Best of this Week Summary 15 June - 27 June 2010

• References to two small Google Guice Inversion of Control tutorials. Check also the comments re: Spring's current complexity.
  


• Nice 2D graphics tutorial for Android creating a vintage thermometer.
  A beginners tutorial creating a tic-tac-toe game for Android.
  


• How to combine Wicket panels with Google Analytics.
  

Best of this Week Summary 14 June - 20 June 2010

• A short comparison between Wicket and Rails.
  


• "A step by step guide of how to develop a simple web application using Google's Web Toolkit (GWT) for the rich client and Spring as the back – end, server side framework: GWT 2, Spring 3, JPA2, Hibernate 3.5. The sample web application will provide functionality to make CRUD (Create Retrieve Update Delete) operations to a database. For the data access layer we will use JPA over Hibernate and for a database we will use Hypersonic. Of course you can change the configuration and use whatever you like. We will deploy the web application to an Apache – Tomcat instance."
  


• Nice bunch of steps on how to setup an Android project that works in Eclipse and builds via Ant on the commandline. Anybody got a Maven variant of this?
  


• This might be the reason why the iPad and iPhone (< iPhone 4) don't support multitasking right now: there's no swap.
  On a side note: Objective-C (programming language for iPhone+iPad) has entered the programming language top 10, up from 45! Not really suprising with 200K+ apps in its app stores and Apple's Mac OSX share increasing. Java still on top but decreasing.
  

Best of this Week Summary 7 June - 13 June 2010

• When rewriting an app from scratch doesn't make sense, and when it might make sense.
  


• Java deadlocks through Cyclic Dependencies: title says it all.
  


• Carnegie Mellon University's CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) has released the Basic Fuzzing Framework (BFF), which is a simplified version of automated dumb fuzzing and includes a Linux virtual machine that has been optimized for fuzz testing and a set of scripts to implement a software test. It helps identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities from software products.
  


• A nice (external) analysis of the FIFA World Cup website against performance best practices.
  


• "Nokia's set of learning and teaching materials on Java in Mobile Devices (JME/MIDP). In fact, it is Forum Nokia’s most comprehensive set of information ever. Included are five courses, 23 lectures, 25 lab exercises with source code, and more than 1,200 slides with notes. The material has been designed for university instructors and students, developers, and self-learners. Five main topics are covered:
  
  
  • Java ME basics
    
  
  
  • Multimedia
    
  
  
  • Networking and messaging
    
  
  
  • Games and graphics
    
  
  
  • Security
    
  
  Of course JME is not so sexy as Android these days, but Nokia still has the largest number of mobile phones out there. And most (even quite low end) support JME, so from a market perspective the potential is much higher than building apps for Android phones...
  


• Several CSS reset examples, including a few really short ones.
  

Best of this Week Summary 30 May - 6 June 2010

• Google Web Toolkit vs. Smart GWT: Which should you choose as front-end? Start immediately with Smart GWT, or start with GWT and pick SGWT components when needed? Some insights here.
  Related to that, you might want to check Vaadin: "Vaadin is an open source web application framework for rich Internet applications. In contrast to Javascript libraries and browser-plugin based solutions it features a server-side architecture, which means that the majority of the logic runs on the servers. Ajax technology is used at the browser-side to ensure a rich and interactive user experience. On client-side Vaadin is built on top of and can be extended with Google Web Toolkit. Vaadin utilizes Google Web Toolkit for rendering the resulting web page. While Google Web Toolkit operates only client-side (i.e. a browser's JavaScript engine) – which could lead totrust issues – Vaadin adds server-side validation to all actions. This means that if the client data is tampered with, the server notices this and doesn't allow it.
  Historically, Vaadin has been compared to Echo and ZK frameworks that use similar of server-side programming model. The server-side APIs are quite similar providing both events and GUI components, but the client-side (i.e. web browser) interaction differs in the way that Vaadin uses Java programmed GWT widgets, while ZK is jQuery based, and Echo has its own implementation. Currently, the most frequently compared frameworks include Adobe Flex, Google Web Toolkit, Apache Wicket and ICEfaces."
  


• A new open spec collaboration has started: OExchange, which is an open protocol for sharing any URL with any service on the web. Bigger parties involved are LinkedIn, Microsoft, Google.
  


• A new way of phishing: TabNabbing - phishing by switching background tab content. Discovered by Firefox's creative lead Aza Raskin. Biggest challenge seems to get the malicious Javascript on a site the user goes to.
  


• Google announced a partnership with VMWare (and thus SpringSource and thus Spring) at I/O by adding its (GTW) widgets to Spring and deployment to the VMWare cloud. In marketing speak: "This is VMware and Google's view of the power of using Spring along with Google's presentation widgets to get apps started in hours, delivered in days, and deployed in minutes". Below it's shown in a diagram:
  
  
  


• The iPad isn't without "errors" in its usability (UI) according to Jakob Nielsen. For example: cross-app UI experience is inconsistent, and for some reason almost no app supports scrolling and shows information only per page.
  


• "An overview of how to design websites and optimise them for Maemo, iPhone, Android, and a variety of touch and non-touch devices based on S60 on Symbian OS. After reading the document, you will have the basic knowledge you need to start developing mobile web pages that provide cross-browser-compatible content in a user-friendly manner. Furthermore, with the tips and advice contained in the document, you can avoid making design choices that could eventually lead to a dead end or poor design, thus saving time in implementing and debugging features that will not work".
  


• Show Slow: an open source tool that helps monitor various website performance metrics over time. It captures the results of YSlow and Page Speed rankings and graphs them, to help you understand how various changes to your site affect its performance