This article discusses the top five tools for Java/JEE application performance management.

After making it to the front page of Slashdot (by surprise) and our WordPress site melting 2mins later with a server load of 41, we spent the next few hours bringing our WordPress site back up to functioning level... these are the tips we used to save it.

The concept of modelling software in an abstract manner to ease the process of creating the real thing has been around for a while. And in all that time it’s never really taken off in the mainstream. So it’s pretty exciting to hear Microsoft has decided to give it a go – Microsoft have always been clever when it comes to examining the landscape, taking out the best bits, and building something that stands out from the rest. Let’s hope they learn the lessons of others and produce something that’s really different.

Tired of getting crappy seats at Southwest? Here's how to make sure you get a better seat all the time using Free and Open Source software.

JAOO 2008 coverage continues with a discussion covering domain specific languages with the great Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks, Neil Ford, Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughWorks and PowerShell creator Jeffery Snover, Partner Architect at Microsoft. Martin is a world leader in the design and implementation of DSLs, which are highly specilaized languages aimed at solving particular sets of problems (unlike general purpose programming languages which are, well, general purpose in nature). PowerShell is a DSL. Or is it? Tune in.

In a software-centric world where we already have many, many languages to program in, from scripting to bytecode compiled languages, to frameworks on top of languages and embedded languages, now Redmond wants to bring ANOTHER language to the table, titled ‘M’ (for Microsoft?).

How to easily create some simple bar charts (and graphs in general) with Ruby and Gruff.

Discover QueryScope, a visualization technology that transforms a complex, multi-page SQL statement into a colorful bubble diagram that shows the key characteristics of the query. The visual cues stand out to signify relative sizes of database tables, table join patterns, and index availability. When many SQL statements are displayed side by side, their commonality and differences become apparent.

In March I wrote a post titled IE8: The Bad, since then a new beta of Internet Explorer has been released. It still seems a bit dubious whether they are actually committing to standards. This could be a communication issue or actually intended. It is mostly unclear to me.

I have been maintaining the content of this blog in Subversion since March 2005, 1292 days ago (and in CVS before that). When I moved this blog from my Fedora Core 6 box to my Debian box 64 days ago, I don't have enough disk space on the partition to hold the 1.9G Subversion workspace. So I simply used the 916M export from Subversion.

Over three years ago, I was faced with a dilemma. I had recently switched to the Mac (from Linux) and was still using my text editor of choice (vim), but at the time, vim’s “integration” with OS X was pretty minimal (and that’s putting it optimistically). I experimented with emacs, but it never clicked for me, and honestly, emacs on OS X wasn’t all that better than vim at the time. Sadly, reluctantly, I said good-bye to vim and switched to TextMate.

How to develop GWT applications without RPC code using the UniversalClient API.

JSystem is an open source framework for writing and running automated system testing projects. The JSystem framework is comprised of the following components: Services Java API - exposes JSystem services JSystem Drivers- Java modules used to interfaces with devices and applications in the system under test. JRunner - GUI application interface used for creating and running tests scenarios. JSystem Agent - Execution engine used to run scenarios on a distributed setup. JSystem Eclipse plug-in - accelerates the development environment setup and enforces JSystem conventions

An example of what a bored Google engineer does during a slow weekend: He writes a Java application using an annealing algorithm that finds the most optimized layout and color to reproduce an image using nothing but Lego blocks.

The OpenOffice.org 3.0 suite of productivity applications arrives Monday, but, as noted at Download Squad, you can get it today. The OpenOffice team has posted it to a number of mirror sites. The list to check is here. As Download Squad notes: "Just pick one in your region, navigate to the folder marked 'stable' and grab the appropriate files for your operating system from the '3.0.0' folder." If you want the Windows version and not the Linux version, FileHippo has it available today. Here's more on what's under the hood.

Tutorial on using Selenium IDE for automating web testing.

Proper version control is a must for everyone who programs more than a few lines of code. Even if you develop your applications all by yourself it is very handy to be able to branch and merge your code, be able to roll back to previous versions or undo changes you made in the past. It works great for regular applications, but managing web applications or websites is a tad harder for two reason: You need a webserver to get your application going and you usually have to manage database revisions as well.

How to convert legacy code into OSGi bundles at runtime

It has some uses you might now know.

Currently there is no way for users to add documentation to components defined in mxml files. The asdoc tool doesn't read the comments in mxml files. Increasingly more components in the flex framework are being written in mxml. Adding support for mxml in the asdoc tool would help developers to generate documentation for their components. Several customer have also added requests in JIRA to support class level comments in mxml files.

In the not-too-distant past, ENIAC was programmed with switches and a plugboard. Stored program computers soon followed that allowed one to write a program, load it into the computer memory, and run it. Initially, those programs had to be written in or manually translated into binary machine code, but soon assembly languages and assemblers were developed to simplify the process.

In this InfoQ interview filmed at RubyFringe 2008, Tom Preston-Werner talks about how both Powerset and GitHub use Ruby and Erlang, as well as tools like Fuzed, god, and more.

Discover the Toolkit for Data Collection and Visual Analysis for Multi-Core Systems; it targets many common performance problems pertaining to Java applications running on multi-core or multi-processing platforms. These problems can have a major impact on the overall performance of Java middleware and applications. This toolkit has been designed for easy use by users with average skills.

Knowing what a proxy is is good. Knowing what you can do with one is even better.

One of our early goals for Google Chrome was to make the browser as fast as we possibly could. But in addition to raw speed, we wanted it to be highly responsive. After all, it doesn't matter how fast pages can be loaded if the user interface is locked up!