Best of this Week Summary 19 April - 25 April 2010

• An introduction to Gizzard, an open sourced sharding framework (store data across multiple computers instead of on just one) which is used by Twitter.
  


• A hands-on tutorial of creating a Spring application that uses Hibernate as JPA provider and JTA for transaction demarcation. A simple Order Processing Message Driven Bean is implemented that showcases this integration. It is deployed on a WebLogic 10.3 server.
  


• Last week Jira from the Apache Foundation was compromised. Here's a description of how the hackers gained access via XSS.
  

Best of this Week Summary 12 April - 18 April 2010

• An advanced article on Spring Security regarding namespaces.
  


• A few pros/cons on when you'd want to use Amazon's EC2, Google's App Engine or maybe RackspaceCloud.
  TweetDeck uses GAE (Python) for some parts of their system, e.g sending emails, in combination with EC2.
  


• John Resig on improving the Javascript in your web app. Video & full transcript, including new features now available in jQuery 1.4. Mentioned are: delegation, live events, html fragments, javascript from CDN, additional header in Ajax calls, custom events, special events, themeability and customizability, i18n, and IE6 support.
  


• An older but still interesting PDF on Scrum and XP experience in a project of 40 people. They experimented for about a year on different team sizes, different sprint lenghts etc.
  

Best of this Week Summary 5 April - 11 April 2010

• Google recently released SkipFish, a free, open source, fully automated, active web application security reconnaissance tool/scanner. "It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments."
  
  


• Great, lessons learned/experiences/comparison on using Wicket and GWT. Definitely also check the comments.
  


• Tim O'Reilly's interesting attempt on defining the internet operating system. What is it, what does it do etc.
  


• Seven tips on how to make your API more successful from NPR's Director of Application Development.
  


• Five myths about old developers (40+?) debunked.
  


• A interesting comparison between Oracle Coherence & GigaSpaces XAP from about a year ago. More feedback also here. OC and GX are two of the largest Java data/computing grid solutions.
  


• And yes it's true, James "Java" Gosling has also left Oracle, after Jonathan Schwartz already did earlier.
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 March - 04 April 2010

• A short overview on what the differences are using Java in Google App Engine (and shortly mentioned in MS Azure) compared to "regular" JEE apps.
  


• Three Java serialization options compared: Java Serialization, JSON Serialization and Google Protocol Buffers. Check also the comments here. Another benchmarking set can be found here.
  The protocol buffers solution was fastest in this test.
  


• The third edition of Mastering EJB, is now available for free download off of TSS as PDF. The new edition includes more than 30 percent revised material and five new chapters covering security, integration, best practices, new EJB 2.1 features, as well as the latest open source Java solutions
  


• Interesting read on the IT infrastructure (most of the article) in F1 racing.
  Some quotes: "each car has roughly 100 sensors placed in key data capture positions and send anywhere up to 20 gigabyes of data back to the pits during a race."
  "They are collecting four to six megabytes per lap. It depends on the track layout and the quality of the coverage but we transfer about 70 per cent in real time to the garage or the pits". And, did you know there's a connection with the factory during the race?
  


• A funny observation that CSS has quite something in common with Aspect Oriented Programming! Includes a table which shows the similarities.