Best of this Week Summary 6 Nov - 11 Nov 2007

• This is a good blog to get you started on JavaFX and related technologies. See this post on what's been covered until now.
  


• Madly interesting is this technical posting about Amazon's Dynamo, which is a their internal distributed storage system in which the data is stored and looked up via a key, with a put() and get() interface. Sounds quite similar to the put() and get() for a Hashtable in Java right? ;-) Actually Dynamo is built in Java, so I guess that's no coincidence! The posting gives you quite some details on Amazon's internal infrastructure, and introduces interesting new terms like that it is an "eventually consistent storage system". What is also cool is that each of Amazon's internal applications can setup their own SLA with Dynamo. This SLA defines the amount of delays and data discrepancy the application will tolerate from Dynamo. The fact that Amazon is opening up its services (with S3 and EC2), makes it a huge differentiator from companies like Google and Microsoft, which don't open up their systems (some Google GFS info you can find here). Related to this the new term that is being coined recently: HaaS (Hardware as a Service). No time to read the whole paper? A summary you can find here. Compare it with Hadoop and CouchDB.
  


• Related to my last week's post about OpenSocial, this week the (very) alpha version 0.5 of the Container API has been released.
  


• Note: I turned on moderation for comments this week because of a big spamming "effort"... Thanks whoever you are...