Book extract, part four Redundancy, testability and readability are key to building simple and maintainable code. In the fourth extract from his book, Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development, published by Addison Wesley, Scott Bain tackles the problems and principles involved.

This bloke once walked into a meeting I was attending and introduced a new word to my vocabulary: "Hafta", as in: "We hafta do it this way because..."

I've been trying to shake it off ever since.

SpringSource has picked up on the trend for modular servers with the planned beta release today of the SpringSource Application Platform, its Java application server.

In the 50 plus acquisitions that IBM has completed over the past five years, none have taken longer to close than the long-awaited Telelogic deal. Nonetheless, the bottom line of the deal is that IBM’s Rational brand will break past the software development lifecycle ghetto into the realm of developing complex products that you can see, touch, and be transported in (think: consumer electronics, automobiles, aircraft).

Hot on the heels of a successful 6.0 release, which we covered here and here, Sun Microsystems has delivered NetBeans 6.1, just in time for the company's annual JavaOne and CommunityOne events in San Francisco, California.

Review What is the point of JBuilder, when you can simply use Eclipse? That has been the marketing challenge for CodeGear ever since it decided to scrap its home-grown Java integrated development environment and replace it with a new product based on the open-source Eclipse tools platform.

Book extract, part three In the third extract from his book, Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development published by Addison Wesley, Scott Bain tackles the complex issue of coupling, and looks at how unnecessary complexity can be injected through accidental or bad coupling.

Hands on part 2 When I looked at IronPython in part one, I focussed on how it marries the Python language and libraries with Microsoft's .NET framework.

The sample code that was developed used the Python console (ipy) and a text editor - in other words with simple text-based tools for writing short scripts. But for bigger projects, or when coding GUIs, a text editor obviously isn't enough.

At IBM’s annual Impact SOA bash last week, software group head Steve Mills stated that the next frontier for SOA is really not a frontier at all: it’s the basic blocking and tackling of getting Enterprise Service Bus backbones to deliver the high levels of ACID reliability and fault recovery now taken for granted with OLTP transaction systems.

In other words, when you start thinking about enterprise SOA, you’d better expect rollback, compensation, and high-availability features that are taken for granted with online transaction systems.

Google is offering to host your web apps for free:

You can create an account and publish an application that people can use right away at no charge, and with no obligation. An application on a free account can use up to 500MB of storage and up to five million page views a month.

RSA Want to know environmental crusader and Nobel laureate Al Gore's views on green technology? Tough.

The former US vice president has barred press from attending his RSA keynote presentation on green technology, citing "contractual reasons".

The loose coupling of data drawn from different systems is one of the enduring appeals of mashups. However, what if some of that data needs to be handled securely, or it is necessary to log in to some or all of the data feeds? What if the mashup as a whole represents some form of sensitive system - now security is an issue.

The phrase "Rich Internet Applications" has become a popular term for applications that run inside your browser or on your desktop and that interact with web applications or web services. RIA platforms include JavaScript (part of the AJAX umbrella), Adobe System's AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight, Java applets, and Java JFX from Sun Microsystems.

Sure, they look pretty with all that video, those rounded buttons and pop-up Windows - but should we trust them? These applications are, after all, downloaded from websites that can be good, bad or compromised. So what's there to protect users and server applications from a renegade RIA?

RSA The idea of throwing random test data at a program to see if it cracks has been around in one form or another since the beginning of software development. A formalized approach called fuzzing, based on Professor Barton Miller's work at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1980s, is undergoing a revival as a means of testing the security of applications.

Book extract, part two Scott Bain's book Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development published by Addison Wesley looks at how to deliver and maintain robust, reliable, and cost-effective systems. In this, the second of five Reg Dev extracts, Scott tackles the complex subject of cohesion as a step to building simple and maintainable code.

Comments can be abused as easily as any other tool or technique. You know comments - and, indeed, the project - have become dysfunctional when you start to see gripes and swearing, or flames concerning either the code or the individual who wrote the code.

Book extract, part one The idea of building simple code that's easy to maintain generates debate at both a philosophical and a practical level. What to we mean by "simple", how do you get there – use a model with comments or just an economy of code - and, importantly, who the hell built this mess? That kind of stuff.

Technology veteran Scott Bain's book Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development published by Addison Wesley this month, digs into this subject. Scott, whose thirty years' experience spans development, engineering and who is a senior consultant with training specialist NetObjectives, examines important principles in patterns, refactoring, and test-driven development for delivering and maintaining robust, reliable, and cost-effective systems.

EclipseCon The Eclipse Foundation looks destined to remain a mistress to Microsoft and Sun Microsystems - while the platform is married to IBM.

Arguments rage over the importance of adding comments to your code versus the importance of writing clear code that speaks for itself, thereby potentially eliminating the need for comments. The dichotomy boils down to this: writing comments versus writing self-commenting code, as if comments and clear code are somehow mutually exclusive.

It's not easy to make software amusing, as a recent contest to crack jokes using Universal Modeling Language (UML) demonstrated.

But flowcharting George Lucas' plan to kill off the Star Wars franchise? Now that's not just funny, it might also be true.