Best of this Week Summary 14 January - 20 January 2008

• Benchmark test of the Javascript performance of Opera, Safari, Explorer and Firefox. Firefox 3b2 vs Ffox 2 seems to head in the right direction too (i.e, 3 getting better and better).
  


• Article that discusses the AjaxComponent strategy to introduce Ajax into your JSF application, including a step-by-step example which uses MyFaces 1.1.5 and the Dojo. If you would handle an Ajax request via a standard JSF component method or using a phase listener, it would give you not enough control or you'd break encapsulation. Combining these two approaches you get what you want (and need): input/output logic nicely packaged in the renderer! There's also mention of a related pattern introduced by the writer: the JSF AjaxCommand strategy, which you would use if the functionality you're providing is only required by one component.
  


• An automated solution on how to implement Yahoo's Rule #3 from YSlow: setting the Expires header on your static data (images, css, javascript etc). Not obvious since it means dynamically incorporating the version nr in your CSS, javascript files for example.
  


• BIG news was of course this week the two large acquisitions: Sun buying MySQL and Oracle buying BEA Systems.
  Gigaspaces is expecting Oracle to either discontinue WebLogic or continue with little innovation. Rod Johnson from SpringSource (formerly Interface 21) is expecting (hoping?) quite the opposite: Oracle will discontinue their OC4J application server, because of WebLogic's market position. Here's some more considerations. My expection is a merge of the best of the two products. Only time will tell...
  


• Great news was of course that Yahoo! is now allowing all users to OpenID-enable their user account. It adds a total of potentially 250M new OpenID users. I still doubt it will be enough to get OpenID widely accepted, most of the points I mentioned here still apply; just allowing more users to use an OpenID is not taking these away.