Archive - 2017

Smart Сontracts: the Future of Blockchain Applications

These days the topic of cryptocurrencies along with mentions of blockchain technology is featuring heavily in top news stories worldwide. It has become very popular to talk about Bitcoins and their possible future in the financial world. To learn more about cryptocurrencies, you can read this ultimate guide for beginners.

But for technical guys, all this news and popularity of the first cryptocurrency are an evidence of obvious applicability and successfulness of underlying technologies and the reason to search for other approaches where they can be used.
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The Best Practices in Organization of QA Process for a Software Development Project

This article describes our best practices in building the QA process for a software development project. What are our main goals in it?

Fast and featureful

First, the delivery of new software versions to end users as fast as possible is vital for software development nowadays. Fierce competition in the software market compels software companies to release new features sooner than their rivals to attract users. As a result, the Agile techniques have spread widely as they combine flexibility and short delivery cycles.
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Augmented reality: a technology that brings amazing opportunities

Augmented reality (or AR) is one of the popular digital trends that transformed the traditional way of things in many spheres of our life. Being capable of enhancing our surroundings, AR demonstrates incredible features that can educate, entertain, and assist with implementing complex procedures. This is unforgettable user experience.

In one of our previous posts we’ve already discussed AR and how it is applied in various industries. In this article we’ll explain Augmented reality concept and describe how it works. We’ll cover devices supporting AR features and the programming tools that help deliver AR solutions. Next, we’ll look at the practical use of AR technology. Finally, we’ll discuss the future spreading of AR.
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How Java Web Service Works

In this post we will uncover a Java web service concept. In particular, we will begin with Java advantages, then we will proceed with web server and web application concepts, and finally we will take a look at how a Java web service processes the request. We will also share some practical recommendations on tools and technologies that can be utilized when working with web services.
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Benchmarking: Best Practice For Code Optimization

For most developers performance testing sounds like something really difficult to get started on. It might come to mind that some special and usually expensive environment and tools to test the performance.

Well, sometimes you do indeed need them to test the network communications impact, or if you have a cluster and want to measure its capacity, for example. But if you have some small system or you don’t have a lot of money, you may still face performance problems. Sometimes you can’t scale the environment, because it is expensive or your code has bugs preventing it from scaling.
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How to Make Performance Testing More Efficient

Performance testing is a type of testing proceess to determine the responsiveness, throughput, reliability and scalability of a system, it has under a certain load. The goal of the performance testing is one of the listed below:

  1. To assess readiness of the system for the production release,
  2. To evaluate performance of the system against some baselines,
  3. To find the best configuration settings of the system,
  4. To find the source of performance,
  5. To determine throughput levels.

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Flexible Data Model Design

Introduction

Data often changes. When it comes to integration, the data can change unpredictably. Of course, large vendors notify the community about the breaking changes in advance or give us some period for migration. However, if you implement your own component of a (distributed) system then you likely face a situation when, for example, Tom changed something, while you were working on your cool feature of a Java-application and now you have to fix some unexpected failures on your side. Or a customer asked you to include some small (or big) changes in the initial specifications and next day Tom found out that his part did not seem to be working.

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How to grow your project without failing at architecture, scalability and system integration

Today I would like to talk about problems of project growth. Suppose you’re doing the right things as we did. We ate lots of pizzas, had lots of fun and worked very hard. And the first project architecture design was made on a napkin during a lunch break. But even if you’re doing all of the above, there is no guarantee to reach the goals of the project. The project can still ruin under the weight of circumstances. This article is about things that may help to avoid that. It also focuses on project scalability and system integration issues.

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Fast creation of performance tests based on SoapUI project

The role of API has grown over the last few years. The growing use of cloud based technologies leads to more API-interfaces providing access to web-services. API supports this important interaction between the client and service. In this case, not only the proper operation of API methods is very important, but also their performance. Let’s take a look at the tools which are the leaders in conducting automated API testing such as SoapUI API testing.
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How to Improve Performance of AWS Java Cloud App? Try ElastiCache

Usually startup projects grow gradually starting as prototypes. The load increase unnoticed, so at one point your server might lay down, because it didn’t manage to handle the number of incoming requests. Fine. We can hide a web application behind an http-server/servers to optimize work with static content. Additionally, we can create several instances of our web application for load balancing and fault tolerance. Some more options to improve performance of AWS Java cloud app is described in my colleague’s article. But what to do if your database is a bottleneck? If you have a lot of information frequently asked, which can be cached in the memory, then it’s worthwhile to try Memcached.

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