Best of this Week Summary 17 November - 29 November 2009

• Great overview of (most of) Spring's portfolio. Includes tips on when you might want to choose Spring, and when not. Also shortly describes what's new in Spring 3.0.
  


• Google has opensourced a bunch of their Javascript libraries, which they use in Gmail, Google Docs and Google maps:
  
  
  • "Closure Compiler is a JavaScript optimizer that compiles web apps down into compact, high-performance JavaScript code."
    
  
  
  • "Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. Web developers can pull just what they need from a wide set of reusable UI widgets and controls, as well as lower-level utilities for the DOM, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and much, much more."
    
  
  
  • "Closure Templates grew out of a desire for web templates that are precompiled to efficient JavaScript."
    
  
  
  • "Closure Inspector, a Firebug extension that makes debugging the obfuscated code almost as easy as debugging the human-readable source."
    
  
  Quite a terrible name btw, since you also have regular closures in Javascript... The name came from bringing closure to their whole mess of Javascript libs they'd made.
  A short comparison between the compression performance of YUI Compressor and Google Closer Compiler using the well-known Javascript Frameworks - Mootools, JQuery and Prototype can be found here.
  


• Analysis and tips on how to improve https performance.
  


• IBM’s Jens Andexer and Willem Bekker from Standard Bank provide some samples of the good, the bad and the ugly business aspects of SOA.
  

Best of this Week Summary 16 November - 22 November 2009

• Did you know Java 5 reached its End of Service Life last month? But luckily not if you've got Java SE for business (support).
  


• This week Google introduced the first version of its Chrome OS. Here's a pretty good explanation on how it differs from current operating systems. And here are 5 (other) points describing them:
  
  
  • "The browser is the OS",
    
  
  
  • "It’s designed to fix itself",
    
  
  
  • "All apps are web apps, no installations", (sounds like Citrix to me ;)
    
  
  
  • "Chrome OS doesn’t support drivers and will not run on your laptop",
    
  
  
  • "Super-fast startup speeds"
    
  
  


• A step-by-step tutorial on creating a CRUD Web application and run it on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The web application leverages Groovy, Spring, and Hibernate (via the Grails framework), MySQL and Tomcat. For deployment the Eclipse AWS-plugin is used.
  


• Great, here you can download chapters 20, 21, 22 for free from the book "Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA" by Thomas Erl, Anish Karmarkar, Priscilla Walmsley, Hugo Haas, L. Umit Yalcinalp, Canyang Kevin Liu, David Orchard, Andre Tost, James Pasley. These chapters address the issues related to service contract versioning. In those chapters described are versioning of WSDL and schema definitions.
  

Best of this Week Summary 09 November - 15 November 2009

• A post on experiences with Git coming from Subversion. Too bad the reasons why the author is having more and more problems with Subversion were not given. Though you can deduct (some(?) of) them from the text.
  


• Presentation by John Resig (from JQuery fame) on testing javascript. Shortly describes QUnit, JSUnit, YUITest for unittesting, Screw.Unit, JSSpec for behavior testing (unittesting broken up by task), Selenium for functional testing and Crosscheck, Env.js, Blueridge for server-side Javascript testing. Also describes browser launching, which I would translate into "build/test management", distributed testing (Selenium, TestSwarm) and browser support (cost vs benefit).
  


• "A Decade of SOA: Where are we, Where are we Going?" The viewpoints from a virtual panel of Enterprise Architects who have lived and implemented SOA for most of this decade.
  


• Why iStockphoto embraced Google's Gears.
  


• And as grand final this week: the hardware and (rails) software architecture of Ravelry, a knit and crochet community.
  

Best of this Week Summary 02 November - 08 November 2009

• A summary of an interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson, three of the Gang of Four who wrote Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software 15 years ago. The full interview here.
  


• Five web frameworks comparison: Shale, Struts, Wicket, WebWork, Rails, JBossSeam, MyFaces and Spring.
  


• Jeff Dean (Google Fellow) on large-scale computing (PDF) during Ladis 2009. Interesting numbers regarding reliability and availability for hardware, like 1-5% of your disks will die. And even if you got very reliable servers with MTBF of 30 years, if you have 10000 of those, that means see one fail each day! And: "a web search touches 50+ separate services, 1000s machines". Some more of these quotes:
  
  
  
  • "Better to give users limited functionality than an error page"
    
  
  
  • "Ensure your design works if scale changes by 10X or 20X but the right solution for X often not optimal for 100X"
    
  
  
  • Monitoring: "If your system is slow or misbehaving, can you figure out why?"
    
  
  
  • "Future scale: ~106 to 107 machines, ~1013 directories, ~1018 bytes of storage, spread at 100s to 1000s of locations around the world, ~109 client machines"
    
  
  Other subjects touched: MapReduce and BigTable.
  
  
• Blogpost that briefly touches a few types of complexity encountered in large software (web) projects.
  

Best of this Week Summary 26 October - 01 November 2009

• Another good summary how merging WOA with SOA could potentially solve (some) SOA problems.
  


• This post covers three major areas of JavaScript/AJAX performance: distributed communication, usability, memory leaks and anti-patterns.
  


• Several interesting details from Facebook’s VP of Engineering about the infrastructure of the company, and the massive scaling problems it has to support. Big role for memcached there. Full video presentation here.
  


• Presentation at Oracle Open World 2009 - how to turn any ADF application into a SaaS application - an application suitable for deployment on the cloud. Includes short description of a SaaS, benefits, concerns, and several requirements. These requirements include customisation of fields shown to the user (e.g show or not show depending on the user or location) and i18n. Technologies suggested to achieve this are Oracle EBR, (WSRP) portlets, WebCenter, deep linking (tricky in JSF) and ESB.