Two experts compare notes on the past and present of IT and provide insights on what the software industry needs, to make progress.

For those who want more control over their environment but like the plug-and-play scalability of PaaS, Beanstalk could be a good and welcome alternative to Google App Engine. Andrew Glover's guided tour of Beanstalk starts with a location-based mobile application (built using the Play framework and MongoDB), which he then ports to the Beanstalk environment. Configuring Beanstalk is both easy and rewarding, he finds, with choice and flexibility over and above what's offered by GAE.

EST unites two architectural styles — Representational State Transfer (REST) and the Java™ Persistence API (JPA) — to let language-neutral remote clients transact with JPA-based applications following REST principles. JEST models customizable persistent closures of managed entities as REST resources and represents them in XML or enhanced JavaScript Notation (JSON) format to account for the cycles in an object graph. This article explains JEST's concepts. Then it introduces a demonstration implementation: a generic web client that communicates with a server to query persistent objects and browse a persistent domain model in domain-agnostic fashion.

Apache ServiceMix is a runtime container for service-oriented architecture components, web services or legacy system connectivity services. It is one of the most mature, open-source implementations of an enterprise service bus and an Apache top-level project.

This article shows how the the MVC pattern vision, all models to come with default views and controllers can be achieved with Entity Framework 4 and ASP.NET MVC.

The paper looks at various error handling considerations associated with design of re-usable services and provides best practices to account for error handling in an SOA implementation.

This tutorial describes one approach to using Amazon EC2′s Elastic Block Store (EBS) as a persistent storage mechanism for a production MySQL database server, including snapshot backup and restore.

This article explores the different contexts in which SOA patterns are applied; how the products from different vendors influence patterns and its effect on the responsibilities of business and IT.

By studying concurrency bug patterns, you both increase your general awareness of concurrency programming and learn to recognize coding idioms that don't, or might not, work. The authors unpack six lesser-known concurrency bugs that threaten the thread-safety and performance of Java™ applications running on multicore systems.

A checklist of considerations and steps to quickly turn your web application into a cloud application