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)