There is a significant change in how software is developed over the last decade. Agile had been the buzzword over the last decade and probably is most significant of changes in software development to date. Now that the hype around Agile has been subsided, it is worth an effort to understand what it is like post agile. Often we see Agile with a narrow perspective, limiting it to a few programming practices and nothing more. We also fail to notice the indirect influence and the larger impact of Agile over the last decade.

State of post Agile Software Development will have to be seen in multiple dimensions in order to really understand its impact:

•  Software Development & Life cycle tooling landscape has completely changed 
•  Software Project management methods (apart from development method) have changed 
•  Focus on Software craftsmanship
•  Re-imagined Technology stack

My book on Akka titled - Akka Essentials published by Packt was released on 26th Oct 2012. The book is available from PacktPub site as well on amazon.com.

"Akka Essentials" will show you the current challenges with Java Scalability and concurrency model and how Akka’s Actor Model can help you design and build applications that are inherently scalable and fault-tolerant. Whether you are building new applications or want to refactor an existing application, you will learn the right techniques to build and scale up in no time.

This book is aimed at developers, architects who are building large distributed concurrent and scalable applications using Java/Scala. The book assumes knowledge of Java/JEE concepts but no knowledge of Actor model is assumed.

I dedicate this book to my father who passed away on 30th Oct 2012. All earnings from this book will be donated to my father's favorite charity.

This post originally appeared at www.techspot.co.in

The advent of the Consumer Business application like Facebook, Twitter has changed the definition of Application Scalability. Decade back 10 million+ was a large user base, Facebook will touch 1Billion+ users by end of this year. There are hordes of applications in 100+ million user range. The techniques and approaches employed by these large Consumer Business Applications are different from the traditional enterprise application design and architecture techniques.

If we study the architectures principles employed by these large Consumer Business Applications, then we can conclude to the following

• All the large consumer business applications are build and make use of Cloud Computing
• Applications are build using a combination of open source products and platforms
• Create solutions where the current set of solution do not meet requirement or scale up (e.g. HipHop, Hadoop, ChaosMonkey etc)
• Constant knowledge sharing within the community (FB/Twitter/Google open sources lot of their internal products)

Google IO 2012 developer conference has just concluded last week amid lot of fanfare.   I for one think that Google has lot more influence on Enterprise technology than it seems. Some of what Enterprises see as latest and greatest of technology (such as Map Reduce) has been pioneered in Google a while ago.  This is one the main reasons why I followed this event closely.   

Over the 3 days Google has several technology and product announcements across the product lines.   Here are the top 5 picks at Techspot.

1. 

   Cloud Connect is a global Cloud Computing event that has come to Bangalore, India this year.   The event is organized by UBM, a reputed media organization that publishes Information week magazine.   Other popular events organized by UBM includes Interop.   Bringing Cloud Connect to India, shows the importance of India as a Cloud market. Event happened this week 5/24 to 5/25 at Nimhans Convention Centre.