A software book I read, and other stuff

I’ve been reading a bit of Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture lately and it has been good. There’s lots of stuff in there that’s really useful. I think my only complaint is that he talks a lot about data access abstraction techniques and object-relational mapping, even though very few enterprise apps these days would roll their own data access layer thanks to a number of free, open source tools that are now available. So that bit may be considered by some to be a tad obsolete, but that doesn’t mean one can’t learn something from reading about data access abstraction even though you’d never have to roll your own layer. One could probably say the same about the section on Model-View-Controller web application design. I don’t think this Fowler book will stand to be as timeless as the Gang Of Four’s Design Patterns, but it is very useful nonetheless. One thing I realized that I’m painfully unaware of is domain-based design that puts behavior and data side-by-side. I don’t really get it yet, so I’m going to have to do some more research.

I’ve been doing a bit of research on distributed messaging technologies lately. Ideally I’m looking for something that’s Java-based, provides guaranteed delivery, provides message persistance and failover in a clustering environment, and guarantees ordering of messages if so desired. Of course, the system also has to be able to scale horizontally using cheap, commodity hardware and freely available software tools. ActiveMQ seems like it might do the job , so I’d like to set up a bit of a prototype to try it out. Now I just need to cook up some fake messages for it to process.