Excellent SOA paper

Don Ferguson's paper on Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) published in the IBM Systems Journal (VOL 44, NO 4, 2005) can be found here.

Starting threads in EJBs

Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) specs forbids EJB components from managing (starting, stopping, suspending, resuming, changing thread priority, changing name) threads.

According to Wayne Beaton, if you must use a thread inside an EJB, take a look at JSR 237 which defines Work Manager. It's not currently part of the J2EE specification, but it is supported by both BEA and IBM in their application server products.

Making things happen

In this chapter excerpt from his book, The Art of Project Management, Scott Berkun illustrates the value of prioritization and how it helps to "make things happen".

During one of my earlier projects, that I worked on, at Hewlett-Packard, we would sometimes find ourselves in a tough argument. Half the team felt strongly for option 1 and the other half liked option 2. Pawan gupta, who was managing the team, would walk into the discussion, ask a few questions, align the discussion in line with the current goals in hand, and quickly get everyone to agree on one option.

Over 30 Cheatsheets

I found Pete Freitag's post "Cheat Sheet Roundup - Over 30 Cheatsheets for developers" very useful.

You might want to check it out.