Best of this Week Summary 18 August - 24 August 2008

• Patterns-based Evaluation of Open Source BPM Systems: jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark. Report's conclusion: "Overall one can conclude that the open source systems are geared more towards developers than business analysts. If one is proficient with Java, jBPM may be a good choice, although if not, choosing jBPM is less advisable. Similarly, whilst OpenWFE has a powerful language for workflow specification in terms of its support for the workflow patterns, we postulate that it will be difficult to understand by non-programmers. Finally, Endydra Shark’s minimalistic support for the workflow patterns may require complicated work-arounds for capturing nontrivial business scenarios."
  


• As part of their EC2 offering, Amazon introduced this week their Elastic Block Store, enabling you to mount an EBS and format it or setup a database on it. S3 is not really intended for database-like storage. Here's another introduction, including a link to an article on how to setup MySQL on EBS. Here's ESB explained, including some diagrams.
  


• Article on the succesful execution of a large project (20 man years, 100.000+ lines of code) with an Agile approach using Scrum, with developers from India and The Netherlands. Includes lessons learned. Technologies used: Java, Spring, Hibernate, WebLogic, Oracle, Swing (UI) and Flex (for the displays) and Bamboo (continuous integration).
  


• Handy short comparison between LWUIT (recently open sourced by Sun) and JavaFX Mobile. Here's another comparison from Sun.