Archive - 2015

The Microservices Architecture becomes more and more popular. The successful experience of our large-scale and well-known projects inspires us to try this approach in our enterprise applications. Deciding to implement the project in this style, we forget that systems like Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, etc have a long history, these projects are not initially implemented in the architecture, but gradually came to it.
When you don’t have the whole scope of the requirements or use cases for your system it is hardly possible to avoid errors in the design.Read More

Needless to say, nowadays social media provides a great opportunity for every business to build relationship with the audience. By building presence on social platforms, you can get a chance to communicate with your potential customers directly, and if you manage to grab their attention, word of mouth won’t be long in coming. The great thing is that electronic word of mouth spreads more rapidly and massively than traditional word of mouth.

Of course, social media is not the only promotional channel. In one of our previous posts we’ve made a review of tools and techniques to promote your product. By the way, if you want to have such a guide ready at hand – be sure to download our software product promotion guide.Read More

In the previous article I mentioned that we’ve decided to use Jetty+Guice+Servlet combination in our Java Web application. What was it motivated for? Why have we refused to use Jersey? Why have we decided to implement a separate Resource class for every Web action and even for every HTTP method?

When everyone of us selects a tool to work with, we all set some requirements to it, and it should meet all requirements to get a green light. Everyone knows them – these are such obvious things as code readability, ease of debugging/testing, following traditional coding practices (OOD, patterns) etc. But today I’ll tell you what requirements I set specifically for a good server-side Web framework. I’ll be happy to work with any technology stack meeting these key requirements, and Jetty+Guice+Servlet is just one of the options.

Briefly, the requirements are:

1. Extensibility
2. Common response format
3. Automatic exception handling
4. Transactionality of a request

And let me explain you what do I mean by this.

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At the moment, there is a great number of various applications already developed. Most of them are connected with providing processed information, taken from different third-party sources.

First of all, let’s review common services that newly developed applications are often integrated with:

• Social networks, such as: Facebook,Twitter,Google+,LinkedIn;
• Delivery services: UPS,USPS,FedEx,DHL,Canadian Post,EMS;
• Online payment systems: Authorize.net, PayPal, Moneybookers, Alertpay, WebMoney, QIWI, video streaming services – YouTube, Vimeo.

We have significant experience with third-party systems integration. And, as long as, this process is rather difficult, sometimes we face various issues. Our successful experience of resolving such issues allows us to develop some recommendations for dealing with third-party systems.Read More