Best of this Week Summary 14 Oct - 21 Oct 2007

• Very interesting post about the Fotolog architecture. Note that they re-implemented a PHP part of the site in Java to improve performance! And they have to be scalable regarding these numbers for example: "300 Million photos and over 500,000 photos are uploaded each day. Over 30,000 new members are added each day and attracts more than 4.6 million daily users."
  


• This is a good comparison and overview of 4 open source version control systems: CVS, SVN, Bazaar and Mercurial. The last two take a distributed repository approach, in contrast to a central repository approach like CVS and SVN.
  


• Good high level overview of the history of software development. From the Waterfall Model to the current Agile (Iterative) Model. The main gain in all these years is that now it is possible to create quite complex systems with significant less persons because of the progress modern program languages and libraries have made. All of which you already knew of course, even if you didn't start in the 70's... ;-)
  


• James Gosling made the (quite logical) announcement earlier this week that in the future (mobile) devices will get so powerful there won't be the need for a separate Java Micro Edition anymore; there will be only one Java SE (Standard Edition). Also a few interesting points about the upcoming Java 6 update N (preload of the Consumer Java Runtime at computer boot), which should be available a few months into 2008, preparing the desktops for JavaFX.