Blog

What is Azure Cosmos DB? Features, Benefits, Pricing, and More

Microsoft aims to help you better manage your data with services like Azure Cosmos DB, a multi-model database service that transparently scales and replicates your data wherever your users are. Let's take a closer look at this SaaS offering and how you can benefit from it. A Definition of Azure Cosmos ... [READ MORE]

What is Load Testing? How It Works, Tools, Tutorials, and More

Performance testing is an important component of the application development lifecycle. Without it, your application could fail miserably in real-world conditions. That's why we build tools like Retrace to help you monitor application performance, pinpoint and rectify bugs before your code ever gets to production. But performance testing isn't a ... [READ MORE]

Starkwood Media and Retrace: Logging and Exception Management and Proactive Customer Support

Starkwood Media has been providing the automotive industry with media solutions for over 16 years. They continually work to pioneer customers’ online presence through their own experience and integration of current, successful web practices. They sought out Retrace in an effort to consolidate their tools and in doing so were ... [READ MORE]

What is IIS Express? How It Works, Tutorials, and More

Previously, when developers built and tested ASP.Net sites and applications, they use one of these two servers: Visual Studio's ASP.NET Development Server and the Windows' IIS Web Server. Each option has its pros and cons. Then, an increasing number of developers expressed their desire to have a server that exhibits ... [READ MORE]

How to Specify and Handle Exceptions in Java

Errors happen all the time in the software world. It might be an invalid user input or an external system that is not responding, or it's a simple programming error. In all these situations, the errors occur at runtime and the application needs to handle them. Otherwise, it crashes and ... [READ MORE]

What is Visual Studio Team Services? A Look at Its Features, Uses, Tutorials and More

At Stackify, we're big fans of tools that make developers' lives simpler, and one such tool is Visual Studio Online, which is now known as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), an extension of the Visual Studio architecture that covers development teams. It has special tools and roles for software developers, testers, and ... [READ MORE]

What Is Application Performance Monitoring and Why It Is Not Application Performance Management

Over recent years, the term APM has become increasingly used by lots of vendors and tools. Some refer to it as Application Performance Monitoring and some as Application Performance Management. But what is the difference? As the founder of a company who creates these types of tools, I definitely have ... [READ MORE]

Top Java Tools: 63 Tools to Power Every Phase of Java Development

Many know Java as one of the simplest, but most powerful (not to mention sought-after) programming languages used by web developers. There are others who see it in the opposite light, saying that Java is a hard and more complex programming language. In order to execute your Java coding more effectively, ... [READ MORE]