Best of this Week Summary 20 August - 25 Aug 2007

No real world shocking discoveries for me this week. Still quite interesting though were:

• Spring Web Services 1.0 was announced this week. One of its major features is that it facilitates contract-first ("design by contract") webservices creation. This is were you create/generate the WSDL first, then build the implementation (closely related to Spring's interface-based Spring framework). This is different from JAX-WS, where you generate the WSDL from the Java (implementation) classes. Definitely check the comments too, for example to get a feel on how these standards/frameworks relate to eachother: JAX-RPC, JAX-WS, XFire, Axis2, Spring-WS and REST.
  
  
• On a I-wonder-why-they-did-this-side-note: Sun has changed their Nasdaq symbol from SUNW to JAVA. I'm quite suprised they did it, Sun is a lot more than Java and one day Java will be replaced by another programming language... really... trust me ;-)
  
  
• Interesting support from Yahoo! for the Apache project Hadoop. Quoting the About page:
  
  "Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters of commodity hardware. The Hadoop framework transparently provides applications both reliability and data motion. Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named map/reduce, where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which may be executed or reexecuted on any node in the cluster. In addition, it provides a distributed file system that stores data on the compute nodes, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster. Both map/reduce and the distributed file system are designed so that node failures are automatically handled by the framework."
  
  
• Finally, check these this IBM developerworks article about the new 2.0 release of Mylyn (formerly called Mylar), a task-driven management tool for Eclipse. It adds two facilities to Eclipse: integrated task management and automated context management.
  
  "Task management integrates your task/bug/defect/ticket/story/issue tracker into Eclipse and provides advanced task-editing and task-scheduling facilities. Context management monitors your interactions with Eclipse, automatically identifies information relevant to the task at hand, and focuses structured views and editors to show only the relevant information."