Best of this Week Summary 21 September - 27 September 2009

• Always feeling a bit less up-to-date when using RSS/Atom feeds? Well, convince your RSS/Atom provider to implement the PubSubHubBub protocol: it provides a callback-hook, which when registered to as feed subscriber, causes an immediate update (ping) to the subscriber (instead of waiting for the next RSS/Atom feed request).
  Or will rssCloud be the winner of this realtime RSS extension? Here's the basic (simpler) flow of rssCloud:
  
  
  Differences between the two are described here (including some issues) and here. A real old-fashioned flame-war has even started between the creators of the two protocols.
  And a good comparison which explains quite well why PuSH is the better choice of the two. Note that both protocols seem to be server-to-server only! (e.g think when you're behind a firewall or NAT...)
  See this article for an explanation of the PuSH flow of notifications/information in below's diagram:
  
  
  Update: PubSubHubbub explained by co-creator Brett Slatkin (an engineer at Google).
  
  
• Want to get to know Hadoop? In short "Hadoop allows you to write and run your application in a distributed manner and process large amounts of data with it. It consists out of a MapReduce implementation and a distributed file system." Check the rest of this introduction for more details.
  


• Five Java anti-patterns to prevent (out-of) memory problems.
  


• Three Best and three worst practices in BPM and SOA.
  


• "Tom Killalea, Vice President of technology with responsibility for infrastructure and distributed systems engineering at Amazon.com wrote an article on ACM queue on building scalable web services. He outlines guiding principles to building scalable web services with a lot of real-world examples, the core theme of which is “build only what you need”."
  

Best of this Week Summary 14 September - 20 September 2009

• Scala is slowly getting some more and more traction lately. Is it a potential long term replacement for Java?
  Interview with Scala creator Martin Odersky where he tells its history, future and why it's so interesting (like combining OO- and functional techniques).
  


• Six valid "takeaways on what most REST adopters can and should do to get the most from their use of this increasingly popular architectural style" summarised by Dion Hinchcliffe.
  


• Article that describes using Benerator, which is a data generator tool that can be used to feed database with pseudo-random test data.
  


• Tip that shows you how to implement composite keys with JPA and Hibernate. Check also the comments here.
  

Best of this Week Summary 07 September - 13 September 2009

• Wondering whether you should add this new piece of functionality quick & dirty or take a bit longer, but cleaner? Taking the first one sets you up for a Technical Debt, as some more explained by Martin Fowler.
  


• "Test logic can be buried in this unrelated code, which has nothing to do with test logic itself, making test code hard to read and maintain. In this article, the layered architecture of test automation is presented to solve this problem. In this layered architecture, the test automation code is divided into three layers: (1) test cases, focusing on the test logic of the application, (2) the domain layer, modeling the system under test in domain terms, encapsulating http requests, browser control, result parsing logic and providing an interface for the test cases layer, (3) the system under test, which layer 2 will operate directly on."
  


• A good explanation of the Canonical Message Model in the context of an ESB, and why you'd need one within an SOA. Great description of different approaches for implementing a CMM in an ESB and their pros and cons.
  A short introduction to CMM modelling (data model and message model) is described here.
  


• From The Open Group two free PDF books: "The Open Group SOA Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) provides consultants and IT practitioners with a means to assess an organization’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) maturity level."
  "This document describes a framework that provides context and definitions to enable organizations to understand and deploy SOA Governance."
  


• The JavaServer Faces 2.0 specification (included in JEE6) got finalised last May. Here's a reference to it and a set of references related to this specification.
  

Best of this Week Summary 24 August - 06 September 2009

• Great introduction to Solr, a search server (and more). The article describes how to get it running, send it some documents to index and how to search those documents in a controlled way.
  


• More details on Google Wave: the draft specification for the Google Wave Federation Protocol and the Java source code for the Google Wave Federation Prototype Server
  


• An extensive comparison of Spring and Seam. And, recently added chapter 5, comparing them with Wicket 1.3.6. Too long for you to read? Then at least read the conclusion :)
  Talking about Wicket, here are some
  experiences written down on migrating an existing Wicket application to the new 1.4 version.
  


• This article provides a short overview on the basics of RESTful HTTP and discusses typical issues that developers face when they design RESTful HTTP applications. It shows how to apply the REST architecture style in practice. It describes commonly used approaches to name URIs, discusses how to interact with resources through the Uniform interface, when to use PUT or POST and how to support non-CRUD operations.
  Related to that, here's 8 great tips/lessons learned for creating an API.