Saving Session Data in Web Applications

There are many ways to store session data in web applications. They all differ in scalability, failover capabilities, and complexity. I’ll give you a quick rundown on the major themes.

Top Articles in 2008

2008 is done and over with. Before moving on I’ll follow David’s example and post my most popular articles in terms of page views.

Filtering DZone RSS Feeds with Yahoo! Pipes

I read a lot of RSS feeds to keep myself up to date. Perhaps too many, almost two hundred articles appear in my Google Reader each day. One of the most busy ones is the DZone front page feed. Not all of it is interesting, so some filtering would be useful.

Subversion: Externals Definitions

Externals definitions are a little known but very useful feature of subversion. Using an externals definition, you can create links to different parts of the repository (or even other repositories). Subversion clients then automatically check out the linked content into your working copy.

Upgrading to Ubuntu Intrepid

Upgrading from Ubuntu “Hardy Heron” to “Intrepid Ibex” wasn’t the smooth ride I was used to. I’m a pretty happy Ubuntu user and my system (an old Acer Travelmate 291) has been running all Ubuntu releases since “Breezy Badger” without a single reinstall. This time, however, I experienced problems with WLAN, sound, battery status display, and postfix SASL authentification.

Efficient Development Environment Setup

Development environments and their configuration can become quite complex. It’s not unusual that a complete workstation setup takes half a day or more and requires extensive help from other project members. Using virtual machines for the runtime environment can help to reduce setup and maintenance costs.

Understanding the find(1) Utility

The Unix find(1) utility is a powerful tool, yet few people really understand how it works. It may be a bit confusing at first, but a programmer who knows his boolean algebra should be able to wrap his head around the basic concepts without much trouble.

Professional Deployment and Operation of Web Applications

There are millions of web applications on the Internet that are under constant development. Paying software developers to work on bug fixes and new features is quite expensive already, but what’s often neglected is the cost for deployment and operation. Well-run organizations invest in their deployment and runtime infrastructure and are rewarded with reduction of errors, shorter downtimes and lower costs in the long run.