programming

I read something interesting recently when looking at BASE databases implemented on the JVM. The linux kernel will quite aggressively swap out pages from processes when they are not being used. This can conflict with the way that generational garbage collection works in the JVM: garbage collection in particular can cause a lot of page faulting. Here the heap will be scanned for objects to be freed, however linux may have already paged out that memory making collection more expensive.

I've taken a few frustrating hours trying to work out how to transfer information out of a soap response into another soap request. As it took so long I thought I'd put this in case it helps someone.

It is easy enough to use the Property Transfer step in SoapUI to transfer single values like session keys, but when it comes to a list of result is is a little more challenging. It is possible to script the transfer using Groovy, however I thought it should be possible to use XPath.

The response is something similar to:

...
<results>
  <items>
    <item>

Robert Pike and Ken Thompson have been working with others to produce a new system language that aims to bring the fun back into programming by being fast and easy to use. The language is called Go and attempts to merge the best of scripting languages with systems languages like C++.

O'Reilly have published a couple of books, one for Architects--- called 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know--- and one for Project Managers--- called 97 things every Project Manager should know. Now they are looking for contributions to a new book. The contributions so far are a pretty good read. There's still time to contribute a article too on their wiki.