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.