Tech Team Lead News: April 2008

Sunday, April 27, 2008

How to setup Spring with Wicket. This is a "challenge" because Wicket is an unmanged framework, this in contrast to Spring. I'm personally now using the Annotation-based Approach.

IBM developerWorks overview of services-based enterprise integration patterns, 3 parts.

Interview with Donald Knuth regarding the success of open source, the problem with multicore architectures, reusable code and unit testing.

Nice bunch of tips that can help you decide when to use ESB or BPEL in your solution.

Eclipse plugin Monkey to automate tasks like Java projects that don't have a Checkstyle configuration defined or find commented out code and defines tasks for them (TODO/FIXME),

The potential doubts regarding REST in practice, mainly for designers/developers with a SOAP/WSDL background.

An overview of Agile anti-patterns, like "keep refactoring for later" and "let's fix the testcase later, we'll uncomment it for now".

Interesting rumor is that Twitter might be moving away from using Ruby on Rails; it might move to PHP or Java. The potential reason for switching is most likely scalability. Their system has to support about 3 million messages a day and has over a million users (march 2008 numbers).

Springsource (the guys from Spring) introduced their beta Application Platform (aka S2AP). Summarizing: "an application platform, built on OSGi, that can resolve Spring bean references by looking up services through OSGi - all of the capabilities OSGi provides, without the headache of deployment. And it would be able to deploy .WAR files through the use of a Tomcat (or servlet container) service."

How Yahoo! is transforming itself into an open and social platform, allowing developers access to internal assets of Yahoo. A first example of this is SearchMonkey. Below a screenshot of their new architecture Yahoo Open Strategy.
Two initiatives that could improve the chances of OpenID becoming more mainstream: IDSelector (also mentioned here) and Confident's RecognitionAUTH, which you can see implemented at MyVidoop (mentioned in a previous post).

Amazon announced its Fulfillment Web Service API, which allows merchants to automatically store inventory in Amazon's warehouses and ship orders to customers. Again, Amazon is one of the frontrunners in this area...

Not that much news this week (is it vacation already??? ;-)

Great writeup (again) on how SOA can be introduced more successfully, especially in the area of design and implementation. Web 2.0's successes can be leveraged here to "learn from".

Three SOA patterns described: data federation, data consolidation, and data cleansing.

12 great points you should know about WOA and REST. Note that these points are not all about technology only...

New from Google: run your Python webapplication on their infrastructure with Google App Engine. Quite a contrast to Amazon's webservices approach S3, EC2 and SimpleDB.
A status check on OpenID, including where you can get an OpenID (providers), resources and where you can use it (couple of major sites only).

Great article focused on SOA Testing model, methodology, types, tools etc, but also explains the terms clearly, including related terms like SOA Governance. Does not go into the details on *how* you exactly test all the mentioned types of tests.

Interesting insight in the design of Audiogalaxy.com's high performance MySQL search engine. As an indication: "At peak times, the search engine needed to handle 1500-2000 searches every second against a MySQL database with about 200 million rows."

How to retag a version in Subversion. Basically you first have to delete the old tag.
Google, Yahoo and MySpace recently formed the OpenSocial Foundation, thus even more forces behind Google's OpenSocial initiative.