Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue: Oracle Java One 2010, San Francisco
Guest: Nati Shalom

Host: Robert

In this episode, Robert talks with Nati Shalom about the emergence of large-system architectures consisting of a grid of high-memory nodes. As memory has become faster and cheaper more rapidly than has disk storage, application state has increasingly migrated to memory in the form of caches. Memory grids take this one step further, using memory as the system of record and disk is used as a write-behind journal for recovery purposes.  Data and processing are colocated on the same node, which hosts what would be multiple tiers in the popular multi-tiered architectures. Data partitioning and distributed algorithms such as map-reduce become critical design decisions. Nati also discusses reliability and availability considerations of memory grids.

Links:

• Nati Shalom’s blog
• Nati Shalom’s slides on slideshare
• Gigaspaces
• Nati Shalom on Twitter
• Designing a Scalable Twitter
• RAM is the new disk
• The Case for RAMClouds by Ousterhout et. al.
• Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing?

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Recording Venue: MongoSF 2010
Guest(s): Dwight Merriman

Host(s): Robert
Dwight Merriman talks with Robert about the emerging NoSQL movement, the three types of non-relational data stores, Brewer’s CAP theorem, the weaker consistency guarantees that can be made in a distributed database, document-oriented data stores, the data storage needs of modern web applications, and the open source MongoDB.

Links:

• 10-gen
• NoSQL – the Shift to a Non-Relational World by Dwight Merriman
• A series of blog posts on consistency in a distributed database (see entries from March 26 to April 15, 2010)
• Slides and video from MongoSF 2010
• NoSQL hub
• NoSQL mailing list on Google
• Follow Dwight Merriman on twitter
• 10-gen’s blog
• Brewer’s presentation on the CAP theorem
• MongoDB

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Recording Venue: QCon
Guest(s): Jay Kreps

Host(s): Robert
Jay Kreps talks about the open source data store Project Voldemort. Voldemort is a distributed key-value store used by LinkedIn and other high-traffic web sites to overcome the inherent scalability limitations of a relational database. The conversation delves into the workings of a Voldemort cluster, the type of consistency guarantees that can be made in a distributed database, and the tradeoff between client and the server.

Links:

• Project Voldemort
• Jay Kreps presentation at QCon San Francisco 2009
• Google mailing list for Project Voldemort
• Project Voldmort on github
• LinkedIn blog entry on Project Voldemort
• Amazon’s paper on Dynamo
• NoSQL hub
• Google mailing list for NoSQL

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Recording Venue: OOP 2009
Guest(s): Bruce Sams

Host(s): Markus
The majority of hacker attacks (70 %) are directed at weaknesses that are the result of problems in the implementation and/or architecture of the application. This session shows how you can protect your web applications (J2EE or .NET) against these attacks. The session covers lots of practical examples and techniques for attack. Furthermore, it shows strategies for defense, including a “Secure Software Development Lifecycle”. A “Live Hacking” demo rounds it out.

This is a session recorded live at OOP 2009. SE Radio thanks Bruce, SIGS Datacom and the programme chair, Frances Paulisch, for their great support!

Links:

• The premier site for application security information
• Bruce’s company

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Recording Venue: OOP 2007
Guest(s): Charles Weir
James Noble

Host(s): Markus
In this Episode we’re discussing patterns for small memory software with the authors of the like-named book Charles Weir and James Noble. We look at various aspects of the small memory problem: How can you manage memory use across a whole system? What can you do when you have run out of primary storage? How can you fit a quart of data into a pint pot of memory? How can you reduce the memory needed for your data? How do you allocate memory to store your data structures? Answers to all those questions are provided in this Episode, and of course in their book.

Links:

• Symbian Developer Homepage
• SonyEricsson Developer Homepage
• Windows Mobile Developer Homepage
• Book: Garbage Collection and Memory Management
• Book Homepage
• Book at Amazon
• Penrillian – Charles’ company

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