Dazed & Confused

Browsing through some blogs today I stumbled upon Domain Based Web Testing, which seems like a good idea. 😉 It would take some effort to develop, but in the long run it would probably pay off.

We have a fairly large Watir suite at work right now, and a lot of the has the type of sequences where you are required to fill out a lot of stuff before you get to the part you really wish to test. Doing the domain based thing would make the code easier to read, maintain and also probably less errors and time consuming.

Listening to Werner Vogel (Amazon) and Dan Pritchett (EBay) talk about their architecture and design for scalability at QCon was a real eye-opener. I doubt I will need any level of scalability close to theirs in the systems I usually work on, but it is an interesting topic. One of my main concerns when developing applications is that not a lot of developers really can relate to transactions. Many are just used to making one call to the database with lots of SQL, not even grouping several of them into one transaction. Understanding transactions and having them makes life in J2EE land a lot easier, but they are also the main obstacle when it comes to scalability. I am not sure where the line is drawn for when it becomes impossible, but I guess you are talking a fair bit of nodes. If you end up in that situation managebility has an article on Design Patterns for Infinite Scalability. Again, a lot of interesting stuff, check it out.

I wanted to write a couple more blogs from QCon as I walked away with a lot of interesting thoughts, but I’ve been totally swamped with both work and personal stuff since I got back. I’ll still write a couple of them, but in the meantime InfoQ has a good summary here.