In the last few years, we see the advent of highly distributed systems. Systems that have clusters with lots of servers are no longer the sole realm of the googles’ and facebooks’ of the world and we begin to see multi-node and big data systems in enterprises. e.g. I don’t think a company such as Nice (the company I work for) would release an hadoop based analytics platform and solutions, something we did just last week, 5-6 years ago.

So now that large(r) clusters are more prevalent, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the fallacies of distributed computing and how/if they are relevant; should they be changed.
If you don’t know about the fallacies you can see the list and read the article I wrote about them at the link mentioned above. In a few words … Read More »

I just got a notice from Manning that my book SOA patterns will be featured as “deal of the day” on Apr 14th – that means that it will be available for 50% off starting Midnight US ET of April 14th (and considering it’s a world-wide offer it would actually last for more than 24 hours).

To get the 50% discount use code dotd0414au at www.manning.com/rotem

If you’re not familiar with my book (which I guess is unlikely if you’re reading my blog, but anyway), you might want to check out the SOA Patterns page on my site, read one or more of the pattern draft or check out the book reviews.

Reviews of SOA patterns

Cameron McKenzie @ TheServerSide.com
Tad Anderson @ Java Developers Journal
Roberto Casadei @ robertocasadei.it
Colin Jack @ losTechies (half a book review)
Jan Van Ryswyck @ ElegantCode.com (half a book review)
Karsten Strøbæk @ … Read More »

Even though I mostly sit at work trying to look busy, every so often someone does stumbles into my office with a question or a problem so I’ve got to do something.

Interestingly enough, a lot of problems can be handled by some pretty basic stuff like like reminding people that a .jar/war file is a zip file and you can take a look inside for what’s there or what’s missing; or sending people to read the log files (turns out these buggers actually contain useful information) etc. – so now for today’s lesson: “It’s open source, so the source, you know, is open…”

We use a lot of open source projects at Nice (we’ve also, slowly, starting to give something back to the community but that’s another story). One of these is HBase, one of our devs was working on enabling … Read More »