DDJ, January 2004
Best Practices


FEATURES

Mission-Critical Development with XP & Agile Processes
by Julius Gawlas
Getting a mission-critical application up and running in a matter of months is easier said than done—and sometimes it requires extreme (programming) measures.

Radical Refactoring
by Eugene Belyaev, Maxim Shafirov, and Ann Oreshnikova
Whether you're aware of it or not, refactoring is a fundamental part of the software development process. In fact, it is as crucial to projects as the initial coding itself.

iSCSI Target Emulation
by Patrick L. Garvan, Shawn McFarland, Manoj Mehta, Mike Ramsay, & Chris Robinson
iSCSI is a networking standard for sending SCSI commands over IP networks. Our authors present an iSCSI emulator and show how it can be used to test iSCSI systems.

VoiceXML & Instant Messaging
by Moshe Yudkowsky
Moshe uses Jabber, VoiceXML, Python, and a bunch of other tools to build a prototype system that enables speech technologies—speech recognition, text-to-speech, and speech biometrics—to interact with instant messaging.

Double Dispatch Revisited
by Nat Goodspeed
Nat takes a second look at the Double Dispatch pattern in C++, then implements a Java version of it.

Preventing Buffer overruns in C++
by Richard Grimes
Buffer overrun vulnerability can lead to security breaches. Richard shows how to use the Visual C++ .NET compiler and libraries to rid your code of buffer overruns.

Porting Lucene to .NET Using Visual J#
by Larry Reeve
Larry uses Microsoft's Visual J# .NET to port the open-source Lucene search engine to .NET. Lucene is a text search engine written entirely in Java.


EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Programmable Systems-On-Chips
by Al Williams
Programmable systems-on-chips are similar to ordinary microcontrollers, but designed so that you configure components into different I/O devices.


COLUMNS

Programming Paradigms
by Michael Swaine
Michael's meanderings take him from paregmenons to paradigms, as he examines e-voting, Eric Raymond, and a bunch of other stuff.

Embedded Space
by Ed Nisley
Ed reports on what went on at this fall's Embedded Systems and Software Development conferences.

Chaos Manor
by Jerry Pournelle
Video boards are wonderful contraptions—when they work. And when they don't work, tracking down why and why not is a job in itself.

Programmer's Bookshelf
by Dan Wohlbruck
Ben Shneiderman's Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies and B.J. Fogg's Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do are the books Dan reviews this month.


FORUM

Editorial
by Jonathan Erickson

Letters
by you

The New Adventures of Verity Stob
by Verity Stob

News & Views
by Shannon Cochran

Of Interest
by Shannon Cochran

Swaine's Flames
by Michael Swaine