Best of this Week Summary 18 February - 23 February 2008

• Nice overview showing how a Ruby on Rails Facebook application named "Friends for Sale" scaled to handle 200 requests/second and 300M page views per month. Includes the used hardware, software, # of visitors etc.
  


• This is a short article describing Comet, one of the better known technologies to push events from the server to the browser client. Also explains the name Comet (I for example thought it was a software product, not a technology).
  


• Reference to a thorough thesis (conclusions in the article) on performance of AJAX applications for 12 frameworks on mobile devices. Also 5 larger AJAX websites on mobile devices were compared.
  


• Nice (but not very elaborate) comparison of 9 features and benchmark of four JEE 5 servers: JBoss 4.x (OSS), Glassfish 2.1 (OSS), WebSphere 2.0 CE (OSS) and WebLogic 10. Check the reference to the jRealBench (zip) benchmarking tool.
  


• IBM has just opened their Jazz tool for beta. This post is a short description of installing and using it. Jazz "is a collaborative development environment product based on Eclipse, designed to support the application of RUP, which is itself an interative software development process framework built around iterative". But as you can see in the comments, it's not really restricted to RUP.
  

Best of this Week Summary 11 February - 17 February 2008

• Jaxer is an interesting new approach to development that brings Javascript, DOM, HTML and CSS to the server! An example of its use is that it helps you to reuse your validation logic on client and server. Here's some hands-on experiences.
  
  
  
• TrustBearer is connecting the (hard) real world with the (software) virtual world for OpenID authentication via hardware token, smart card or biometric reader.
  


• Some experiences from using Amazon's EC2. Check also the comments. This week though EC2 and S3 were not performing as they should be. Amazon gave an explanation for the outage (in short: an accidental DDOS).
  

Best of this Week Summary 28 January - 10 February 2008

• Interesting idea mentioned in this post: the very basic site inursite.com validates your markup daily and you get sent the result via email or RSS. Of course during the building your site should already validate, but this site can help for Continous Integration of your front-end.
  


• Great overview of Javascript/AJAX performance issues in all major browsers (except Opera). You can use this information to know where to focus your Javascript optimizations on.
  


• This week several BIG names joined OpenID: Google, Verisign and IBM.
  


• Google's just released Social Graph API. It tries to find public relationships between people's accounts.