Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

This episode is the long-awaited (and much requested) interview with Krzysztof Czarnecki , the author, together with Ulrich Eisenecker, of the book Generative Programming . In the interview we discussed the state of generative programming today and related it to model-driven development and DSLs. We then talked a little bit about product lines in general. We then discussed his current field of res...

In this episode we talk to Matthew Wall (Guardian News and Media) and Erik Doernenburg ( Thoughtworks ) about their work on the new guardian.co.uk website. We discuss the challenge of scalability and interactivity, their use of Domain Driven Design , some of the technical building blocks as well as the approaches they use for performance measuring and scalability tuning.

In this episode we're talking to Dirk Riehle about open source business models. We started looking at the way OS projects work and defined different kinds of open source projects. In the main part of the discussion we looked at various ways of how to make money with open source: consulting, support contracts, commercial variant of an open source project, etc. We then looked at the chances and risk...

In this episode, Markus talks to Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on what she has learned from architecture reviews. This is a very complement to the earlier episode on architecture evaluation .

In this Episode, Arno talks with Oliver Jucknath about the art of writing computer games. A lot of myth is attached to this area of computing, and while a game technically is just another program, it is written in a different context than typical business applications. This is true at the code level, where aggressive optimization is a focus throughout development. It also applies at the team level...

In this episode, we talk with Kevlin Henney about the C++ programming language. We look at the history and the culture of the language, and how it went through several phases in its evolution. We also take a look at some of the special language features of C++ and their overall influence.

In this episode Charles Krueger, a well-known member of the product line engineering community, talks about his long term experiences in the field. Charles is also the founder and CEO of a company that provides tooling for variability management and product derivation. Besides some clarifications on terms like product line architecture and reference architecture, you also learn what kind of precon...

In this Episode we're talking about Erlang with its creator Joe Armstrong . We started by looking at the history of the Erlang language and why it is so relevant today. We then looked at Joe's approach to Concurrency Oriented Programming and its main ingredients: share nothing, lightweight concurrency and pure message passing. We also compared this to the classic shared memory approach to concurre...

In this episode we talk to Galen Hunt about the Singularity research OS. Galen is the head of Microsoft's OS Research Group and, together with a team of about 30 other researches, has built Singularity. We started our discussion by covering the basics of Singularity: why it was designed, what the goals of the project are as well as some of the architectural foundations of Singularity: software iso...

In this episode, Michael and Markus talk about software components. We first looked at a couple of attempts at defining what a component is. We then provided our own definition that will be used in the rest of the episode. We then looked at the promises of component-based development: why are components useful? We then discussed some of the typical metadata components should specify to make them u...

This episode is an interview with Dave Thomas (OTI Dave or Smalltalk Dave, not PragDave). We started our discussion with a look at the (non-)success of objects and components. We then discussed some history behine Eclipse and Dave's role in OTI. We then compared Smalltalk and Ruby and looked at the promises of small and powerful languages such as Lisp. We also discussed the role of (static) type s...

In this Episode we're talking about Web Services with IBM's Olaf Zimmermann . We mainly focus on the WS-* stack. We also discuss a couple of SOA foundations and architectural decisions that need to be taken when building an SOA using Web Serivces. We also briefly mention the REST vs. WS-* debate.

In this Episode we're talking with Dick Gabriel on Lisp . We started by looking at artificial intelligence as the historic context of Lisp, the goals AI tried to reach, and how Lisp was supposed to help reach those. We then discussed the language itself, starting with the Data As Program / Program As Data concept that is a foundation for Lisp. Then we discussed adding a meta-circular interpreter,...

In this episode we talk with Jeff DeLuca about Feature Driven Development (FDD). As one member of the agile methods family FDD is not so famous as Scrum or Extreme Programming but is becoming more and more popular, especially for situations where you have fixed price contracts. As the inventor of FDD Jeff gives short introduction to the method itself, talks about the basic ideas behind FDD and dis...

In this episode Eberhard Wolff speaks with Jürgen Höller, the co-found of the Spring framework. Spring is a tremendously successful Java framework so they discuss the design of large frameworks and the issues that arise in the evolution. Jürgen explains the management of dependencies in the framework, how to structure such a framework, how to offer compatibility for the existing user base while ev...

This episode is a conversation with Erich Gamma . We covered the four things he is known for in chronological order. We started with design patterns and the Gang-of-Four book of which he is the lead author. We then looked at JUnit, the testing framework he coauthored with Kent Beck and how it introduced unit testing to the masses. The next topic is obviously Eclipse, where Erich and his lab in Zür...

This episode is about OSGi , the dynamic module system for Java. Our guests are Peter Kriens (OSGI's Technical Director) and BJ Hargrave (OSGI's CTO). We'll discuss what OSGi is all about and why and in which contexts it is useful. Additionally we are having a look at the different layers of OSGI and where and how they are used. Other questions discussed are: What means dynamicity in an OSGI envir...

In this Episode we're discussing patterns for small memory software with the authors of the like-named book Charles Weir and James Noble . We look at various aspects of the small memory problem: How can you manage memory use across a whole system? What can you do when you have run out of primary storage? How can you fit a quart of data into a pint pot of memory? How can you reduce the memory neede...

This is the second part of the discussion on fault tolerance with Bob Hanmer (if you didn't listen to Episode 77, which contains part one, please go back and listen now; this episode builds on that previous one!) We start by discussing a set of error detection patterns. Among are the well-known approaches such as checksums and voting. We then look at error recovery patterns, including restart, rol...

In this Episode we discuss fault tolerance based on the new book by Bob Hanmer. This is the actually the first part of the discussion, the remainder will be published in the next episode of SE Radio. We start by discussing some of the context for fault tolerant systems and the imperfect world assumption. We then discuss a number of terms we will need when discussing the fault tolerance patterns. W...

In this special Episode we briefly discuss the upcoming Patterns Journal with the two editors, Ralph Johnson and James Noble.

In this special Episode we briefly discuss our new website. We will migrate to our new website during the coming week. If you experience any difficulties, contact the team or temporarily go to the old site at seradio.libsyn.com .

Enterprise Architecture is already common practice in most Fortune 100 companies. As the topic is comparably young, knowledge about it is not so widespread in the Software Architects Community, who deals mostly with project architectures. In this episode Alex speaks with Wolfgang Keller who has practical experience as an enterprise architect and has written a book on the topic. He is a Partner wit...

This episode is a conversation with Bruce Powel Douglass on real time systems. We started by discussing what real time software is, and explored the difference between hard and soft real time. We then looked at different scheduling strategies, and the meaning of terms like urgency and importance in the context of scheduling. Next was a discussion of typical architectural styles for real time syste...

This episode is a discussion with Erik Meijer on LINQ. This is a relatively technical discussion about the following topics: what is LINQ, what are the common abstractions between the different data structures one can access with LINQ, what is the relationship to established languages for querying, how does the integration into the type system of the host language work, how to specify the mapping...