rows of a database table are held separately, rather than splitting by columns (as for normalization). Each partition forms part of a shard, which may in turn be located on a separate database server or physical location.

Sharding duplicates a database model (or schema) across multiple database servers (this is different than traditional partitioning, which is row based and usually on the same server).

The first article entitled “Sharding with Hibernate Shards” explores when sharding works, and when it doesn’t, and then demonstrates a simple Hibernate-Spring application capable of handling terabytes of data. What’s more, this article was authored by Beacon50′s managing partner, Andrew Glover.

The second article entitled “Scaling OpenJPA applications with Slice” profiles Slice, which is a module for distributed persistence in OpenJPA. Slice enables an application developed for a single database to adapt to a distributed, horizontally partitioned, possibly heterogeneous, database environment. This all occurs without any change in the original application code or the database schema.

Both articles are a great starting point for exploring how to scale, via the application level, relational databases.

The first podcast in the series is a discussion about Git with Matthew McCullough. We think you’ll find, as we did, his excitement regarding Git is infectious — if you don’t want to start using Git after listening to Matthew, then you probably never will! So what are you waiting for? Have a listen!

Sid Anand, the author of the Practical Cloud Computing blog has done an excellent job of summarizing the CAP theorem in his entry entitled “The CAP Theorem Distilled” — it’s well worth the read.

The varied opinions expressed by the group makes this discussion interesting — have a read to see for yourself!

To find out more, read the article and while you are at it, check out Andrew’s entire series “Java development 2.0” on IBM DeveloperWorks.

CI in a Box is an Amazon machine image or AMI — it’s an Ubuntu Server running Hudson and Java 6– the instance already has Ant 1.7.1 and Maven 2 installed. With this AMI running, all you need to do is configure a Hudson Job — point it to your project and you’re done! Using CI in a Box will cost about 8 cents an hour, but it’s even cheaper if you reserve an instance through Amazon.

Check it out today and let us know if you need any help!

While there are myriad RESTful libraries for the Java platform, I firmly believe that Grails is by far the easiest (and thus, quickest) way to produce RESTful web services today. For more information about this talk including links to various resources, check out the Resources for RESTful web services in Grails page on this site.

Both EC2 and GAE have their respective benefits and disadvantages. For instance, GAE, for the most part, is free (you do get charged once you reach a certain threshold of bandwidth and space — at that point, however, you should have figured out how to monetize your application); nevertheless, GAE is a constrained box. That is, you have to develop for the GAE as opposed to EC2 (which isn’t free, but doesn’t cost too much per hour). EC2 is a veritable blank slate on which you can do what ever you’d like.

For more information on this talk, GAE, and EC2, please see the Resources for Comparing the cloud: GAE versus EC2 page on this site.

I’ve posted the resources for this talk on Beacon50.com — this page has a few links to various resources such as a tutorial on easyb and of course, various other articles about easyb.

If you are curious about easyb, check out this quick video, which demonstrates easyb:

Thanks to all the attendees — it was fun discussing BDD, TDD, and requirements management with each of you!

The primary benefit of Groovy is speed of development; that is, with Groovy you can knock out features quickly. Best of all, you are also leveraging an existing infrastructure: the JVM and its manifold libraries. With Groovy, you get the benefit of “Enterprise Java” while keeping lean.

For more information on this talk, check out the “Groovy from the trenches” resources page where you can download a copy of the presentation and find links to some Groovy related resources.