Best of this Week Summary 13 April - 19 April 2009

• To build an OpenSocial application, you no longer need an online a (test) container, because now there is the OpenSocial Development Environment (OSDE) for Eclipse.
  


• "Jitr (pronounced "jitter") is a JUnit Integration Test Runner. It allows your web application integration tests to easily run against a lightweight web container in the same JVM as your tests."
  


• Twitter has been starting to replace some Ruby on Rails backend functionality with Scala (which has Java compatibility) on a JVM. Read here in detail why. In short:
  
  
  • Better support for long-lived processes
    
  • Static typing
    
  • Better thread support
    
  
  The article also lists lessons learned and the "good and the bad" of Scala. One of the interviewed guys also did a presentation on why you should (could) use Scala for building web 2.0 applications.
  


• Twelve steps on how to introduce OSGi on an existing application without having to write the whole application.
  


• Summary of a one hour presentation on 10 ways to improve your code.