David has over twelve years of experience in all phases of web application design and architecture on all major platforms, with a concentration in open source technologies. Prior to Cantina, David worked as Director of Technology for Crunch Brand Communications, Senior Web Developer for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Lead UI Developer for NewsHunter, Manager of Interactive Services for Greco Ethridge Group, and Web Developer for FasTV. In his spare time, David produces and DJs Drum and Bass music with his production group, The Statesmen.
Hosting applications on Amazon EC2 is a relatively painless process. Getting instances set up and ready to deploy applications to can literally take minutes. However, once your virtual infrastructure gets larger, you start to run into more complicated issues. One of those is the limit on the number of static IP addresses (called Elastic IP [...]
Today one of our founders, Adam, sent a link to this excellent article by Martin Fowler on non-determinism in tests. One of the points he makes is not to use sleep() to wait for asynchronous methods to return. Generally if you are calling sleep() at all in your tests, except in certain specific situations, it’s a [...]
I recently set up a new build server for Cantina which needed an SSL certificate installed. Having not done this in a while on Tomcat (and never on Tomcat 6), I found it to be a little challenging. In the end, I found that some of the optional methods described in the Tomcat documentation didn’t [...]
Testing, and specifically test-driven development is a methodology which few developers fully embrace. Automated testing is inevitably viewed as something that can be done last minute once an application is completed, or it’s considered too time consuming to be done at all. What most people don’t realize though, is that over the lifetime of an [...]
Several market trends have been shaping the mobile services we offer at Cantina. The use of consumer technologies in the enterprise is increasing, including everything from Dropbox, social networks, Google apps, and mobile devices. Companies considering the deployment of business applications to the mobile context need to consider bring your own device (BYOD) strategies to [...]
