Best of this Week Summary 28 September - 04 October 2009

• "Tony Hoare introduced Null references in ALGOL W back in 1965 “simply because it was so easy to implement”, says Mr. Hoare. He talks about that decision considering it “my billion-dollar mistake”. Tony Hoare, is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development in 1960, at age 26, of Quicksort. He also developed Hoare logic, the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), and inspired the Occam programming language."
  


• "Peter Thomas has updated his web framework performance benchmark with Grails and Tapestry. Apache Wicket still leads the best of breed frameworks in terms of request times and memory usage." Other observations:
  
  
  • Grails was far more productive than Tapestry 5. This was mainly due to the documentation quality of Grails compared to the scattered and not very well organized Tapestry documentation.
    
  
  
  • Ease of writing custom tag-libraries is IMO one of the best things about Grails.
    
  
  
  • Grails still has some way to go in terms of performance. I am told that significant performance optimizations for GSP will make it into 1.2
    
  
  
  • Session usage of the Seam + JSF combination is significantly higher compared to all the rest, around 760 KB per session."
    
  
  


• "At the JVM Languages Summit, Josh Bloch expressed his concern about what he called the "semantic gap" between the source code we write and its performance at runtime: As performance improves, our ability to predict the performance consequences of our source code degrades." Feedback from people on this subject can also be found here.
  


• "Mckoi Distributed Database (MckoiDDB) is a database system used by software developers to create applications that store data over a cluster of machines in a network. It is designed to be used in online environments where there are very large sets of both small and big data items that need to be stored, accessed and indexed efficiently in a network cluster. The focus of the MckoiDDB architecture is to support low latency query performance, provide strong data consistency through snapshot transaction isolation, and provide tools to manage logical data models that may change dramatically in physical network environments that may experience similar dramatic change.
  MckoiDDB is written in 100% Java and runs on any operating system that supports Java 1.6. MckoiDDB is released under the GPLv3 open source license."