Tag: Technology Talk
Episode 102: Relational Databases

In this espisode we take a closer look at relational database systems and the concepts behind them. We start by discussing the relational paradigm, its concepts and ramifications, and go on to architectural aspects.
Episode 87: Software Components

In this episode, Michael and Markus talk about software components. We first looked at a couple of attempts at defining what a component is. We then provided our own definition that will be used in the rest of the episode. We then looked at the promises of component-based development: why are components useful?
We then discussed some of the typical metadata components should specify to make them useful. We discussed to some extent typical variations in component models. The next topic was the separation of concerns between the component functionality and functionality provided by the component’s execution environment (aka. container).
We then compared components with other (more or less) related technologies such as OO and SOA.
We concluded the episode with the notion of architecture as language, where you use a formal DSL to describe a system’s architecture. Components are the basic building block for this approach.
Episode 58: Product Line Engineering Pt. 2

Variability is one of the key concerns in software product line engineering. The episode introduces the concepts of structural and non-structural (or configurative) variability. It also discusses how to find and model variability, and especially how to implement variability in the solution artifacts. Michael and Markus discuss a series of variability mechanisms that can be used with today’s programming languages and technologies.
Episode 55: Refactoring Pt. 2

In the first episode on Refactoring we talked about the basic ideas behind refactoring and some base principles why refactoring is a key part of software engineering. Now we move on to more complicated refactorings and discuss three major situations, their problems and possible solutions: advanced refactorings in large projects that can hardly be finished in a few minutes or hours and refactoring in larger teams. Also covered are the refactoring of published APIs and how merciless refactoring could be aligned with backward compatibility of published APIs, and refactorings that affect more than just code like for example database schemas.