Best of this Week Summary 20 April - 26 April 2009

• The big bigger biggest (sad?) news this week was of course Oracle going to buy Sun (here's Oracle's announcement). Rod Johnson (from SpringSource) is wondering what Oracle actually did buy. He concludes luckily one of the great strengths of Java is its developer and open source community, thus Oracle does not own the future of Java. Makes sense.
  
  Alef Arendsen (previously SpringSource, now JTeam) wonders which company/group will be the next, since only a few large opensource bodies are left: "the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), products in the Eclipse Foundation, products carying the JBoss name and last but not least, a broad set of products under the SpringSource umbrella".
  
  Sun "invited Oracle president Charles Phillips and chief corporate architect Edward Screven to an employee-only town hall last Wednesday", answering employee questions. In short: Oracle loves Sun's software (Java, MySQL) and hardware, but the future is unclear for OpenOffice and Sun's cloud effort.
  


• A beginners tutorial on how to integrate GWT with PHP using XML as the "bridge" between the two technologies.
  


• Manage your Amazon S3 with freeware CloudBerry Explorer. Makes it for example easy to move buckets between the US and Europe.
  
  Cloudkick is a free tool which allows you to migrate your Amazon EC2 AMIs to to Slicehost (owned by Rackspace).
  

Best of this Week Summary 13 April - 19 April 2009

• To build an OpenSocial application, you no longer need an online a (test) container, because now there is the OpenSocial Development Environment (OSDE) for Eclipse.
  


• "Jitr (pronounced "jitter") is a JUnit Integration Test Runner. It allows your web application integration tests to easily run against a lightweight web container in the same JVM as your tests."
  


• Twitter has been starting to replace some Ruby on Rails backend functionality with Scala (which has Java compatibility) on a JVM. Read here in detail why. In short:
  
  
  • Better support for long-lived processes
    
  • Static typing
    
  • Better thread support
    
  
  The article also lists lessons learned and the "good and the bad" of Scala. One of the interviewed guys also did a presentation on why you should (could) use Scala for building web 2.0 applications.
  


• Twelve steps on how to introduce OSGi on an existing application without having to write the whole application.
  


• Summary of a one hour presentation on 10 ways to improve your code.
  

Best of this Week Summary 06 April - 12 April 2009

• Big news this week was of course that Google App Engine now also supports Java, though still in closed beta. Other reports of this news can be found here, here, and this summary from the related Campfire '09. A nice two pager overview can be found here. Also immediately available is an Eclipse plugin. Groovy is supported too btw.
  
  Note that the Java 1.6 support is not (yet?) 100%:
  
  
  • It hasn't passed Sun's Java certification tests
  
  
  • Over 7 items of what's not supported are listed here.
  
  
  • 9 mostly similar are listed here.
  
  Here's a runthrough of getting a Wicket Hello World example running on GAE.
  


• Google also tries to introduce a new standard to easily take your contacts with you to other sites: Portable Contacts. It's used in combination with OAuth.
  


• Interesting, this opensource XSS bookmarklet (thus javascript) scans for potential XSS problems.
  
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• Talking about scanners and security, here's a free HP Flash .swf scanner that decompiles it and searches for well known leaks.
  


• Great survey results on Javascript/RIA frameworks. Questions surveyed were: which frameworks do you use the most, quality on documentation and community support, performance, ease of implementation, popularity, and 3rd party plugins quality.
  

Best of this Week Summary 24 March - 05 April 2009

• How can you make sure your site can handle peak-loads? This article lists the possibilities:
  
  
  
  • Over-provisioning (estimating what the peak will be).
    
  
  
  • Under-provisioning.
    
  
  
  • Right-sizing: estimate for a short period in time, then scale up or down: flexible scaling and auto-scaling.
    
  
  How this can be achieved? Add a middleware virtualisation layer that helps the application take advantage of these new dynamically added resources. The article also describes in detail how to add auto-scaling to your existing application, including a description how to try it out on GigaSpaces XAP which uses EC2.
  


• Quite amazing, Salesforce.com runs on only about 1000 servers (and that's mirrored, so only really about 500 servers). Salesforce has more than 55K enterprise customers, 1.5M individual subscribers, 30M lines of third-party code and hundreds of TBs of data.
  


• Here's a list of criteria when selecting a SOA testing tool.
  


• A nice introduction to Hibernate's second-level cache.
  


• Five tips for successfully deploying Maven. Including a bunch of pros and cons in the comments.
  


• On a keep-an-eye-on-this-innovation side note, Digg introduced a interesting (new?) way of a URL shortener like TinyURL, and at the same time attract traffic. Just prefix any URL with http://digg.com/, and voila, a shortened URL appears including a Digg toolbar. Below I entered http://digg.com/http://ttlnews.blogspot.com/ in the address bar: