I see a lot of agreement in the software community poor quality code and other forms of technical debt slow you down. Where I see disagreement is on how to manage technical debt. What is your approach?

In his weblog, Peter Williams points out that Rails' default URIs are procedural, rather than RESTful, because they include an action name. I believe Rails' default URL scheme also puts the developer before the user.

While it may be attractive from the usability perspective to let users click on a link in an email to confirm a registration, it violates one of the cardinal rules of the web: don't change state on HTTP GET requests. This weblog post explains the problem and suggests solutions.

In an article introducing Ruby on Rails' Active Record, Bruce Tate suggests that Java could enjoy some of the benefits of Rails by taking a wrapping rather than a mapping approach to persistence. I think this misses the point. What Rails really demonstrates is the benefit of code generation.

Sun's original marketing message that positioned Jini as a technology for devices backfired in 1999, because at that time many barriers existed that prevented the vision from becoming reality. Seven years later, how many of these barriers remain?

This morning Artima was down around eight hours because of a 15-minute disk replacement job. In this blog post I recount the struggle I've had with backups over the past half year.

Artima has launched Ruby Code & Style, a new online magazine dedicated to sharing the pleasure of Ruby programming. Edited by James Britt and Shashank Date, this magazine will publish technical feature articles, tutorials, and commentary for Ruby programmers.

Writing mediocre code may help you move fast in the short term, but it can slow you down in the long term. A good architecture can help you move fast in the long term, but slows you down in the short term. How is a developer to decide how good is good enough?

To what extent does the mindset encouraged by a language and its surrounding culture influence people's perceived productivity when they use that language? In this weblog post, I take a look at this question in the context of the static versus dynamic typing debate.

Software development involves constantly making return on investment decisions. Investing extra time to achieve higher quality software can yield dividends far into the future, or can cause you to miss a market window in the near term. How do you make the tradeoff between software quality and development speed?

Automated tests can make demands on an API that are not made by any other client of the API. For example, you may find yourself wanting to add methods to a class that are not needed by any other, non-test clients. To what extent do you feel automated tests should be allowed change the API being tested?

No matter how you arrive at a design, be it UML modeling, TDD micro-steps, or applying patterns, you should take a step back and look at the public API as a whole from a usability perspective. How easy is the API as a whole to learn, understand and use?

How do you design a website home page to give the best impression of both the quality of the site's content and the update frequency? Take a walk down memory lane, and see how Artima's home page has morphed as the site evolved.

Artima has launched "Developer Spotlight," a new feed that scrolls down the center of the home page. Each day this feed will shine the spotlight on interesting content flowing through the various parts of the website--articles, chapters, news, buzz, weblogs--plus point to interesting content beyond Artima's borders.

Today we launched the Artima Chapters Library, where you can get information about newly published books for developers. For each book, you can download a free chapter, and review or discuss the book in the Books Forum.