From Red Hat

This week before the Christmas break is my last week at Red Hat, the company I’ve been with for the last 6.5 years. Actually, I joined a small start up close...

Be as serverless as you can, but not more than that

No doubt, if you’ve been paying attention to technology trends, you’ve seen the rise in interest of “serverless”. In some accounts, “serverless” is billed as...

Application Safety and Correctness Cannot Be Offloaded to Istio or Any Service Mesh

I’ve recently started giving a talk about the evolution of integration and the adoption of service mesh, specifically Istio. I’ve been excited about Istio ev...

My Sessions at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco

I’m fortunate to have a few sessions at Red Hat Summit next week (May 8-10) in San Francisco! I’ll be speaking/co-presenting with some fantastic presenters a...

Our Book Has Been Released! Introducing Istio Service Mesh for Microservices

Burr Sutter (@burrsutter) and I (@christianposta) have finished writing a small book to help folks get up and running with Istio.io service mesh!

How a Service Mesh Can Help With Microservices Security

I see lots of customers moving to microservices, (whether they should or not is a topic for a different post), and in doing so they are attempting to solve s...

Advanced Traffic-shadowing Patterns for Microservices With Istio Service Mesh

Microservices allow us to go faster and reduce our time to value. However, we cannot just naively move fast and break things. We need a way to reduce the ris...

Traffic Shadowing With Istio: Reducing the Risk of Code Release

We’ve been talking about Istio and service mesh recently (follow along @christianposta for the latest) but one aspect of Istio can be glossed over. One of th...

Comparing Envoy and Istio Circuit Breaking With Netflix OSS Hystrix

When we build services architectures (Service Oriented Architecture, Microservices, the next incarnation, etc), we end up making a lot more calls over the ne...

2017

Deep Dive Envoy and Istio Workshop

Just getting back from KubeCon 2017 and I can tell you the excitement about Istio and service mesh in general is through the roof! There were lots of talks a...

Low-risk Monolith to Microservice Evolution Part III

In the first part (part I) we introduced a strategy to bring microservices to our architecture without disrupting the current request flows and business valu...

Low-risk Monolith to Microservice Evolution Part II

Let’s dive right in! In the previous post (part I) we set up the context for this blog. Basically, as we introduce a strategy to bring microservices to our a...

About When Not to Do Microservices

Quick interlude to my last blog. As part of my last blog on low-risk monolith to microservice architecture, I made this statement about microservices and not...

Low-risk Monolith to Microservice Evolution Part I

As part of a two-day microservices workshop I’m putting together, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to explain monolith-application decomposition and what a...

Application Network Functions With ESBs, API Management, and Now.. Service Mesh?

I’ve talked quite a bit recently about the evolution of microservices patterns and how service proxies like Envoy from Lyft can help push the responsibility ...

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Proxy, Part III: Distributed Tracing

This blog is part of a series looking deeper at Envoy Proxy and Istio.io and how it enables a more elegant way to connect and manage microservices. Follow ...

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Proxy, Part II: Timeouts and Retries

This blog is part of a series looking deeper at Envoy Proxy and Istio.io and how it enables a more elegant way to connect and manage microservices. Follow ...

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Sidecar Proxy, Part I: Circuit Breaking

This blog is part of a series looking deeper at Envoy Proxy and Istio.io and how it enables a more elegant way to connect and manage microservices. Follow ...

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Sidecar Proxy: The series

I’ve blogged in the past about “how I’m excited for a ‘2.0’ microservices stack” and what some of that entails. I even tried to lay out why service interacti...

The Hardest Part of Microservices: Calling Your Services

You’re probably saying “Wait. You already wrote a blog telling me the hardest part of microservices was my data. So what is the hardest part? That? or Callin...

Excited about a '2.0' tech stack for microservices

Technology moves fast! At the same time, the old becomes new.

2016

Spring Boot Microservice Development on Kubernetes: The Easy Way

Ever wondered how to create, build, deploy new Spring Boot microservices on Kubernetes What if you had integrated tooling in whatever IDE you used (IntelliJ,...

The Hardest Part About Microservices: Your Data

Continuing on with my series about microservices implementations (see “Why Microservices Should Be Event Driven”, “Three things to make your microservices mo...

My Book Has Been Released! Microservices for Java Developers

I’ve just written a book that is now publicly available! The name of the book is “Microservices for Java Develooers” (O’Reilly) and is a hands-on, step-by-st...

Carving the Java EE Monolith Into Microservices: Prefer Verticals Not Layers

Following my introduction blog about why microservices should be event-driven, I’d like to take another few steps and blog about it while I prep for a bunch...

Netflix OSS, Spring Cloud, or Kubernetes? How About All of Them!

Some of this I cover in my book “Microservices for Java Developers” O’Reilly June 2016 (launching soon!), but I want to give a more specific treatment of it ...

Why Microservices Should Be Event Driven: Autonomy vs Authority

I’ve been working on a series of articles showing how to build microservices using an event-driven approach (which IMHO is the only real way to build microse...

3 Easy Things to Do to Make Your Microservices More Resilient

One of the advantages of building distributed systems as microservices is the ability of the system as a whole to withstand faults and unexpected failures of...

Message Durability in ActiveMQ 5.x

I get asked quite a bit to explain the basics of how ActiveMQ works with respect to how it stores messages (or doesn’t in some cases). Here’s the high level ...

Java Remote Debug for Applications Running in Kubernetes

Kubernetes 1.2 was just released and is quickly becooming the defacto cluster management solution for containers (Docker, Rocket, Hyper, etc). Check it out i...

Cloud Native Camel riding With JBoss Fuse and OpenShift

Red Hat recently released a Microservices integration toolkit for running our microservices in a Docker and Kubernetes environment on OpenShift v3. To help p...

Typesafe Kubernetes-manifest DSL for JVM-based apps

Managing a cluster of Docker/Rocket containers (or anything) in a production environment is rife with distributed-systems challenges. Luckily, a compelling a...

2015

DevOps and the Myth of Efficiency, Part II

In the previous post post, I outlined why DevOps is not about efficiency, and how our old ways of looking at “complicated” problems by solving for efficiency...

DevOps and the Myth of Efficiency, Part I

This post is for those of you working in large companies or “enterprises” and are exploring what “DevOps” really means and why you’re struggling with it. I’v...

Using Spring-data With Apache Camel

Spring Data saves you a lot of time by creating smart DAOs that you can basically get for free without writing any code. It basically follows the Repository ...

Quick Go-lang for Java Developers

Golang seems to be getting quite popular as its the programming language of choice for some cool new technology like Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. Lucki...

High Performance APIs for Microservices With Baratine.io

The following is a guest post from the folks at Baratine.io! Building microservices takes trial and error, and Baratine provides a fast, pojo-based approach ...

Logging Into a Kubernetes Cluster With Kubectl

The kubectl command line client is a versatile way to interact with a Kubernetes cluster, including managing multiple clusters. I’ve not found a good way to ...

4-day Docker and Kubernetes Training

I just delivered a 4-day deep-dive training course on Docker and Kubernetes to a customer in Atlanta. In true open-source spirit, I’d like to publish the sou...

Microservices Day in NYC

Everyone wants to talk about microservices. Everyone even wants to do them, although they’re not really sure how – Martin Fowler’s initial write up left more...

Critical HL7 Usecases With Camel, ActiveMQ, Elasticsearch

HL7 over MLLP is a very common transport mechanisms for systems that can speak the HL7 protocol format. JBoss Fuse is a very powerful microservices-style int...

Cold hard truth about Microservices -- vJBUG

So you think you’re going to do microservices? Did you also try to adopt SOA? And agile? And scrum?

Blue-green Deployments, A/B Testing, and Canary Releases

A lot of teams I talk to recently are very interested in “DevOps” (whatever that means… seems to mean different things to different people?) and when we sit ...

The Real Success Story of Microservices Architectures

We hear the benefits of microservices architectures loud and clear; we hear the constant drum beat of how/why/by all means/etc you should be doing microservi...

Speaking About Microservices, Apache Camel, and CI/CD at Red Hat Summit

I’m looking forward to speaking at DevNation 2015 and Red Hat Summit 2015 next week in Boston, as well as meeting some of you in person! If you’ll be going a...

Immutable Infrastructure, hotdeploys, and the JVM

Do you deploy and undeploy your JVM-based applications (regardless of JVM container/no-container) in production? ie, when you have new versions of an app or ...

Integration Testing JBoss Fuse 6.x With Pax Exam, Part I

JBoss Fuse is a powerful distributed integration platform with built in features for centralized configuration management, service discovery, versioning, API...

Fuse Fabric Profile Migration for Continuous Delivery

JBoss Fuse is a powerful distributed integration platform with built in features for centralized configuration management, service discovery, versioning, API...

Microservices for Enterprises Part I

Technology is the foundation of differentiation whether you’re a large enterprise or the small startup. If businesses fail to embrace that fact, they run the...

Microservices, DevOps, and the cost of change?

As developers, we all love shiny new things. New technologies (Docker, Kubernetes), new languages (Golang, NodeJS), new hyped conversation starters (Microser...

See You at DevNexus in Atlanta!

Next week I’ll be giving a talk at the DevNexus conference in Atlanta. AFAIK the event is sold out, so for those going, look forward to meeting you!

The Cost of Code Reuse Abuse

Oddly enough, while I’m sleeping or in some zombie state while attempting to sleep, I often feel like the ideas I have while in that state are the best thing...

Speeding Up ActiveMQ Persistent Messaging Performance by 25x

Apache ActiveMQ is a very popular open-source messaging broker brought to you by the same people who created (and work on) Apache Karaf, Apache Camel, Apache...

Very fast Camels and Cloud Messaging

Apache Camel is a popular, mature, open-source integration library. It implements the Enterprise Integration Patterns which is a set of patterns that often c...

You're not going to do Microservices

Seems like every 5 to 10 years our industry, especially in the Enterprise Integration, or enterprise application space, we get introduced to some new methodo...

Starting multiple JBoss A-MQ JVMs on the same machine

So I haven't been blogging as much recently -- just been really busy. But my New Year's resolution is to blog a little more sharing some things I come across...

Integrating Microservices with Apache Camel

Okay, so nobody is kidding anybody, Microservices isn't a new concept... but it seems like it might be generating its own hype curve based on the frequency w...

2014

Easy REST endpoints with Apache Camel 2.14

Apache Camel has a new release recently, and some of the new features were blogged about by my colleague Claus Ibsen. You really should check out his blog en...

Continuous Delivery with Docker, Jenkins, JBoss Fuse and OpenShift PaaS

I recently put together an end-to-end demo showing step-by-step how to set up a Continuous Delivery pipeline to help automate your deployments and shorten yo...

Developer Interview #3, my interview about HawtIO and Fabric8

Recently, in between waking up to help my wife with our ten-day old baby at wee hours of the day, I had a chance to be part of Markus Eisele's Developer Inte...

Apache Camel Developer's Cookbook -- ebook giveaway

Apache Camel Developer's Cookbook by Scott Cranton and Jakub Korab is a large catalog of useful patterns, solutions, and best practices for developing and in...

HawtIO on JBoss EAP (Part II)

I just posted an entry on running HawtIO on JBoss Wildfly 8.1 recently. From that post you know how awesome HawtIO is, and all of the cool plugins it has to ...

HawtIO on JBoss Wildfly 8.1 -- step by step

HawtIO gives awesome eye candy to your JVM based middleware. It's a unifying console for applications that would otherwise have to build out their own crappy...

Camel on JBoss EAP with Custom Modules

Apache Camel -- the best open source integration library Apache Camel is an awesome, open-source, integration library that can be used as the backbone of an ...

JBoss Fuse DevOps Demo -- step by step

I recently did a step-by-step demo on using Fabric8 or JBoss Fuse with an emphasis on DevOps. For those of you who aren't familiar with Fabric8, check out th...

Fabric8 HTTP Gateway

I recently put together a quick Github project to show the Fabric8 HTTP gateway in action. It shows a sample project that you can use to test out the HTTP Ga...

DevOps with Apache Tomcat/TomEE and Fabric8

DevOps is all about automating your build and release environment, reducing human error/tasks, and building up a pipeline to support continuous delivery so y...

Meet Fabric8: An open-source integration platform based on Camel and ActiveMQ

Fabric8 Fabric8 is a Apache 2.0 Licensed upstream community for the JBoss Fuse product from Red Hat. It's is an integration platform based on Apache ActiveMQ...

Videos: JBoss Fuse on OpenShift: Detailed walk through

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while, but never got the time. Well I have a few seconds to point out that I've posted eight (8) step-by-step vide...

Video: Simplify your integrations with Apache Camel and Fabric8

I just finished my talk at DevNation on Simplifying your integrations with Apache Camel. You can find the slides here: Simplify integrations-final-pdf f...

JBoss Fuse iPaaS on OpenShift : Getting Started

Well, you probably know my thoughts on cloud, PaaS, iPaaS and the like. In short, there's a lot of hype around it, unscrupulous vendors, and some awesome mag...

Integration platform as a service, the cloud, and… baby unicorns

Ahh yes, this mythical utopian "cloud" where unicorns frolic, butterflies abound, and magical elves fetch me a beer three quarters of a way into my current ...

Fuse at DevNation! Fabric8, Camel, ActiveMQ: 50% off

Interested in the JBoss Fuse technolgoies, or the new Fabric8 open-source community? Wanna meet James Strachan (Creator, HawtIO, Camel, [Groovy][groovy][/gro...

Contract first web service integration with Apache Camel on JBoss EAP

Apache Camel is the most popular open-source integration library. You can implement complex routing, orchestration, transformation, and mediation with this l...

Lessons learned: ActiveMQ, Apache Camel and connection pooling

Every once in a while, I run into an interesting problem related to connections and pooling with ActiveMQ, and today I'd like to discuss something that is no...

Cooking with Camel: New cookbook with recipes for Apache Camel!

Word on the street is that Camel tastes good. Well, I can't vouch for that (as I haven't tried it...), but what I can vouch for is that working with Apache C...

2013

Simplify your integrations with Apache Camel

I'm excited to be giving a webinar on Wednesday (December 18th, 2013) at 9am MST (so that translates to 8am PST, 11 EST, and 16:00 UTC). I've already heard t...

JBoss Fuse 6.1 + HawtIO Part I

It's Open Source! JBoss Fuse is an open-source ESB and is the evolution of Fuse ESB after the Red Hat acquisition of FuseSource. It's open-source, Apache v2 ...

JMS-style selectors on Amazon SQS with Apache Camel

This blog demonstrates how easy it is to use Apache Camel and its new json-path component along with the camel-sqs component to produce and consume messages ...

50% off PackT books!

This week you can get 50% off PackT Publishing books! There are a couple new Apache Camel Books released that you may wish to take a look at: Instant Apache ...

Light-weight, open-source integration: Apache Camel or Spring Integration?

First of all, for full disclosure, for the last 1.5 years, I've been working as a consultant for FuseSource (now Red Hat) supporting SOA and Integration proj...

New features in ActiveMQ 5.9!

So ActiveMQ 5.9 is due out from the community any day now! I just did a talk at the local Phoenix JUG about it, and did some live demos of some of the new fe...

From inside the code: Camel Routing Engine Part I

So I've recently re-kindled my interest in how Apache Camel works. Camel is such a powerful integration tool and is very widely used, but anytime I put it to...

HawtIO + ActiveMQ

Have you had a chance to take a look at HawtIO yet? If you haven't, it's a new web-based dashboard for managing and monitoring JVM-based services like Apache...

ActiveMQ 5.9.0 + Apache Apollo at Phoenix JUG in September!

So I was planning to give a talk on ActiveMQ at the Phoenix JUG this August, but through no fault of my own, it has been rescheduled for September. Well... a...

Deploying JBoss A-MQ for High Availability scenarios

JBoss A-MQ is based on Apache ActiveMQ. It's lightweight, has excellent performance, and can be configured to fit a variety of use cases. One of those use c...

Successful CamelOne 2013!

Thanks to all that came out to Camel One in Boston this year! I had a great time, my presentation went well, and there were some other great talks! I believe...

New ActiveMQ Book just released!

I recently had the pleasure of reviewing Tim Bish's new book Instant Apache ActiveMQ Messaging: Application Development How-To and wanted to share some thou...

Join me at CamelOne this June!

For the past couple of years, FuseSource has held CamelOne, an annual conference specifically geared toward the open-source messaging and integration commun...

Plugging the HawtIO monitoring webapp into a stand-alone ActiveMQ instance

HawtIO is a new pluggable HTML5 dashboard for monitoring ActiveMQ, Camel, Karaf, Fuse Fabric, Tomcat, and other technologies. Actually, I was completely surp...

ActiveMQ Message Priorities: How it works

There's usually a steady drip of questions on the mailing list surrounding ActiveMQ's message-priority support as well as good questions about observed behav...

ActiveMQ Clustering, Durable Subscribers, and Virtual Topics to the rescue

So you want to do publish-subscribe with ActiveMQ across distributed topics and be reliable. You can just use durable subscriptions, right? Well, you could, ...

Lean distribution of ActiveMQ

I saw a question on the mailing list asking for a simple, stripped-down, version of ActiveMQ. The default version 5.7.0 distribution and all of its runtime d...

Camel Essential Components Webinar

On January 23rd, I will be giving a live webinar about Camel! I recently completed a DZone RefCard on essential camel components that will be published next ...

Introduction to Apache Apollo Part II: HawtDispatch

Apache Apollo is a next-generation, high-performance, multi-protocol messaging broker built from the ground up to one day be a drop-in replacement of ActiveM...

2012

Apache Apollo REST API

Apache Apollo is a next-generation, high-performance, multi-protocol messaging broker built from the ground up to one day be a drop-in replacement of ActiveM...

ActiveMQ: Understanding Memory Usage

As indicated by some recent mailing list emails and a lot of info returned from Google, ActiveMQ's SystemUsage and particularly the MemoryUsage functionality...

From inside the code: ActiveMQ Network Bridges and Demand Forward Subscriptions

I've written previously about ActiveMQ Network Connectors as a way to help describe some of the responsibilities of the classes that are involved with config...

Benchmarking your JMS layer with an open source JMSTester tool from FuseSource

For most of the clients I've been to, scaling out a JMS messaging layer with ActiveMQ is a priority. There are a couple ways to achieve this, but without a d...

Guaranteed messaging for topics, the JMS spec, and ActiveMQ

Recently a customer asked me to look closer at ActiveMQ's implementation of "persistent" messages, how it applies to topics, and what happens in failover sce...

Introducing Apache Apollo: Part I

See Part II here Apache Apollo is the next-generation version of ActiveMQ built "from the ground up" on a core designed to be faster and scale better on mul...

FuseSource acquired by RedHat... Who is FuseSource?

Progress Software announced it was divesting FuseSource from it's product line back in April. Today I'm happy to say RedHat is where FuseSource will now make...

Getting a Scala def main() to run with IntelliJ IDEA

When you set up a run configuration to run a Scala object's main function, you have the option to run it as an Application. If you manually set up the Scala ...

Part II: Managing large deployments of MQ and ESB with Fuse Fabric

In the last blog post I introduced Fuse Fabric, an overview of the problems it is intended to solve, and the components that it uses to accomplish pain-free ...

Managing large deployments of MQ and ESB with Fuse Fabric, Part I

FuseSource just recently released enterprise versions of their distributions of ActiveMQ and ServiceMix. Some of the top features include incremental patchin...

From inside the code: Camel RouteBuilder and Java DSL

Recently got back from Camel One and now it's time to get back to business. One topic of discussion I wanted to go over quickly is the Camel route builders a...

Recap from CamelOne 2012

I just got back from CamelOne which was earlier this week in the beautiful city of Boston, MA. It was quite the experience; definitely one of the best techni...

Understanding how OSGI bundles get resolved part II

In my previous post, I introduced the rules for how bundles get resolved in an OSGI container. In this post, I'd like to demonstrate each rule step using the...

From inside the code: ActiveMQ Network Connectors

This post is more for me and any ActiveMQ contributors that may be interested in how the Network Connectors work for ActiveMQ. I recently spent some time loo...

Understanding how OSGI bundles get resolved part I

I'd like to review how OSGI bundles get resolved and use Apache Karaf to demonstrate. Karaf is a full-featured OSGI container based on the Apache Felix kerne...

REST endpoint for integration using Apache Camel

REST is an architectural style used for organizing resources and when applied to HTTP-based services allows building stateless, decoupled, scalable services....

Including additional artifacts with Maven

Sometimes your build will contain other artifacts for a build other than the pom, a jar, etc. For example, you may wish to attach data-source configurations ...

Why I'm excited to attend Camel One

I'll be attending CamelOne this year, and I'm pretty excited. I didn't make it to the event last year, but judging by the speaker line up and the presentatio...

Focused, informative documentation for ActiveMQ, Camel, ServiceMix and CXF

What criteria do you use when evaluating whether to use a commercial product or open-source project to support your system-integration development? Is docume...

Using Excel Templates with Excel Mac 2011

I use a Mac for all of my development (where I can), but one thing I had to do recently was use Excel on a Mac and create a new spreadsheet from a template. ...

Serious about your software career? Leave your job

I recently resigned my position as senior software engineer and technical lead for a middleware services group at Wells Fargo. The job was great: work from h...

Maven, M2_HOME, and IntelliJ on a Mac

Apparently, even if you put your environment variables into your .profile, IntelliJ won't pick it up. Which makes sense since .profile is for setting your sh...

Mixins in Python

In Python, mixins allow a programmer to package a set of clearly defined and cohesive methods into a unit that can then be used to add functionality to other...

Programming without a call stack?

Over the weekend I read an excellent essay called “Programming Without a Call Stack - Event-driven Architectures” by Gregor Hohpe that does an excellent job ...

Backing Spring Integration routes with ActiveMQ

As discussed in my previous post, Spring Integration (SI) is a routing framework built on top of the Spring Framework that allows you to use proven enterpris...

What is Spring Integration?

As the Spring Integration project slowly gains more adoption and interest, developers in the enterprise integration or enterprise development space will most...

Easier way to create custom Spring Config Namespaces using xbean-spring

Over the weekend I was debugging a peculiar issue with ActiveMQ (turned out to indeed be a bug that had been reported a few months ago: https://issues.apach...

2011

What is ActiveMQ?

Although the Active MQ website already gives a pithy, to-the-point explanation of ActiveMQ, I would like to add some more context to their definition. From ...

The code is the design!

I recently stumbled upon an essay that I've read many times in the past. I didn't have it bookmarked on this newer laptop, so after doing so I also decided ...

Being a better enterprise architect

Enterprise architects seem to become more and more involved in “trying out new things” or pushing down technology or implementation advice -- nay dictation -...

Pass by reference? Java is pass by value.

I stumbled upon a discussion, probably an age-old discussion, about whether java passes function arguments by reference or by value. i know I've studied this...

Using pysvn to get a tag name for current working directory

Recently, I needed an way to report the version of the application I'm working on to the users of the application. I wanted to avoid manually updating a sett...

On Convincing Your Co-Workers TDD is a Good Thing

For a lot of people, TDD (read -- both Test Driven Development and Test Driven Design) is a software practice that one couldn't and shouldn't live without. C...

2010

Design should never stop!

I was listening to a podcast today of Scott Hanselman interviewing Michael Feathers, the author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code. I'm currently readin...

Response to "Generalized data-access operations"

Recently, a reader spotted a comment that I made on a different blog concerning generalizing data-access operations for inappropriate reasons. What follows w...

Java static methods can be a code smell

Response to "How to Mock Static Methods" Definition of code smell (from Wikipedia): "any symptom in the source code of a program that possibly indicates ...

A "useful" model for object-oriented analysis and design

Object Oriented Analysis and Design is certainly not new to the enterprise software workforce, but how is it actually carried forth in industry? Are software...

Response to "Flaw in object-oriented modeling"

I recently read a blog on the Intel Software Network describing the reduced execution flow readability in object-oriented systems that implement a domain mod...

2009

Why should we 'waste time' on unit tests when we could be writing functionality?

Our goal when writing code is to write 'high-quality' code, not just hack together what appears to work and moving on to the next set of functionality. When ...

CRUD example: Ext-GWT + Spring + Hibernate

I am planning a series of posts that walk a reader through building a simplistic application using Ext-GWT as the choice of technology for the user interfac...

SOLID Object Oriented Design Principles

I am working on the next Ext-GWT blog, but in the interim, I would like to share an awesome podcast that I found at Scott Hanselman's blog. He interviews Rob...