Best of this Week Summary 16 December - 28 December 2008

• Great insight on Second Life's architecture. For example: "A physical server (1 CPU) is responsible for about 16 acres of land and it is connected to neighboring ones which are each responsible for another 16 acres. The server is responsible for the objects existing in its area, the scripts running, the users logged in and standing in its area". Presentation is one hour in total.
  


• There's more to REST than meets the eye. And many REST APIs are not really as REST as Roy Fielding defines it. Media type design is an important item that was not in his original REST dissertation. Some interpretation of what Roy actually means can be found here.
  


• JanRain (known for their OpenID libraries) have created a nice widget named RPX that allows you to integrate authentication within your existing site in an easy and user-intuitive way. I really like the clear, easy and non-intrusive way the possibilities are shown. For real novice users the redirecting to and from the authenticating sites might still be a little bit confusing though. Supported protocols are: OpenID 1.x/2.0, Facebook Connect, MySpaceID and Google. Below is a screenshot of what the registration part looks like:
  
  A couple of example sites where this is already implemented can be found here. And some more on the possibilities here.
  Note that from the technical overview you can see that the RPX server sits in between. That is the only disadvantage of this solution: that you are dependent on an intermediate server.
  


• The W3 Consortium has released a webpage mobile-friendliness checker. The tests it performs can be found at the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 specification. Other validators you might know from them are the feed validator, XML Schema Validator, CSS validator or Markup validator. Running these very succesful services without any advertising is costing a lot of money. Therefore you can now donate here for support. If you compute how much time those validators have saved you, donating any small percentage of that will already help W3C keep these validators running.
  

Best of this Week Summary 15 December - 21 December 2008

• A nice and simple logical diagram of the "open stack" for the social web and how the different technologies relate, including OpenID and oAuth.
  
  
• Mostly quite valid points of criticism on the currently available Java persistence frameworks. Some more comments on the article on TSS.
  


• A bit off-track interview with Bjarne Stroustrup (designer of C++) on educating software developers and the fact that companies are complaining about the lack of skills of current computer science university graduates. Especially in the area of writing maintanable code.
  


• Google just released the free Browser Security Handbook whitepaper, which is "meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers".
  


• Awesome, unit testing for Javascript with FireUnit is now available, a Firebug/Firefox extension.
  

Best of this Week Summary 8 December - 14 December 2008

• Spring's Web Flow 2 now lets you use JSF as view technology. It addresses a couple of the existing JSF issues and already some features only present in JSF 2.0.
  


• Microsoft (yes yes, don't stop reading immediately ;-) has published a How-To Design Using Agile Architecture guide which "will help you start the process of designing your application. It discusses the six main steps you should follow, and then discusses the issues involved in making logical choices. It also provides checklists to help you ensure that the proposed design will meet your requirements", including patterns, best practices and agile considerations. This is a quick summary of the guide.
  


• A tiny bit off-track, but still interesting to point out: of course you know Google's GWT, in which you can create a Javascript web front-end application in Java. But now this is also possible in Python (recently releasing version 3) with Pyamas! Pretty cool!
  


• Talking about software architecture, how would you document that correctly? Here's a bunch of good tips trying to answer that. It is a good high-level overview of what you should document in an application architecture. Focus is on UML 2.0, but what should be in the documentation is valid for any notation format.
  


• Here's the first list (and maybe last :-) I'll post on looking back @ 2008: on overview of what happened with Java in 2008.
  

Best of this Week Summary 1 December - 7 November 2008

• Post from UI expert Jakob Nielsen on what to think about regarding user interaction and usability when using an Agile methodology (like Scrum).
  


• This week, Sun released version 1.0 of JavaFX, their RIA platform. Too late or just in time? The competion Smooth animation demo here. Quite some reactions here.
  


• These days you see quite some integration happening with Flex at the front-end and Java at the back-end of a web applications. There are a couple of things to consider whether you might want to choose Flex or not.
  


• Tips to help you pass the SCBCD (Sun Certified Business Component Developer) exam.