Best of this Week Summary 21 December - 27 December 2009

• An introduction to the Java Taste framework personalized recommendations. Taste is part of the larger Mahout framework, which features various scalable machine-learning algorithms.
  


• Great extensive 424 pages PDF report from Morgan Stanley on the current state of the mobile internet (apps and browser). A summary you can find here.
  

Best of this Week Summary 14 December - 20 December 2009

• A basic explanation on why to use a service layer in (web) applications.
  


• A description of key concepts in Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) Patterns: Write-behind Caching. In contrast to write-through caching, the write-behind function batches updates to the back-end database asynchronously within a user configurable interval of time. Also a business use case is described with performance improvement charts. Biggest disadvantage of write-behind is that the database is not always having the latest state available!
  


• This seems like a good Amazon EC2 blog.
  


• A deeper dive into the parts of REST that many people do not understand and therefore do not discuss. These topics include the implications of:
  
  
  • URLs as identifiers
    
  
  
  • Freedom of Form
    
  
  
  • Logically-connected, Late-binding Systems
    
  
  
  • Hypertext as the Engine of State Transfer (HATEOS)
    
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 07 December - 13 December 2009

• This week Java EE 6 and GlassFish 3.0 were released.
  
  
• Presentation on the Java architecture of SpotiChart.com, a site that creates a Spotify chart based on Spotifiy tweets on songs.
  Includes:
  
  
  • Spring 3rc1 + Spring MVC 3
    
  
  
  • Quartz
    
  
  
  • Maven 3
    
  
  
  • Hibernate, EHCache
    
  
  
  • Transactional & multi-threading
    
  
  
  • Ubuntu 9.04
    
  
  
  • Tomcat 6 (single war)
    
  
  
  • MySQL 5.1
    
  
  
  • Twitter4j
    
  
  
  • OpenFlashChart
    
  
  
  • JTreeMap
    
  
  
  • Rome (for Atom feeds)
    
  
  
  • Use of URL shortening services
    
  
  
  • Developed in 3 days(!)
    
  
  
  • Statistics of the site
    
  
  
  • Lessons learned
    
  
  


• Five Javascript performance tips.
  


• Read the interview with the writer of Javas SOA cookbook, including how he uses Agile in SOA projects. Includes a free download of the Governance chapter.
  

Best of this Week Summary 30 November - 06 December 2009

• A top 10 of SOA myths revisited.
  


• Google is slowly pulling the plug on Gears (mainly used as offline browser storage) in favor of HTML5; see the posts for a bunch of reasons. Google: "We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."
  


• A couple of interesting Java topics found during Devoxx 2009: Kanban, Spring-ActionScript (Spring-Flex integration), and a couple of technologies to detect and prevent coding errors before they actually happen.
  


• True or false: if the comments are ugly, the code is ugly? I agree: if your comments are sloppy, you very likely also will be in the actual code?
  Don't forget to read the referenced "three rules" C post.