Developing tools to help other developers be better developers.
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 DB Comos DB is a database service that is …
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 single process or method that lets you know whether your …
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 able to offer more proactive customer support. Daniel Taylor, the …
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 the characteristics of user-friendly ASP.NET Development Server along with the …
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 can’t process further requests. Java provides a powerful mechanism which …
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 specialists. These include tools for collaboration, reporting, development, and measurement. …
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 some opinions on Application Performance Monitoring vs Application Performance Management. …
Have you had a chance yet to play with Azure Functions? Here at Stackify, we’re pretty excited about this capability on Azure and the promise that it holds for building rapidly scale-able event-based processing with little to no management overhead! We’ve also heard from a lot of you asking when Retrace would be able to support this new serverless architecture. …
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, there are a handful of Java tools that web …
What did my code just do? That is a critical question that developers always need to know. Application logging, tracing, and profiling are the primary ways that developers can answer this question. In this article, we’ll review ASP.NET tracing and how to view your tracing statements with Prefix. Intro to ASP.NET Tracing Tracing is built into the .NET framework and has …
Stackify is thrilled to announce our latest release, Linux Agent 2.0 and Java APM 1.15. We think you’ll be excited about this release, too, and here are just a few reasons why. What’s New in Our Linux Agent 2.0 and Java APM Release? In this latest release, we’ve added additional agent installation options and support for additional application servers, including: …
Web services have taken the development world by storm, especially in recent years as they’ve become more and more widely adopted. There are naturally many reasons for this, but first, let’s understand what exactly a web service is. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines “web of services” as “message-based design frequently found on the Web and in enterprise software”. …
SQL performance tuning is a never ending battle. I’m not a DBA, but I am a developer who has pretended to be one for 15 years. I have worked with SQL Server databases with terrabytes of RAM all the way down to Stackify’s massive fleet of little SQL Azure databases. I have seen a little bit of everything over the …
Java remains a popular programming language, and it’s still the most sought-after programming language among employers. That means if you’re looking for a programming job, prospective employers will likely be asking questions designed to gauge your knowledge of this long-established programming language. (If you’re interviewing for new developer positions, you should probably brush up on your DevOps interview questions, too.) …
JUnit 5 is the updated version of the highly popular testing library for Java applications, JUnit, scheduled to be released in Q3 2017. The new version enables a lot more testing options and finally adds support for Java 8 features. In fact, JUnit 5 requires Java 8 to work. The library is composed of several modules, organized in 3 main sub-projects: JUnit …
If you are trying to figure out how to measure the performance of your application, you are in the correct place. We spend a lot of time at Stackify thinking about application performance, especially about how to monitor and improve it. In this article, we cover some of our most important application performance metrics you should be tracking. Key Application …
Syslog is a standard for sending and receiving notification messages–in a particular format–from various network devices. The messages include time stamps, event messages, severity, host IP addresses, diagnostics and more. In terms of its built-in severity level, it can communicate a range between level 0, an Emergency, level 5, a Warning, System Unstable, critical and level 6 and 7 which …
Gradle is one of several Java development tools featured in Stackify’s Comprehensive Java Developer’s Guide, but it’s not the only build automation tool to consider. Maven is an older and commonly used alternative, but which build system is best for your project? With other tools, such as Spring, allowing developers to choose between the two systems, coupled with an increasing …
The Java Persistence API (JPA), and Hibernate ORM as its most popular implementation are used in most Java applications to interact with a relational database. The main reason for their popularity is that they use object-relational mapping to abstract the database interactions and make it very easy to implement simple CRUD operations. But this abstraction also has its downsides. Hibernate …
Docker is an open-sourced project that uses containers instead of virtual machines to run server applications. This is a setup that uses fewer resources for development and hosting, so it’s no wonder that Docker is taking the development world by storm. You can even use Docker with ASP.NET, and of course, you can leverage Stackify’s Retrace with your existing stack, including Docker, …
