Best of this Week Summary 17 August - 23 August 2009

• Here's a basic list of software architecture review guidelines. You can definitely also use it as a starting point for your documentation, or to see if your documentation is covering it all.
  


• Shame on me: forgot to mention last week the VMWare acquisition of SpringSource! Basically the CTO says "the aim of this acquisition is to provide a comprehensive platform as a service (PaaS)". Here's a view on it from a technical level by Adrian Colver (SpringSource), and here's one from Frank Cohen.
  


• Potential cloud "dangers" described during Black Hat USA 2009.
  


• And related to the previous one, here's a short summary with interesting results on stress testing the Amazon EC2, Google AppLogic and Microsoft Azure cloud solutions. Bascically, the performance quite varied and response times varied by a factor of 20! And good to know: on Google AppEngine, any task can not last longer than 30 seconds!
  


• Need to know "everything" about Java Generics? Then this large PDF Java Generics FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions is for you. Think you know everything about Generics? It still might be for you. For example, do you know what this says: "Enum<E extends Enum<E>>"? Or can you follow this one: "Can I use the type parameter of an outer type as part of the bounds of the type parameter of an inner type or a method?"? :)
  

Best of this Week Summary 10 August - 16 August 2009

• Always interesting the Gartner 2009 Hype Cycle. For example, Web 2.0 is already on the way up again, while microblogging (e.g Twitter) is starting its downward trend.
  


• Code review tools Review Board: "is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process." Downloadable.
  


• Great description on how full-scale Scrum was applied at a JTeam project. It includes answer to the why and what went well and what can be improved. Also shortly the used technologies are described (Spring, Spring WS, Spring MVC, JPA, JExcelApi, Apache Commons for FTP, iText for addresslabels with bar codes, jQuery and Google Maps, Mockito (see this post on why they switched from EasyMock), MockFTPServer and Subethamail Wiser for email integration testing. Again, great that they share this publicly.
  


• Discussion of the quality assurance/testing challenges to be addressed with a SOA adoption, recommended best practices, and lessons learned.
  


• More or less a beginner's introduction to the Java Collections framework and algorithms. Sample chapter from "Core Java 2, Volume II - Advanced Features 7th Edition". Uses CircularArrayQueue and LinkedListQueue as examples (how often have you used those two? ;)
  

Best of this Week Summary 3 August - 9 August 2009

• Securing SOAP/webservices overview and tips including encryption, testing, maintainability and reusability.
  


• Four steps to securing webservices with focus on testing.
  


• Several junit best practices. And related antipatterns.
  


• Overview of StackOverflow.com's architecture, including general tips. The tools are MS, but the mentioned principles apply everywhere. Quite a lot on scaling up and out. Also included is how Saleforce.com solved its perforance problems in the database (Oracle).
  


• Awesome, parts of the original source code of Apollo 11's Command Module (Comanche054) and Lunar Module (Luminary099)! Pretty funny are some of the comments.
  


• A couple of more or less advanced Firebug usage tips: advanced debugging with the console, replacing a Javascript funtion in the console and profiling.
  

Best of this Week Summary 27 July - 2 August 2009

• "A discussion on the lifecycle processes of SOA governance, how SOA governance can become more mature, and how a maturity model can be used to support this growth, and the role of the architect in SOA governance, providing some practical guidelines for architects in a maturing SOA environment."
  


• Two great interviews with Jeff Davis about his "Open Source SOA" book, recently released. The first interview has mainly questions about the book itself. The second interview has quite some questions about stuff not in the book. A free excerpt of 1 chapter of the book is also available for download! The book itself describes many open source SOA products, helping you in selecting the right one and how/where to use it. Btw, CEP = Complex Event Processing. See for more here.
  


• jQuery 1.3 optimisation & advanced tips including example code on: unbind(), live()/die(), Ajax Queue and Ajax Sync, and Namespaces.
  


• Summary of implementations of the Builder pattern suggested by Joshua Blog during JavaOne 2007. Note that it is different from the GoF pattern.
  Related: interview with Joshua Bloch with many tips and best practices, most referring to Effictive Java 2nd Edition. E.g: generics, enums, annotataions, wildcards, lazy initialisation, strange things about Java.
  


• Kind of obvious observation (but still worth mentioning :) viewpoint on scalable web architectures and application state: don't store everything in the database, but treat (and "store") application state, cached data, and persistent data differently, using dedicated tools to manage these.
  


• This week Wicket 1.4 has been released.