An increasing number of organizations are taking the plunge to Scrum, with or without professional coaching. Developers transitioning to Scrum can avoid many pitfalls by following a handful of hard-learned principles. In this article, I discuss a common mistake with the popular "user story" requirements format: poorly defined done criteria.

Flex 4 introduces a new API to define effects for rich-client applications. This article provides an overview of new features in Flex 4's effects and animation-related APIs.

This article describes a Scala design pattern in which traits provide stackable modifications to underlying core classes or traits.

In this interview, Clojure creator Rich Hickey suggests that the problems people associate with shared state are problems of time. He compares the lack of automatic time management in today's mainstream languages to the lack of automatic memory management in languages such as C++.

Flex 4's new syntax simplifies working with application states. This article provides a tutorial introduction into UI state management with Flex 4, and includes a complete example.

This article describes a simple Scala design pattern that allows library designers to provide services that their clients can access either through mixins or imports. Giving users a choice between mixin composition and importing makes a library easier to use.

An important feature in Flex 4 is a new component architecture, Spark, that allows a complete separation of a component's view from its display logic. This article provides a tutorial introduction to creating custom Flex 4 skins using the Spark architecture.

An important enabler of designer-developer workflow in Flex 4 is a new component architecture, Spark, that separates the visual elements of a Flex component from other component logic. This article describes the basic principles of the Spark architecture, and how Spark makes it easier for developers and designers to work together.

Data binding is among the most common UI programming tasks. Although the open-source Flex framework has supported data binding since its inception, the latest Flex 4 SDK adds two-way data binding as well. This tutorial illustrates two-way data binding in Flex 4.

Rich-client technologies permeate not only browser-based applications, but the more traditional desktop client as well. In this interview with Artima, Rob Christensen, Adobe's product manager for AIR, discusses the reasons for creating rich desktop applications, and how AIR enables developers to deploy their apps to users' desktops.

In this interview with Artima, Gwyn Fisher, CEO of Klocwork, describes cases where well-known Java APIs work differently based on deployment platform, and how well-defined type systems can make resource management more reliable.

In this interview with Artima, Terracotta co-founder Ari Zilka discusses various techniques to load-test a stateful application on a cluster, highlights features of the open-source Terracotta clustering environment that make such load-testing simpler, and talks about managing heavily disk-bound workloads.

In this interview, Adobe's Shafath Syed and Steven Heintz discuss the differences in how designers and developers approach rich-client application development, and how Adobe's Flash Builder 4 and Catalyst tools can make their interaction more effective.

In this interview with Artima, Rodney Carvalho, founder or ScrumNinja, shares his experiences withe Scrum, an agile development methodology.