Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers

In this episode Arno and Alex talk about the basics of software development processes. They discuss why and when software development processes are needed and also why some developers don't like them. They discuss the theories behind different processes and talk about defined vs empiric processes in general. This episode is the first in a row that will later on describe specific processes like eXtreme programming or the unified process.

This is the first of a series of Episodes on Software Architecture. Alex, Michael and Markus talk about rather fundamental topics in this episode, we'll go into much more detail in subsequent episodes in that series. Topics in this episode include:

• What is architecture, how is it different from design
• what different kinds of architecture are there in addition to software architecture
• the role of the architect, do we have one or more?
• architecture in agile software development
• tasks of the architect
• architect vs. the technical project lead
• architecture and project politics
• architecture requirements, estimating, team assembling

There aren't too many good references for this general architecture discussion. You might want to take a look at Software Architecture in Practice by Len Bass, or, if you speak German, at the book Software-Architektur by Vogel, Arnold, Chugtai, Ihler, Mehlig, Neumann, Voelter and Zdun.

This is an episode with some more of your feedback. Specifically, the episode also contains a 5 minute section from Geert Bevin where he explains how Continuations are used an implemented in the Rife Framework. This is in response to a discussion about continuations and Rife in Episode 15, Future of Enterprise Java. We also have some feedback from Bill Pugh about flaws in our description about the problems of double-checked locking in Java.

In this Episode, Arno and Michael take a closer look at Exceptions and Error conditions, how to categorize them and how to deal with them. We look at the different levels of guarantee that a piece of code can provide with regard to exceptional condition and finish with a discussion of a number of best practices and their respective trade-offs.

In this Episode, we talk to Michael Stal, a Senior Principal Engineer at Siemens Corporate Technology, POSA 1 and 2 Co-Author and Editor of the german JavaSpetrum magazine. Since Michael's core focus is middlware, much of our discussion centered around that topic. Webservices and SOA, of course, have also been covered. Other topics include Java vs. .NET as well as Patterns.

In this second part of our concurrency series Michael and Alexander talk about basic patterns for concurrent programming, such as Active and Monitor Object, Scoped Locking and Futures. Further, they discuss some architectural considerations regarding the number of threads and resource usage in general. For more information, see the references for part one as well as the following links

In this episode Michael and our guest Prashant Jain talk about patterns for resource management. Efficient management of resources is critical in the execution of any kind of software. Ranging from embedded software in a mobile device to software in a large enterprise server, it is important that the resources, such as memory, threads, file handles, or network connections, are managed efficiently to allow the systems to function properly and effectively. Michael and Prashant discuss various patterns, such as Lazy Acquisition, Caching, Leasing and Evictor and explain when, why, and how to apply them for effective resource management.

This is a short episode that outlines the upcoming episodes and interviews, as well as reports on some listener feedback.

This episode provides a hands-on guided tour through a simple model-driven software project. It is based on an actual code sample (see link below) and takes a look at the typical steps of real-life code generation: prototypical implementation, defining the metamodel, reading a model into a metamodel instance, writing templates and validating the model. The example for the episode uses openArchitectureWare as a generator environment, but the overall approach is tool independent. This episode is the first in a new category "code/technology" that discusses technical concepts based on actual code. Please give feedback whether you find this format useful or not.

A very important area for Java are Enterprise Systems. With the advent of new technologies like Ruby on Rails, Java EE 5 or EJB 3 the landscape for Enterprise Systems appears to be changing a lot at the moment. In this episode Markus talks with Eberhard about what Enterprise Java actually is, why and where it is used. Based on that they discuss what the future might look like and how to make Enterprise Java shine in the future.