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"Reliability is one story that hasn't been told about extreme programming (XP), which focuses heavily on testing. People talk a lot about its responsiveness and its light weight, but I hear more stories about XP's staggeringly high reliability. A couple weeks ago I chatted with Rich Garzaniti, an old colleague from the C3 project. The C3 project is often referred to as the birth project of XP at Chrysler where Kent first really put the various practices together coherently. Rich talked about this system he was developing using XP with testing and refactoring -- drinking the whole XP Kool-Aid completely through the system. He's had one bug so far this year," says Martin Fowler in this Artima.com interview:

"Underneath the covers, JRun's RPC method invocations are fundamentally a messaging subsystem. When you perform an invocation, in JRun we actually wrap the invocation in a message object....The pattern has been implemented in many ORBs and servers, and in DCOM, and now .NET Remoting. It's probably best described in Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 2. When the EJB container gets the invocation message, it passes it through all the filters, before it gets to the instance. So if you have a transaction interceptor, it gets the invocation first. It pulls off the transaction ID, and discovers the transaction attributes of this particular instance. It does whatever it needs to do for the transaction. It then passes it onto the next interceptor, which may put something on or take something off the invocation message. Some folks consider this a Pipes-and-Filters pattern, and in the default cases where the interceptors are hardwired that's a good match. The concept isn't too different from designs that application developers create with servlet filters or message sinks, though in this implementation the container filters are a bit more dynamic and can account for more dependencies than a servlet filter could," says Sean Neville in this Artima.com interview.

"When you deploy a remote object, it needs a way to locate all similar remote objects on the cluster. The cluster would include whatever hosts the admin decided to link together. By default, if the admin did nothing, we wanted the cluster to include all the nearby hosts reachable via multicast. So whatever that network neighborhood cluster was, we needed a particular remote object to find its buddy on another system within the cluster based on class lookup. The lookup could possibly be based on some other information in the template, but it would mainly be based on the class. We wanted those objects to automatically find each other and exchange stubs," says Sean Neville in this Artima.com interview.

LA Times: "Peters believes that many "fair use" practices consumers take for granted, such as taping a TV program or copying a magazine article, need to be re-evaluated in the digital age because the economic harm to copyright owners is far greater. For instance, she believes song-swapping over the Internet, popularized by Napster, is illegal."

Small webcasters can now pay a minimal $500 fine, the Post reports. The royalty collection group offered the low rate because a bill in Congress was held up by a lone Senator, Jesse Helms of N.C.

Jeremy Allaire in an interview with the JDJ (Java Developer's Journal) explains ColdFusion MX's new features and positioning relative to Java. (Hint: It is for people who are not Java experts or need RAD tools)

"I am not fond of copy constructors. In fact, I'm not very fond of constructors at all. The problem is that the code that creates the object with a constructor is defining the object's type. In all other operations, the code that uses an object effectively only defines that the object is at least a certain type. Constructors are an exception to that rule. I don't think that exception should exist," says Ken Arnold in this Artima.com interview.

"JavaSpaces tries to accomplish something rather different. Yes, JavaSpaces is data-driven. It is object-oriented in the sense that the entries have type and you can match subtypes, and that entry fields can be object types. But at some point, you get past objects in any system. At some point, you call a method with an integer value. In some languages that integer is still logically an object, but it doesn't contain other objects. At some point, you hit the bottom. JavaSpaces is a bottom point in the sense that it is a way to make an asynchronous method call. You can consider that the entry fields are like the parameters to the method call. The fact that those are data shouldn't bother you, because that is when you hit bottom," says Ken Arnold in this Artima.com interview.

Perl, through Project Breeze, has made it possible for the School of Natural and Physical Sciences (SNPS) at the University of Papua New Guinea, to accommodate the new academic calendar while handling the affairs of its students with far more accuracy and efficiency.