David Dossot

I am posting this mainly for the sake of reference and, maybe, helping others with the same problem. If, like us, you're running the Zabbix monitoring platform in Zulu time (aka UTC), you should have noticed a time glitch when displaying historical graphs. The cause of this probl... (more)

I've been caressing the idea to buy a Wi-Fi enabled media player in order to tap into the gigabytes of (legal) music that sits in my NAS. I've considered investing into a Logitech Squeezebox, or a similar product, but I wasn't sure such a device would be able to play directly fro... (more)

As software manifestos have started to proliferate these past months, I have started to wonder what could be the root cause for their creation. Why would thought leaders gather, assert a small set of values and shrink-wrap them as a manifesto, calling for others to sign it? My fe... (more)

Like any test infected programmer switching to a new development platform, I have spent my first days working with Erlang looking for my seams. Here, I am talking about seams as defined by Michael Feathers in Working Effectively with Legacy Code: "A seam is a place where you can ... (more)

If you wonder why is the Software Craftsmanship movement valuable, Calvin and Hobbes have the answer for you: © 1996 Bill Watterson ... (more)

During the past months, ToughtWorkers have been regularly pounding on ESBs in a manner that Martin Fowler has neatly summarized like this: "Hang around my colleagues at ThoughtWorks and you soon get the impression that the only good Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a dead ESB. Jim... (more)

I feel a little like George McFly, now... Trees had to die to get us there by here we are: Mule in Action is now treeware. And in case you missed it, the making of was here. Enjoy the reading! ... (more)

In "Working Effectively with Legacy Code", Michael Feathers gives this definition: To me, legacy code is simply code without tests.He also adds: I've gotten some grief for this definition.Indeed, defining legacy code is hard. After purging one of our project from code that we consi... (more)

Transgressing the Law of Demeter can not only attract the grain goddess' wrath on you but can also turn classes into angry monkeys. Let's see how. Consider this freshly created method and notice how it asks for more than it needs, setting the stage for the upcoming drama that invol... (more)

Groovy's MarkupBuilder makes outputting REST microformats a bliss. Read more about this in my guest blog entry "Having Some REST with Mule’s Power Tools" that MuleSource has just published on "From the Mule’s mouth". ... (more)

Suppose we have the following code: public class Thinger { private static final RESULT = "Joy"; public String doThing() { return RESULT; } } When testing such a code, it is tempting to modify the visibility of RESULT to package protected in order to write tests that share the constan... (more)

While following the discussions on Oasis Blue's SmartGrid Interest List, I noticed that smart device makers quickly reacted to the draft charter for the proposed OASIS Energy Market Information Exchange (eMIX) Technical Committee by stating that their capacity to implement full-f... (more)

Migrating monolithic systems to distributed ones is probably one of the most exhilarating tasks in software development. Monolithic systems, even if they engage in interconnected relationships, remain pretty much like silos (I like compare a network of monolithic systems to silos... (more)

Embedding Mule in a web application allows you to tap the Servlet layer of your favorite web container, which is a good thing as you are supposedly very familiar with its behavior and tuning. When it comes to writing functional tests for such an application, my strategy was to re... (more)

Who owns this application? What can possibly be complicated about such a simple and innocent question? Unfortunately, the answer to such a question is not that easy. Or at least, we have created software organizations that make it hard to answer. Though it makes sense to have a div... (more)

Not so long ago, I have been tasked with the development of an in-memory IP address geolocation library. Yep, that was pretty cool and challenging at the same time (well, the challenge made it cool, right?). In this short post, I want to share how the design of one component, the d... (more)

One of the thoughts I gathered from last night's panel on the possible death of SOA, pertains to the natural consequence of the push back on the WS-DeathStar and the spike of interest in the REST architecture. So what is the consequence of dropping the dream of web-level distribute... (more)

DD: Hi Mr. Web Thread and thanks for joining us. WT: My pleasure. Do you mind if I stay in the pool? DD: Hmm? Sure, why not. So, can you please tell us how is your life nowadays? WT: Life has been pretty good. I have become very popular recently and came to perform some massive gigs ... (more)

More than twenty years after my last statistics class, this book really tasted like a rejuvenating read. It is well structured, with an opening focused on theory followed by numerous applications in all sorts of domains (yes, including poker, though my preferred subject was the D... (more)

In Standards Based vs. Standardized Neal Ford develops a very interesting rhetoric that is mainly focused on what he sees being "wrong with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) in the way that it's being sold by vendors", but really touches a vast subject that has many thought pro... (more)