Tech Team Lead News: December 2007

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Always interesting, a look inside "the kitchen of": the people from 37signals.com have provided some inside-info on the architecture of some of their sites: Backpack en Basecamp. For
example they are using RoR, MySQL, S3 and memcached.

Post (related to the ESB entry in my post last week) regarding the rise of Tomcat as "application" server, in relation with the rise of Spring. Comparing Tomcat with WebLogic and WebSphere is more like comparing Oracle with MySQL. Tomcat is still not at the same level in certain areas as WebLogic and WebSphere, though it is making progress in these areas: clustering and high availability.

There's a new revised version of the free e-book from Microsoft on the most important security engineering activities that you should have in your development process: The Developer Highway Code. Written by Paul Maher (Microsoft UK) and Alex Mackman (CM Group Ltd).

Great news, version 2.0 of SoapIU has just been released. Improvements include webservice WSDL coverage and WS-Security completely refactored.

Nice set of 10 lessons learned from designing and building a high transaction database (Microsoft SQL Server). The system was required to support 35K tps.

Reasonable comparison of 3 open source applicationservers: JBoss 4.2, Geronimo 2 and Tomcat 6. Geronimo comes out as most complete. Tomcat is a bit odd in this comparison, it is more a servlet/web-container than a full applicationserver. Glassfish for example would have fitted better here. Here's some The ServerSide feedback on it.

In this article Paul Fremantle discusses the fundamentals of the Enterprise Service Bus concept. His point is that the model of ESB sometimes might be converting into an anti-SOA pattern: the conversion of the formats happens in the ESB instead of happening at the service providers (the endpoints). Thus you would need a central ESB team that needs to deal with each application, its format and protocol the ESB needs to interface with. Note that the author is owner of the WSO2 ESB, his company and also works on Apache Synapse. As he claims these tools are designed from the ground up to match the original idea of SOA: the owners of the services take responsibility to define a clean and simple interface.

Good summary of somebody using GWT for three months and the pros and cons found.

Short intro to Amazon's new offering SimpleDB, which is its third offering besides S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). It provides "a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results".

Interview with Bruce Schneider, Internet security guru on security (duh), privacy, electronic voting, encryption, passwords and more. One of the ways to attack identity theft is to not rely on authenticating the person, but on authenticating the transaction, as credit card companies do. Another thing he mentions is to *write down your passwords*, which is contradictionary to what you read everywhere; but he says, just put the paper in a safe place like your wallet! And because you write it down, you will more likely pick a strong password.

Nice inside view on how BT uses social software like RSS, Wiki, Podcasts etc. on their intranet.

Pattern specification of the requester side caching pattern and its implementation.
The requester side caching pattern is one of mediating the interaction between one or more clients and one or more data providers. The mediation consists of holding data items that have been produced by the provider(s) and using them to support requests from the client(s).

Nice article on designing to facilitate unittesting, e.g. using interfaces to decouple an implementation class from its dependency.

Here's a couple of reasons when to use and when not to use stored procedures. Most of the time it is not such a good idea to use them, except for example when having data-intensive/abstract computations, or batch-oriented operations.

Interesting post on how PayPal is transacting 1500 USD per second(!) every day, and that their system is completely build in-house, running on thousands single-rack Unity servers. By using this kind of chunks (instead of a mainframe approach) they can upgrade a lot cheaper, because the servers are so cheap. This distributed, highly redundant Linux approach make the system a lot less vunerable to failures. A big benefit they have using open source is that it is a lot cheaper to have a development environment that is exactly the same as the production environment, therefore reducing the chance of inconsistent results and bugs caused by difference in environments.