Best of this Week Summary 21 January - 27 January 2008

• Nice routing pattern for webservices that need to provide both synchronous and a-synchronous calls. You can even make the router such that depending on certain criteria (like load, response time), it will either turn the call into an a-synchronous call when needed. Disadavantage of this approach is of course that the caller has to be able to support both an a-synchronous and a synchronous version of each call. Related patterns you can find in these seven Self-Service: select application patterns.
  


• An effort to give answer to the question whether Tomcat is an application server or not. GREAT introduction to JEE btw, so good read for beginners or as a refresher. The answer: Tomcat does not support the entire Java EE stack: no distributed transactions, EJBs, and JMS.
  


• IBM made their Jazz tool available for the public. It can be used to "build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle." Note that it is not fully opensource yet. There's also a Mylyn connector available for Jazz.
  


• Version 3.0.0 of HTML Purifier has been released. It will scan your HTML for malicious XSS code, check for compliance and will try to fix your code.
  


• Summary of a statement made by Bruce Eckel in this article that Java should not change much anymore: it should stop growing and just become stable, and Sun should focus on optimizing/extending the JVM. Interesting considerations.
  


• And finally for this week, for the developers among us, a bunch of shortcut keys in Eclipse you might not know about.
  


• The Open Source hardening Project of the US Homeland Security department together with Coverity has led to the milestone where in 11 opensource projects all main bugs have been fixed. These 11 have been moved up to the new level Rung 2. Here you can see all the results of the scan.