Best of this Week Summary 20 July - 26 July 2009

• Handy tip for creating testdata for your testclasses via "factory" helper classes, to prevent copying the construction of this testdata again and again.
  There's also a database version.
  


• A comparison of the following opensource search engines: Lucene, Zettair, Indri, Sphinx, and Xapian.
  


• Best practices for using the Java Native Interface.
  


• A great "free PDF White Paper from OASIS, OMG, and The Open Group was written to help the SOA community at large to navigate the myriad of overlapping technical products produced by these organizations with specific emphasis on the “A” in SOA; i.e., Architecture. The docment explains and positions architectural standards for SOA reference models and ontologies, reference architectures, maturity models, SOA modeling profiles, and open standards work related to the topic of SOA governance. It also outlines the agreement on core SOA and SOA governance concepts."
  


• How bad can one GOTO statement really be? ;)
  
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 13 July - 19 July 2009

• Pretty basic SOAP monitor (proxy) that allows you to edit SOAP messages before sending them on. Does not support a proxy (yet).
  


• IBM recently released Milepost GCC (website has styling from 1998 ;), a "compiler which analyses the software and determines which code optimizations will be most effective during compilation using machine learning techniques. Experiments carried out with the compiler achieved an average 18% performance improvement. The compiler is expected to significantly reduce time-to-market of new software, because lengthy manual optimization can now be carried out by the compiler." Related to that is also the Collective Tuning wiki, dedicated to developing self-tuning computing systems.
  


• ZeroTurnaround "has released the results of their "Java EE Containers - Heaven or Hell" survey. Using responses from 700 respondents, they cover topics such as: containers most often used on large projects, fastest container, redeploy times and annual costs of redeployment in a series of charts and calculations. Both the charts and raw data are made available for your own analysis."
  


• Looking for petabyte and beyond scale storage? The opensource project Ceph might be an option: it is a distributed network file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability.
  


• Several basic and advanced JPA implementation patterns can be found here.
  

Best of this Week Summary 06 July - 12 July 2009

• Pretty high impact news: The W3C standards organisation has decided to let XHTML 2 go in favor of HTML 5. XHTML 2 was a "cleaner and better-architected version of HTML" but not backwards compatible with the current HTML standards and current browsers. Incrementally improving the current standards is what is headed for now. W3C is already involved in HTML 5.
  


• YourKit described for finding Java memory leaks. Free for opensource projects, otherwise commercial licensing.
  


• Interesting piece on Twitter's evolving architecture presented during QCon London 2009, addressing:
  
  
  
  • Caching
    
  
  
  • Message queuing
    
  
  
  • Memcached client
    
  
  All slides can be found here.
  


• Of course the big news this week was Google's announcement of its Chrome OS. A quick bunch of FAQs from Google can be found here. Why Google Chrome? Well, why not? And finally, a funny reason why a within-seconds bootup time is a disadvantage ;) Couldn't agree more :)
  


• Virtual Javascript keyboard (API) such that different languages can be used as input, without the need for a special fysically present keyboard (e.g for arabic letters)).
  


• 10 criteria that can be used to determine whether a product has good code generation support.
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 June - 05 July 2009

• Here's a Getting Started and bunch of Case Studies for Google App Engine with Java: case study 1, case study 2 and case study 3. Main things to take away:
  
  
  
  • GAE does not support the whole JEE API nor all regular frameworks.
    
  
  
  • Google's database for GAE is non-relational(!) but an object store
    
  
  


• A collection of web 2.0 architecture articles every software/application architect should know about, collected over the years by Dion Hinchcliffe.
  


• Great extensive article from Martin Fowler on the Scrum daily stand-up meetings, including tips on: benefits and consequences of common practices for daily stand-ups, how to run them effectively, stand-up patterns, what to talk about, when to run them, and the goals, to help beginners and remind experienced practitioners.
  


• A few weeks ago Google introduced Speed, its open source effort to all make the web faster. Looking at some of the feedback, it seems to currently contain only basic best-practices tips.
  


• Great long article on the history of Javascript and what hopefully awaits us in the future.