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While I don't believe in putting numbers on source code quality, SonarQube (formerly known as Sonar) can be a really useful tool during development. It enforces a consistent style across your team, has discovered several possible bugs for me and is a great tool to learn: You can browse the violations and see why a certain expression or code block can be a problem.
Most of us are not exposed to data at real scale. It is getting more common but still I appreciate that more progressive companies that have to fight with large volumes of data are open about it and talk about their problems and solutions. GitHub and Fog Creek are two of the larger users of Elasticsearch and both have published articles and interviews on their setup. It's interesting that both of these companies are using it for a very specialized use case, source code search. As I have recently read the article on Kiln as well as the interview with the folks at GitHub I'd like to summarize some of the points they made. Visit the original links for in depth information.
A while ago I showed an example on how to use Akka to scale a simple application with multiple threads. Tasks can be split into several actors that communicate via immutable messages. State is encapsulated and each actor can be scaled independently. While implementing an actor you don't have to take care of low level building blocks like Threads and synchronization so it is far more easy to reason about the application.
Big Ball of Mud is a collection of patterns by Brian Foote, published in 1999. The title stems from one of the patterns, Big Ball of Mud, the "most frequently deployed of software architectures". Though this might sound like a joke at first the article contains a lot of really useful information on the forces at work when dealing with large codebases and legacy code. I especially like his take on prototyping applications.
Feature Toggles are a useful pattern when you are working on several features but want to keep your application in a deployable state. One of the implementations of the pattern available for Java is Togglz. It provides ways to check if a feature is enabled programmatically, from JSF or JSP pages or even when wiring Spring beans. I couldn't find a single example on how to use the JSP support so I created an example project and pushed it to GitHub. In this post I will show you the basics of Togglz and how to use it in Java Server Pages.