mike.mainguy

The rigor and quality of testing in the current software development world leaves a lot to be desired. Additionally, it feels like we are living in the dark ages with mysterious edicts about the "right" way to test being delivered by an anointed few vocal prophets with little or no effort being given to education of the general populace about why it is "right", instead spending effort evangelizing. I use the religious metaphor because to me it seems a very large amount of the rhetoric is intended to sway people to follow a particular set of ceremonies without doing a good job of explaining the underpinnings and why these ceremonies have value. I read with interest an post by David Heinmeier Hansson titled TDD is dead. Long live testing that pretty much sums up my opinion of the current state of affairs in this regard. A number of zealots proclaiming TDD to be the "one true way", but not a lot of evidence that this is actually true. Yes, Test Driven ...

In the cloud, it's important to be able to do have computers talk to each other and invoke commands on each other. This is called Remote Method Invocation (RMI). By language, I have the following recap: Python works Ruby works Javascript works Java ... makes you work Java RMI is a godawful mess that should be killed now. RMI is a very simple thing until you let an argument of architects come up with "the best solution" and then it becomes a convoluted mess of edge cases. In it's simplest, RMI involves serializing and deserializing some input parameters and then running some logic, then doing the same with some output parameters... gosh, that almost sounds like HTTP to me (hint, it really IS). I don't know exactly where things went wrong with java RMI, but there are registries, incantations, and special glyphs you need to paint on your door on alternate Tuesdays to make it work correctly. In python, ruby, and javascript, I can do RMI 15 different w...