Detecting concurrency-related bugs and performance bottlenecks is hard, especially on clusters consisting of a large number of nodes. In an interview with Artima, Terracotta co-founder and CTO Ari Zilka explains the importance of visualization in cluster-based applications, and introduces Terracotta's open-source cluster visualizer tool.

Object-oriented databases complement relational databases in important ways, says Anat Gafni, VP of Engineering at db4objects, the company behind the open-source object database db4o. In this interview with Artima, Gafni explains how OO databases support agile development, and how they co-exist with relational databases in an enterprise.

Software-as-service (SaaS) has started to permeate the field of software development tools as well, says Atlassian's Jeffrey Walker in this interview with Artima. Walker describes important characteristics of hosted developer tools, and highlights the need for such tools to integrate well with locally-installed tools, such as IDEs.

A programming language is as much about a set of design principles as it is about syntax and code structure. In this brief interview Martin Odersky, creator of the Scala language, talks about design tendencies that Scala encourages, especially in comparison with Java. He also discusses Scala's approach to concurrency.

Discovering security problems early in the development cycle is only the first step toward creating more secure and reliable applications, says Parasoft's Wayne Ariola in an interview with Artima. For developers to work effectively in a security-conscious environment, addressing security-related coding issues must be integrated in developers' daily workflow.

Re-using developer knowledge is an important concern for many enterprises. In this interview with Artima, CodeGear's Jeff Anders talks about Application Factories, a feature of the new JBuilder 2008 IDE that facilitates knowledge sharing among developers.

Rich clients are more than just about user interfaces, argues Adobe's James Ward in this JavaOne 2008 interview with Artima. Rich clients are about architecture, and are also about collaboration between developers and designers.

In Artima's initial interview from JavaOne 2008, Patrick Curran, Chair of the Java Community Process, shares his vision for the JCP, and discusses how artisans and engineers differ in their approach to building software and in their attitude toward standards. He also explains how the JCP adapts to the reality of open-source development, and explains the relationship between software design and the standards creation process.

In this interview with Artima, Terence Parr, creator of the StringTemplate template engine as well as the ANTLR parser generator, talks about the importance of separating business logic and presentation.

In this interview with Artima, Shannon Hickey, spec lead for the Beans Binding API, JSR 295, discusses the challenges of Java data binding, and how the JSR 295 API simplifies that task.

In this interview with Artima, Bill Shannon and Roberto Chinnici, spec leads for JSR 316, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6, discuss the key design considerations for the upcoming version of the enterprise Java specification.

In this interview with Artima, Robert Dunne, principal software engineer at Paremus, discusses three levels of dynamism, and why it's so difficult to deal with "impolite" services.

Readily available frameworks and APIs can make developers very productive. However, they can also limit developers' imagination, explains Overstock.com principal software engineer Chris Maki in this brief audio interview with Artima.

Small bugs can sometimes lead to significant failures, especially when those bugs manifest themselves in production code. In this interview with Artima, Mark Thomas, Director of Java Technologies at IBM, talks about the potentially big implications of defects that are discovered only in a production environment, and what developers can do to discover and mitigate such problems.

In this article, we discuss how the RIFE Web framework helps you become productive and efficient in building conversational Web applications. Productivity with RIFE is in large part due to RIFE's unique approach to Web development—its use of continuations for conversational logic, and complete integration of meta-programming to minimize boilerplate code. We also introduce you to Terracotta and it's JVM-level clustering technology, and show you how Terracotta and RIFE can work together to create an application stack that allows you to scale out and ensure high-availability for your applications, but without sacrificing simplicity and productivity. This means working with POJOs, and minimal boilerplate and infrastructure code.