Today's Book: The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction, Third Edition

The Rational Unified Process unifies the entire software development team and optimizes the productivity of every team member by putting the collective experience derived from thousands of projects and many industry leaders at your fingertips. Philippe Kruchten's concise book offers a quick introduction to the concepts, structure, content, and motivation of the Rational Unified Process—a Web-enabled software engineering process that enhances team productivity and delivers software best practices to all team members. The Rational Unified Process is unique in that it allows development teams to recognize the full benefits of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), software automation, and other industry best practices.

• Philippe Kruchten, The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction, 3rd Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Requirements for shifts to SOA

Supporting the smooth shift from legacy components to SOA-enabled (Service Oriented Architecture) ones in enterprise architecture is a key requirement for wide-SOA adoption. An SOA structures large applications into reusable building blocks called “services” that respond rapidly to changing business conditions. For an enterprise, in order benefiting from SOA, they first need to transform their enterprise architecture so that it is at least partially SOA-enabled. However, it is often the case with enterprise that they also hate to dispose their current IT systems so drastically. In such situation, reusing legacy components rather than re-implementing them from scratch for provided SOA-enabled components is a preferred approach to SOA adoption for an enterprise in the real world.

Papers on Enterprise Server Performance Testing

I have just searched a bit for papers on performance testing that is specialized for enterprise servers.

Elaine J. Weyuker (DBLP) and her colleagues have done extensive work in this area.
http://www.research.att.com/info/weyuker/

Selected papers are listed below:

• Alberto Avritzer, Elaine J. Weyuker: The Role of Modeling in the Performance Testing of E-Commerce Applications. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 30(12): 1072-1083 (2004)
• Elaine J. Weyuker, Alberto Avritzer: A metric for predicting the performance of an application under a growing workload. IBM Systems Journal 41(1): 45-54 (2002)
• Cheng J. Lin, Alberto Avritzer, Elaine J. Weyuker, Sai-Lai Lo: Issues in Interoperability and Performance Verification in a Multi-ORB Telecommunications Environment. DSN 2000: 567-575
• Elaine J. Weyuker, Filippos I. Vokolos: Experience with Performance Testing of Software Systems: Issues, an Approach, and Case Study. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 26(12): 1147-1156 (2000)

Today's Book: Capacity Planning for Web Services

While we can find only little research on capacity planning, practioners actually do this. A book by Daniel Menasce et al. gives us a good insight for:

• Web services: protocols, interaction models, and unique performance, reliability, and availability challenges
• State-of-the-art capacity planning methodologies
• Spreadsheets implement the solutions of the models presenteed in the book
• Specific issues and workloads associated with HTTP and TCP/IP protocols
• Benchmarking current performance at system and component levels

• Daniel A. Menasce, Virgilio A.F. Almeida, Capacity Planning for Web Services: Metrics, Models, and Methods, Prentice Hall, Sep 11, 2001

Academic Conference for Wikis

WikiSym 2005, the first symposium on Wikis was held for Oct 16-18, 2005, San Diego, California, USA, co-located with ACM OOPSLA.

Avoiding Code Generation Pain in JiBX

Generating correct and verifiable bytecode isn't always easy. Dennis Sosnoski, a famous programmer and the developer of JiBX, shares his insights from his painful classworking experiences along the way to the 1.0 production release of JiBX. He discusses the internal structures used for code generation and the steps he's gone through to make sure that the generated code follows JVM rules.

• Classworking toolkit: Inside JiBX code generation - Find out how JiBX implements class file enhancement for XML data binding, by Dennis Sosnoski, IBM developerWorks, Sep 6, 2005.

Enterprise Messaging Using JMS and IBM WebSphere

IBM's JMS provider, known as code name JetStream, is available in WebSphere 6. The article by Kareem Yusuf at WebSphere Journal gives us a good introductory for using this. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/45008.htm