Best of this Week Summary 03 May - 09 June 2007

• An interview with writers of new book about REST. One free chapter for download. Interesting is the interview with the writers were they explain why they think REST is great and (when) preferable above WS-* (SOAP).
  
• An overview of nine free virtualization environments. Plus one free spreadsheet to compute the TCO of virtualization.
  
• Interest points made about what Google Gears does not yet support out-of-the-box, like synchronization strategies. But as mentioned already a little bit in the article, the correct synchronization strategy depends on the application you are building. So maybe Gears could (should?) have contained already one or two simple syncing strategies. Also, I think saying it replaces one problem with another is a not really correct. I'd say Gears is a starting point in providing a full offline library/framework solution, but it does not solve all problems at this point in time.
  
• The writers of the book "GWT in Action" answered a couple of questions on their impression is on GWT after a year.
  
  Most important points made:
  - Regarding debugging: most of the time you don't need to go into the generated Javascript,
  - The great fact that you can re-use all your Java knowledge and tools,
  - That for simple apps it would still be too heavy-weight (overkill),
  - How GWT tries to make the generated Javascript as little as bloated as possible,
  - That the generated Javascript code can be output in pretty, more readable Javascript,
  - A GWT application can mix Javascript and Java (so it is not that "crippled" as it seems),
  - There are wrappers available for Scriptaculous, JSCalendar etc,
  - Javascript files are provided per browser type, instead of one big file that handles all browsers,
  - Changing locale can require you to switch to a dynamic approach, losing GWT stripping,
  - Modularization can be improved; now you have to always download all modules that your application uses.