Best of this Week Summary 12 - 19 May 2007

• A "Performance Evaluation of Virtualization Technologies for Server Consolidation" which compares Xen and OpenVZ virtualization. Published by the University of Michigan and HP labs. One of the tentative conclusions seems that OpenVZ is scaling better than Xen.
  
  
• The Java Performance Group homepage regarding the whole application stack: from hardware level via the desktop to grid level.
  
  
• A bit older this article which I discovered this week. It gives a good short overview of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) which is getting more and more attention these days, for example at JavaOne. This line summarizes it all:

  "SCA emphasizes the decoupling of service implementation and of service assembly from the details of infrastructure capabilities and from the details of the access methods used to invoke services. SCA components operate at a business level and use a minimum of middleware APIs."

  
  The specification supports implementations written in languages like Java and PHP, and also XML-like languages like BPEL and XSLT. Even SQL and XQuery are supported. The complete specifications are available here.
  An open source runtime and Eclipse plugin are also listed.
  
  
• The MS official final version of the IE toolbar has been released. Not as near as much possibilities as FF's Firebug and WebDeveloper, but it's a start! 624K so not that big. I managed to get IE7 crash 2 times in 60 seconds... This is not really workabable. This is the link to the blog, which contains a link to the download page.