Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

This Episode is a round table discussion about Ultra-Large Scale Systems. In 2006, a number of authors (among them our guests Linda Northrop, Doug Schmidt, Kevin Sullivan, and Gregor Kiczales) have produced a report that addressed the following question: Given the issues with today's software engineering, how can we build the systems of the future that are likely to have billions of lines of code? In this episode, our guests discuss many of the issues that arise from this kind of system and provide an overview of the research areas that should be investigated in order to tackle the challenge. If you want to get more detailed information, you can read the ULS Report (PDF).

This is another episode on concurrency. We talk to two experts in the field, Brian Goetz and David Holmes about aspects of concurrency we hadn't really covered before. We start out by discussing liveness and safety and then continue to talk about synchronizers (latches, barriers, semaphores) as well as the importance of agreeing on protocols when developing concurrent applications. We then talked about thread confinement as a way of building thread-safe programs, as well as using functional programming and immutable data. The next set of topics covers various ways of how compilers can optimize the performance wrt. to concurrency, talking about techniques such as escape analysis as well as lock elision and coarsening. We then covered how to test concurrent programs and the consequences of the Java memory model on concurrency. We then went on to look at some more advanced topics, namely, lock-free programming and atomic variables. We also briefly discussed the idea of transactional memory. Finally, we looked at how better language support - specifically, a more declarative style of concurrent programming as e.g. in the Fortress language - can aid in improving the quality of concurrent programs.

This is the second part of our two part discussion of the eXtreme Programming development methodology. While the first part introduced the values, principles and basic practices, this time Arno and Alex speak about the practices that set the context for an XP project and how to get started, and they discuss some FAQs they often get when introducing XP.

In this episode, Gregor Hohpe gives us a great introduction to enterprise messaging based on his EAI Patterns book. Before we started discusssing the patterns in his book, we characterized messaging and talked about the various interaction styles. We also contrasted the messaging architectural style with an RPC based approach. We then took a look at the relationship to SOA, the role of contracts and the orchestration-vs-choreography discussion. We briefly discussed the nature of pattern languages before we then went through the different section in the book. There are six main sections: channel, message, routing, transfomation, endpoint as well as management and monitoring. We discussed the core patterns for each of these sections. This should give listeners a good high-level view of message-based systems. We concluded the discussion by looking at the critical importance of systems management and monitoring.

This is the fourth and final episode on the fundamentals of Software Architecture. We talk mainly about architectural styles and patterns, as introduced in the POSA 1 Book. We also discuss a little bit the process of actually using those patterns for architecting systems.

This episode is an interview with Werner Vogels, the CTO of amazon.com. We first talked about what scalability is, and which aspects there are to scalability. We then took a brief look at the technologies used at amazon, specifically, the middleware systems and the issue of vendor lock-in. Web services, and the role of SOA was the next topic. Then we covered what a service actually is add Werner explained the term "pizza teams". Testing and Deployment was the next topic followed by a look at architectural characteristics of scalable systems, the value of simplicity and the CAP theorem. We concluded the discussion with a brief look at the future of distributed systems

This episode is an interview with Steve Vinoski. Steve works as the Chief Engineer for IONA. He's what you'd call a middleware guru, he was for example deeply involved with CORBA. So, this interview centers mainly around middleware. We begin by talking about his own history wrt. middleare and ORBs and how ORBs evolved over time. We then talked about whether coarse-grained, stateless components might be a better abstraction for distributed systems than "objects". We then covered the future of CORBA, it's use in ethe embedded space as well as the practical relevance of the POSA patterns when building ORBs. Then we switched topics and addressed the role of web services as a "middleware middleware" and the maturity of WS-* specifications. We then looked at what Steve is working on these days, which is e.g. the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) as well as dynamic languages. We concluded the interwiew with his view on SOA.

Designers, programmers, engineers, we must all return to programming! Very few programmers tend to see their (sometimes rather general) difficulties as the core of the subject and as a result there is a widely held consensus as to what programming is really about. If these notes prove to be a source of recognition or to give you the appreciation that we have simply written down what you already know about the programmer's trade, some of our goals will have been reached.

This is the first of two episodes where Arno and Alex discuss eXtreme Programming in se-radio's development process track. eXtreme Programming (XP) revolutionized the way of thinking about software development methodologies and helped to make the agile movement popular. In this episode they discuss the very basics of XP, its value system, principles and the basic practices used in an XP project. The second episode will continue the introduction adding the missing practices and how to introduce XP into projects.

This episode is an interview with Guy L. Steele Jr.. Guy is a Sun Fellow and heads the Programming Language Research Group within Sun, and a generally well known "programming language guy" (see here for details). We briefly talk about Lisp and the resurgence of dynamic languages before we delve into the main topic, the Fortress programming language he is working on. Fortress is a language intended to replace Fortran as a scientific computing language. We talk about how mathematical notations, syntax extensio and built-in support for parallelism are crucial properties of such a language. We then briefly talk about potentials for compiler optimization before taking a closer look at the type system (static typing, type inference), traits and contract specification as well as first-class support for hierarchical components. We conclude the discussion with a look at automatic partitioning and distribuion of concurrent algorithms and a brief look at the future roadmap for the Fortress language.