Best of this Week Summary 16 February - 22 February 2009

• JavaFX SDK 1.1 has been released last week including mobile support. Some first impressions can be found here. There've been already over 80000 downloads of the SDK and over 100 million downloads of the runtime. The last number is technically correct, but doesn't say much about the real usage: JavaFX is bundled with the 1.6uXX runtime, so you get it whether you use it or not.
  Here's a tutorial on creating a mashup with JavaFX and a Flickr webservice.
  
  (No it will not win the beauty contest in UI design ;-)
  


• A nice collection of Java resources on the net, from websites to tools and trends. Useful for newbies, but also for experienced Java professionals: maybe there's something in there you did't yet know about!
  


• So how are we going to port applications that you built on a cloud like Amazon's EC2 to run on another cloud like Microsoft's Azure? And what about migrating data stored in a cloud? For that the Unified Cloud Interface project has started recently: "The concept is to provide a single interface that can be used to retrieve a unified representation of all multi-cloud resources and to control these resources as needed." Looking for an overview of cloud-providers out there? Check this list.
  


• First article Understanding transaction pitfalls when using JPA (EJB 3.0) or Spring in a series on developing an effective transaction strategy for the Java platform.
  


• More than 30 US and international cyber security organizations jointly released the consensus list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors that lead to security bugs and that enable cyber espionage and cyber crime. Among the experts were also members from OWASP, known for their top 10 web application vulnerabilities. Here´s seven ways to avoid those 25 programming errors.
  

Best of this Week Summary 09 February - 15 February 2009

• This week a new web-based online code editor from Mozilla Labs. Javascript, HTML and CSS support are in this first beta release. All made in Javascript and requires Canvas support. One of the goals is to create new useful functionality for the code editor. Check the video for a full introduction.
  


• You can now get your IBM licensed software on Amazon's EC2 AMIs. Development AMIs with IBM software on them are also available at no additional fee. In the future it will also be possible to purchase these services by the hour. Initially available are: IBM DB2, IBM Informix, WebSphere sMash, IBM Lotus Web Content Management, and IBM WebSphere Portal Server. No I'm not sponsored by IBM, but I do think it's a smart move.
  


• RWW is noticing there is a trend towards a different type of databases than relational databases. There's increased interest in key/value pair storage, e.g Distributed Hash Tables. Pros and cons are described. Example cloud initiatives of these key/value storages are: Google's AppEngine Datastore (built on BigTable), SimpleDB by Amazon and Microsoft's SQL Data Services.
  Non-cloud initiatives are CouchDB, Project Voldemort, Mongo and Drizzle (this last one is more or less a mix of the two paradigms).
  


• An application architecture pattern for RIA applications. At the end of the pattern the implementation is based on MS frameworks/tools but pattern is technology-agnostic.
  


• Summary of a SOA case study at Cisco.
  


• A nice set of coding tips for writing efficient Android code by Google, essential for Android since it runs on embedded systems. Still the tips are so generic you can apply quite a few of them in regular Java applications too.
  


• And as the last item for this week: an overview of the expected changes in Java EE 6.
  

Best of this Week Summary 02 February - 08 February 2009

• In SOA lessons learned for Web 2.0 "two experienced SOA architects look at the new world of Web 2.0 technologies with a critical eye and present five best practices that can help you be more successful in adopting Ajax, REST, and other Web 2.0 technologies as part of your SOA."
  


• A quick comparison between Echo2 and GWT. Both enable you to create a rich internet application with only Java using a component-based approach. Wicket is also component based, but requires still to work with HTML; not necessarily a negative thing! For example, how will you split the work between the user interface designer and developers with Echo2 and GWT?
  


• A nice extensive summary of Model Driven Development misperceptions and challenges. Five challenges and five misconceptions in total.
  


• A whitepaper named "Centralized Service-Oriented Architectures without ESB" which shows how to create service-oriented architecture in a Google-like way, that is services around huge data repository, but without ESB. It is based on experience of the writers in data warehouses, Wiki and telecommunication systems. Thus, proposed is not really an ESB, but an architecture that's more like a centralised repository with distributed caching. Of course this comes with its own set of pros and cons, as mentioned in the whitepaper.
  

Best of this Week Summary 26 January - 01 February 2009

• Part 1 of a series on how to represent XML schema types taking into account the mismatch between XML and the datatypes of a programming language.
  


• Nice non-techie explanation of what OAuth is. Plaxo and Google are now trying out a combination of OpenID for federated authentication and OAuth for the authorization process, and including the Google Contacts API in the workflow. Thus, more and more towards the Open Stack.
  


• A great series of SOA Patterns by Thomas Erl. This is the first one, a Service Façade.
  


• An interesting opensource effort to make consuming REST services more object oriented and Rails ActiveResource like with Rapa. "Rapa uses the tried and tested Jakarta Commons HttpClient and JAXB."
  


• And as the last item this week, get ready to test your websites with Internet Explorer 8, RC1 can be downloaded now and should be nearly identical to the final version.