Summary of presentation with tips on creating visually appealing Android applications that scale to various screen sizes

Interesting points from a presentation in which Eric Burke shares tips on creating visually appealing Android applications that scale to various screen sizes.
The session focuses on custom views, rounded corners, scalable drawables, gradients, shine, holograms etc.
Eric is the St. Louis Engineering Manager and Android Tech Lead with Square.

06:00 Use alpha compositing with anti-aliasing, not canvas.clipPath() because you get jagged pixelated corners

17:25 triangular shine

29:00 Check the imeOptions for EditTexts/keyboard input. E.g imeOptions="actionNext" for example. Or "actionDone". NOTE: does not work on HTC Sense UI! So "actionNext" seems safest (might work, might not, but no harm done). For "actionDone" you still need a button for it on your screen anyway.
31:00 SafeViewFlipper code because the standard one crashes your app eventually (guaranteed) on pre-HoneyComb!
35:00 Holograms! Using the accelerator it acts as if it's shiny. Cool!
39:00 demo of cards sliding in/out and hologram on emulator

Best of this Week Summary 14 September - 26 September 2010

• A set of best practices for Collections, including multi-threading support.
  


• Good source to get you started with HTML5.
  
  


• A short overview of the current state of Model Driven Development and a couple of lessons learned.
  


• And lastly: a couple of summaries on Thomas Kurian's keynote of last week's JavaOne 2010 on Oracle's plans with Java, and a summary of the General Technical Session regarding the future of Java SE, EE and embedded.
  

Best of this Week Summary 23 August - 29 August 2010

• Basic best practices and optimization techniques for JBoss EAP 4.3 Production Environments.
  


• A tutorial in which you will "create Pingstream, a small notification tool that uses PHP (sorry ;), jQuery and RSS to communicate over the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), a set of XML technologies designed to support presence and real-time-communications functionality."
  


• Asynchronouse method invocation with Spring 3.0 tutorial with example code via annotiations. Full task and scheduling reference here.
  


• Good list of REST API anti-patterns.
  


• And another set of anti-patterns, this time for Apache Hadoop. Also includes best practices.
  


• Pretty funky: researchers developed misco, a mobile framework of MapReduce in Python (sorry again :) that can be handled by a server farm/cloud comprised of smartphones (e.g Nokia N95)."
  
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 9 August - 15 August 2010

• A quick tutorial creating a Spring Roo application and deploying it on Google App Engine. And related to that, an article deploying Spring Security on GAE.
  


• A "concise summary of the key points of API design, in easily digestible form" by Joshua Bloch.
  


• Finally: jQuery is also working on a version that is for mobile devices.
  


• A short comparison of Google App Engine and Amazon EC2. They are not really comparable, but still useful when deciding where to host your site/service.
  


• A Big Data analytics equivalent for LAMP (Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP) architecture based on Hadoop. Mentions Adobe and Facebook using several components. Interesting is the mentioning of Facebook which created a web-based tool, HiPal, that enables non-engineers to run queries on large data sets, view reports, and test hypotheses using familiar web browser interfaces. More details on how Facebook uses Hadoop can be found here.
  


• Gartner released their new 2010 Hype Cycle. Always useful to see if you missed any new trends :)
  
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 22 February - 28 February 2010

• A real life example on using Spring Integration to migrate content from multiple websites into Hippo CMS, handle errors, measure performance and deal with the fact that content could contain references to other content that is not imported yet.
  


• Summary of this article, which suggests rules for designing standard authentication schemes for REST API’s.
  


• Did you know JavaFX is already used on a big site like the Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010?
  


• Ten useful Java programming tips, maybe there are a few you don't know yet...
  

Best of this Week Summary 15 February - 21 February 2010

• Expected that Mozilla uses Agile everywhere, and definitely on its flagship Firefox? Think again, only recently they started to combine Agile and more traditional Waterfall as their new development model, dubbed "Lorentz".
  


• Tips for hardening your Tomcat installation. Other implementation guides, not only limited to Tomcat (also for example WebLogic) tips from U.S. DOD DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) can be found here.
  


• Always interesting to at least quickly browse through: a review of the 1993 code of Doom. And more "today": the code of Doom for the iPhone reviewed.
  


• Think you know Javascript? Try one of these quizes!
  

Best of this Week Summary 21 September - 27 September 2009

• Always feeling a bit less up-to-date when using RSS/Atom feeds? Well, convince your RSS/Atom provider to implement the PubSubHubBub protocol: it provides a callback-hook, which when registered to as feed subscriber, causes an immediate update (ping) to the subscriber (instead of waiting for the next RSS/Atom feed request).
  Or will rssCloud be the winner of this realtime RSS extension? Here's the basic (simpler) flow of rssCloud:
  
  
  Differences between the two are described here (including some issues) and here. A real old-fashioned flame-war has even started between the creators of the two protocols.
  And a good comparison which explains quite well why PuSH is the better choice of the two. Note that both protocols seem to be server-to-server only! (e.g think when you're behind a firewall or NAT...)
  See this article for an explanation of the PuSH flow of notifications/information in below's diagram:
  
  
  Update: PubSubHubbub explained by co-creator Brett Slatkin (an engineer at Google).
  
  
• Want to get to know Hadoop? In short "Hadoop allows you to write and run your application in a distributed manner and process large amounts of data with it. It consists out of a MapReduce implementation and a distributed file system." Check the rest of this introduction for more details.
  


• Five Java anti-patterns to prevent (out-of) memory problems.
  


• Three Best and three worst practices in BPM and SOA.
  


• "Tom Killalea, Vice President of technology with responsibility for infrastructure and distributed systems engineering at Amazon.com wrote an article on ACM queue on building scalable web services. He outlines guiding principles to building scalable web services with a lot of real-world examples, the core theme of which is “build only what you need”."
  

Best of this Week Summary 10 August - 16 August 2009

• Always interesting the Gartner 2009 Hype Cycle. For example, Web 2.0 is already on the way up again, while microblogging (e.g Twitter) is starting its downward trend.
  


• Code review tools Review Board: "is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process." Downloadable.
  


• Great description on how full-scale Scrum was applied at a JTeam project. It includes answer to the why and what went well and what can be improved. Also shortly the used technologies are described (Spring, Spring WS, Spring MVC, JPA, JExcelApi, Apache Commons for FTP, iText for addresslabels with bar codes, jQuery and Google Maps, Mockito (see this post on why they switched from EasyMock), MockFTPServer and Subethamail Wiser for email integration testing. Again, great that they share this publicly.
  


• Discussion of the quality assurance/testing challenges to be addressed with a SOA adoption, recommended best practices, and lessons learned.
  


• More or less a beginner's introduction to the Java Collections framework and algorithms. Sample chapter from "Core Java 2, Volume II - Advanced Features 7th Edition". Uses CircularArrayQueue and LinkedListQueue as examples (how often have you used those two? ;)
  

Best of this Week Summary 3 August - 9 August 2009

• Securing SOAP/webservices overview and tips including encryption, testing, maintainability and reusability.
  


• Four steps to securing webservices with focus on testing.
  


• Several junit best practices. And related antipatterns.
  


• Overview of StackOverflow.com's architecture, including general tips. The tools are MS, but the mentioned principles apply everywhere. Quite a lot on scaling up and out. Also included is how Saleforce.com solved its perforance problems in the database (Oracle).
  


• Awesome, parts of the original source code of Apollo 11's Command Module (Comanche054) and Lunar Module (Luminary099)! Pretty funny are some of the comments.
  


• A couple of more or less advanced Firebug usage tips: advanced debugging with the console, replacing a Javascript funtion in the console and profiling.
  

Best of this Week Summary 20 July - 26 July 2009

• Handy tip for creating testdata for your testclasses via "factory" helper classes, to prevent copying the construction of this testdata again and again.
  There's also a database version.
  


• A comparison of the following opensource search engines: Lucene, Zettair, Indri, Sphinx, and Xapian.
  


• Best practices for using the Java Native Interface.
  


• A great "free PDF White Paper from OASIS, OMG, and The Open Group was written to help the SOA community at large to navigate the myriad of overlapping technical products produced by these organizations with specific emphasis on the “A” in SOA; i.e., Architecture. The docment explains and positions architectural standards for SOA reference models and ontologies, reference architectures, maturity models, SOA modeling profiles, and open standards work related to the topic of SOA governance. It also outlines the agreement on core SOA and SOA governance concepts."
  


• How bad can one GOTO statement really be? ;)
  
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 June - 05 July 2009

• Here's a Getting Started and bunch of Case Studies for Google App Engine with Java: case study 1, case study 2 and case study 3. Main things to take away:
  
  
  
  • GAE does not support the whole JEE API nor all regular frameworks.
    
  
  
  • Google's database for GAE is non-relational(!) but an object store
    
  
  


• A collection of web 2.0 architecture articles every software/application architect should know about, collected over the years by Dion Hinchcliffe.
  


• Great extensive article from Martin Fowler on the Scrum daily stand-up meetings, including tips on: benefits and consequences of common practices for daily stand-ups, how to run them effectively, stand-up patterns, what to talk about, when to run them, and the goals, to help beginners and remind experienced practitioners.
  


• A few weeks ago Google introduced Speed, its open source effort to all make the web faster. Looking at some of the feedback, it seems to currently contain only basic best-practices tips.
  


• Great long article on the history of Javascript and what hopefully awaits us in the future.
  

Best of this Week Summary 8 June - 14 June 2009

• A whole bunch of AJAX best practices in this PDF presentation from JavaTech 2008, Pune - India.
  


• Another article with more details and explanation on WOA by Dion HinchCliffe. Web Oriented Architecture: it's a set of best practices for designing Web applications in which REST is the foundational architectural style. Below the stack:
  
  


• A little bit off-track, but maybe very appropriate for you: Top 10 Reasons Why Employees Leave in IT.
  


• Yup, Sun (Oracle) now also has its app store: the Java Store. Still in private beta.
  

Best of this Week Summary 25 May - 31 May 2009

• Facebook is now also supporting registration/login via a GMail account and OpenID, see the image below. I especially like that they've implemented it with a lightbox ("popup") so the user doesn't get as much confused anymore, as was the case in the old/standard implementation where the user is completely redirected to Google or the OpenID provider's website. Note that it is actually more "Facebook Connect" like this way! See here another example where OpenID is combined with OAuth to enable a popup login.
  
  
  
• Understanding how the JVM uses native memory on Windows and Linux. The extensive article explains what native memory is, how the Java runtime uses it, what running out of it looks like (so you're not running out of heap space!), and how to debug a native OutOfMemoryError on Windows and Linux. A companion article covers the same topics for AIX systems.
  


• Quite big news was of course Google's announcement of Google Wave at the Google I/O conference. It has been built with GWT. A good description can be found here. It's open source with plugin-like APIs with many integration possibilities. See the 80 minutes video for the full details. It hopes to become the replacement for email... Servers can be run by anybody. Wonder how Google is thinking of making money with it. Ads, just like in GMail? Maybe they are going to charge you for using their Wave server instances (SAAS version)? An interview with Wave's creators can be found here. And six reasons why Wave could be game-changing.
  


• Eight generic best practices for scalable high performance systems.
  


• Are you any of these two tools with almnost the exact same name? SonarJ is a plug-in for Eclipse that helps you validate your code against a software architecture, using static analysis (free for projects up to 500 classes). And now for the confusion: check also Sonar: enables to collect, analyze and report metrics on source code. It leverages the existing ecosystem of quality open source tools (ex. Checkstyle, PMD, Maven, Cobertura …), to offer a fully integrated solution to development environments and continuous integration tools.
  

Best of this Week Summary 18 May - 24 May 2009

• Tutorial in which you learn to build an SOA application which is listening for incidents coming from web service or files. According to the origin, the content (= incidents) are transformed into their corresponding objects using for the CSV file, a new Camel component : camel-bindy and for the Web Service camel-cxf component. Each message transformed is placed in a queue handled by ActiveMQ engine. All the messages (containing the objects) are next processed by a Bean service who will (with the help of injection of dependency provided by Spring) save the incidents in a DB using Spring and Hibernate frameworks.
  A small Apache Wicket web application running in Jetty Web server provide to the users a screen to consult the incidents created.
  


• This feed is handy to follow to see what's getting more mainstream traction and technology trends. E.g Thought Leadership: Technology Brief May 2009.
  


• All of Dion Hinchcliffe web 2.0 diagrams at one place.
  


• JSON REST webservices best practices described by the Feedly team. A related more general pros & cons of REST are described in this article.
  


• WiQuery aims to integrate the JavaScript frameworks jQuery and jQuery UI with Wicket, a Java framework providing a real way to create web applications with an OO approach. Other integrations like with MooTools, Dojo and Scriptaculous with Prototype can be found here. BTW, a comparison between MooTools and jQuery can be found here.
  


• The distinction between a spring singleton and a java singleton explained.
  

Best of this Week Summary 23 March - 29 March 2009

• Need to know whether a collection is modified concurrently, which causes the ConcurrentModificationException? Check this handy wrapper solution here.
  


• The second article in the Transaction strategies series. "Using examples from the Spring Framework and the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0 specification, explained is how the transaction models work and how they can form the basis for developing transaction strategies ranging from basic transaction processing to high-speed transaction-processing systems".
  


• For the Amazon EC2 now a free AWS Eclipse plugin is available. It facilitates remote development, deployment, and debugging Java applications on Amazon Web Services.
  


• Three common mistakes to avoid when implementing XML and webservices: don't make your messages too large, don't create too fine-grained services, and don't forget to create an XML schema.
  


• Javascript is getting more and more important the last couple of years, so here's a bunch of best practices and efficiency tips.