As with a house, software applications require maintenance too. Otherwise, you risk the digital equivalent of rot: bit-rot. Often, the maintenance is done like with a house: Superficially to make it look nice again with a new look-and-feel, a new colour scheme (a paint job) and a few new stock photos. But every once in a […]
Dockerising your legacy integration tests
As most of you will know, every now and then you can expect the question ‘Can you help fix something on this ancient project?’ According to the Universal Software Ageing table, that means anything from last month to much, much older. I got such a question recently, being in-between projects, and this project fell squarely into […]
Documenting your REST APIs
Whenever you deliver some API that is to be consumed by another party, you will get the inevitable question of providing documentation. Probably every developer’s least favorite task. In Java there is javadoc, but that doesn’t cut it if you are delivering a Web Service API. In that realm we already know WSDL for SOAP based […]
Efficiently storing your domain model in Riak
Domain modelling and persistence appear to be at odds with each other, no matter which persistence store you use. Over the years practices have been developed for storing a model in a relational database using ORM frameworks like Hibernate, and various design patterns to help mitigate a number of issues. Not all of these translate […]