Agile Operations and DevOps offer huge benefits to organizations of all size. It seems much easier to accomplish in startups than large enterprises, though. In this article, I examine some of the challenges presented by moving to agile operations in an established, large organization.

This problem vexed me for several days. In this article, I ask whether we need to find new practices, consistent with agile values, that would let us prevent this type of problem. While the problem itself didn't arise from using agile methods---in fact, it was a distinctly non-agile project---I do wonder whether we can find an agile, pragmatic approach to architecture that would let us avoid this type of headache without incurring BAUF (Big Architecture Up Front).

An introduction to the NIO classes added to Java 1.4 (which was code-named "Merlin"). A fun piece to write and an early source of information about this important package.

The "selector" architecture of asynchronous I/O in NIO was based on earlier UNIX constructs that I had used to multiplex keyboard, network, and inter-process communication in a single-threaded console application. This article let me dust off some of those old memories, while also appreciating how far we've come... that stuff was hard to do in straight UNIX/C programming!

The code in this article was written against the beta release of NIO. About three days after this article hit the front page, Sun released the GA version and broke all the sample code.

This article presents a technique for what we now call in-container testing of EJBs, using a servlet to trigger the execution of unit tests.

This approach to unit testing worked for a time. Since J2EE 1.2, however, the separation of contexts between the container and the individual applications makes the specific configuration in the article ineffective.

Furthermore, I now believe that in-container testing is not a good approach. First, it requires too much startup and shutdown time, which makes you likely to run the tests less often. Second, it encourages context-dependence in both the unit tests and in the objects being tested.