School has started for two weeks! Recently, the university year began, too! And at the same time with them, inevitably, the mass-media resounds with the same choir of lamentations related to the precarious state of the Romanian system of education. We hope this choir does not resemble those of the antique Greek tragedies and sing about the destiny of a perpetual doom of education into degradation and derisory. In order to prove the importance of education in the progress of society it is enough to take a look towards the IT domain. Without the prestigious universities, the IT industry couldn't have reached the level it is on today in the big cities of Romania. Actually, any IT company and not only, which wishes to open an office in a city, will be interested in the level of education or the universities existing in the respective community. If we relate to a reference ecosystem, such as Silicon Valley, made up of companies/ startups, investors and universities, we notice that the latest are a compulsory ingredient in creating a competitive industry. If the financing of startups and finding investors has begun to be a natural thing, consciously and responsibly assumed, the financing of universities does not depend only on the local ecosystem, but also on the social and political context. Let us only mention those cases when entire departments were closed because the professor went to work for a private company, or when the students are expected to learn from old and outdated textbooks. What are the solutions? We hope it does not remain a rhetorical question and we will be able to find a consistent answer if we want the growth of the IT sector.
One first solution to this problem may be the organization on the 24th-25th of November of the third edition of Cluj IT Days by Today Software Magazine, which is meant to be a good opportunity of learning and soldering of the IT community in Cluj. You can find more details in the article dedicated to this subject.
Concerning the content of this issue, we signal the article of Dan Suciu, Agile Humanum Est, with an interesting title that paraphrases a famous Latin saying - Errare humanum est… We go on with the API Design - a Case Study, which debates the rules of defining an API and illustrates it with the one used within Betfair. Performance in Java is discussed in Low latency FIX engine in Java, an engine created by Peter Lawrey, also invited to Cluj IT Days. Unfortunately, the article was too technical for a useful translation into Romanian and we have decided to keep it in English in order not to miss its scientific precision. Still in the Java area, jOOQ for the simplification of SQL integration in Java, proposes an abstraction built on the relational and object oriented models (ORM) of the data bases. OpenStreetMap is a crowd-sourced project used by Telenav as a base in the products offered, but you can find more details in the article called OSM and Telenav seen through the eyes of a map analyst. Next, we present a testing tool: Cucumber, which is based on the concept of Behaviour Driven Design. In the end, we recommend the article on what a registered sole trader (PFA) means in 2016.
by Ioana Varga
by Peter Lawrey
by Monica Rațiu
by Călin Biriș
