The cloud has rapidly gone from "that thing I should know something about" to the "centerpiece of our corporate IT five-year strategy." However, cloud computing is still in its infancy. Sure, the marketing materials presented by cloud providers tout huge cost savings and service level improvements-but they gloss over the many risks such as data loss, security leaks, gaps in availability, and application migration costs. Ken Johnston and Seth Eliot share new research on the successful migrations of corporate IT and web-based companies to the cloud. Ken and Seth lay out the risks to consider and explore the rewards the cloud has to offer when companies employ sound architecture and design approaches. Discover the foibles of poor architecture and design, and how to mitigate these challenges through a novel Test Oriented Architecture (TOA) approach.

Internationalization isn’t only about dealing with other nationalities and languages. It’s about creating software for a multicultural world. Even if the software you’re testing won’t be translated entirely into another language, it still should meet some basic requirements for international visitors.

The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging one. Too much design often results in overkill, complexity, and wasted work. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that require rework, additional complexity, and wasted effort. How can we know what the right balance is? Alan Shalloway shows how to use the advice from Design Patterns coupled with the attitude of not building what you don't need from Agile. The trick is in discovering what you don't know, how it may affect you, and then how to isolate these risks in your code in a simple manner. Alan describes the essence of emergent design–that is, starting with a simple design and letting it evolve as the requirements evolve. He also demonstrates how to refactor to better designs and how this is different from refactoring bad code.

Functions are the basic building blocks of computer systems. Object-oriented classes are a way of packaging functions with shared data. Inheritance and polymorphism essentially are all about finding the right function. It’s all about functions! Get the picture? Chuck Allison explains that functions come in many varieties: static functions, polymorphic functions, generic functions, nested functions, higher-order functions, generator (aka stream) functions, coroutines, function closures, delegates, etc. Functions can handle arguments in different ways: by value, by result, by reference, by sharing, and by need, to name a few. Do you know how and when to use which? Functions should also be resource-friendly and robust should something hit the proverbial fan. Are your functions error-safe? Reusable? Maintainable? Do you know-really know-how to write a function? Come join Chuck and find out.