Best of this Week Summary 23 March - 29 March 2009

• Need to know whether a collection is modified concurrently, which causes the ConcurrentModificationException? Check this handy wrapper solution here.
  


• The second article in the Transaction strategies series. "Using examples from the Spring Framework and the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0 specification, explained is how the transaction models work and how they can form the basis for developing transaction strategies ranging from basic transaction processing to high-speed transaction-processing systems".
  


• For the Amazon EC2 now a free AWS Eclipse plugin is available. It facilitates remote development, deployment, and debugging Java applications on Amazon Web Services.
  


• Three common mistakes to avoid when implementing XML and webservices: don't make your messages too large, don't create too fine-grained services, and don't forget to create an XML schema.
  


• Javascript is getting more and more important the last couple of years, so here's a bunch of best practices and efficiency tips.
  

Best of this Week Summary 16 March - 22 March 2009

• Great article by Dion Hinchcliffe with 10 emerging technologies every software architect has to know about. In short:
  
  
  1. Cloud computing
     
  
  
  2. Non-relational databases
     
  
  
  3. Next-generation distributed computing
     
  
  
  4. Web-oriented architecture (WOA)
     
  
  
  5. Mashups
     
  
  
  6. Open supply chains via APIs
     
  
  
  7. Dynamic languages (e.g Rails, PHP compared to Java/.Net)
     
  
  
  8. Social computing
     
  
  
  9. Crowdsourcing and peer production architectures
     
  
  
  10. New Application Models (e.g the symantic web, opensocial, widgets)
      


• Elaborate explanation of managing boilerplate text (e.g. titles, button labels, prompt, error messages, tool tips) in JSF applications. This includes more advanced locale requirements, like certain text that needs to be different when shown to junior and senior users.
  


• Here's a nice diagram with an overview of what activities are needed to create a website, from idea to support and everything in between.
  
  


• Always annoyed that you have to manually close a resource like InputStreams, Connections etc? And that the first exception might be surpressed by the second in the finally block? Here's a suggested solution: the Automatic Resource Management pattern by Joshua Bloch.
  


• Ten more Eclipse shortcuts you maybe didn't know...
  


• Of course you've heard/read that Microsoft has released IE8 last week. Here's a bunch of tips when migrating your site from IE7 to IE8.
  


• Ever need to create a UUID/GUID? Here's a few offline generators compared. uuidgen is an online UUID generator supporting version 1 and 4. A handy FAQ on UUIDs with some more depth can be found here.
  

Best of this Week Summary 09 March - 15 March 2009

• A table-based quick review of the following RIA frameworks: GWT 1.5, Laszlo 4.2, pure Javascript and Flex 3.2.
  


• A short introduction on how ActionScript 3 differs (and not) from Java.
  


• A wiki constructed with over four dozen architects: 97 things every software architect should know. Also now available as a book. It includes advice such as:
  
  
  • Don't Put Your Resume Ahead of the Requirements (Nitin Borwankar)
    
  
  
  • Chances Are, Your Biggest Problem Isn't Technical (Mark Ramm)
    
  
  
  • Communication Is King; Clarity and Leadership, Its Humble Servants (Mark Richards)
    
  
  
  • Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse (Kevlin Henney)
    
  
  
  • For the End User, the Interface Is the System (Vinayak Hegde)
    
  
  
  • It's Never Too Early to Think About Performance (Rebecca Parsons)
    
  
  


• An introduction to Object Oriented CSS.
  


• Sample chapter from Thomas Erl's latest SOA Design Patterns book, and an interview with him. He "talks about the main benefits of having a pattern catalog, SOA and Web services, the current state of SOA, the difference between SOA and service orientation, and the role of patterns in SOA adoption".
  


• A series of five articles on setting up a Java Wicket project and implementing a frontend with it.
  


• Handy piece of (alpha) software to test IE8 RC1, IE7, IE6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP. Note that it looks like Microsoft is releasing IE8 this coming week, so get ready...
  

Best of this Week Summary 02 March - 08 March 2009

• The UI teamlead of Google's Chrome browser explained at a presentation why they decided to build Chrome. Basically because all the existing browsers suck :-)
  


• A memory and performance comparison between Seam+JSF and Wicket. Wicket wins both. Also check the comments for useful feedback. Possible reasons for the differences in performance are: JSF performs much more expression evaluation and the JSF lifecycle is much more complex.
  


• The Open Group has released version 9 of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) for enterprise architectures. TOGAF is often combined with ArchiMate for modelling. Most important addition to version 8 is the content framework which describes what an architecture exists of. Here's some feedback from actual users on TOGAF 9.
  


• Talking about standards, the OASIS committee has updated a bunch of webservices specifications/standards.
  


• A nice post on how to write a Javascript client that sites can use to access your REST API. Biggest challenges that had to be solved were:
  

  1. Browser same-origin restrictions on XMLHttpRequests (XHRs) and inter-window/frame access
     
  
  
  2. The lack of wide browser support for HTML 5-style message passing between windows.

• Java Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) Specification (JSR 316) is getting there...
  

Best of this Week Summary 17 February - 01 March 2009

• A relatively new type of mashups are so called clipping mashups. Instead of building a mashup against some official API, a clipping mashup just parses the final content in the presentation, thus including CSS, Javascript etc. Links can be rewritten, new elements injected. The presentation doesn't have to follow for example portal JSR-168 standards.
  An example use case would be that you could use it to (temporarily) fix a bug in a system (not necessarily owned by you) until the official next release comes out.
  


• Eight architectural styles described. Handy overview including which one could be when appropriate.
  


• Summary of migration project from JDBC to Hibernate. Valid comment at the bottom is that iBatis might be a better solution when you have to work from an existing schema.
  


• Additional tips and articles for the Wicket in Action book. For example this article on how to do a partial Ajax repaint of newly created repeater items (e.g adding 1 row dynamically to a table or list with a "+" button). This in contrast to rendering all rows in a table when repainting the WebMarkupContainer as in the example described here.
  


• Nice step-by-step introduction to asynchronous processing in Java 5 using Futures, ExecutorServices, CompletionService, Callback interfaces and ThreadPools. Here's part 2 where it's being used in combination with Javascript to improve the user experience.