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.