Best of this Week Summary 28 December - 10 January 2010

• "An interview with Duane Nickull, Senior Technical Evangelist at Adobe Systems as he revisits the notion of 'Web 2.0', and discusses some of the new architectural and human interaction patterns that are shaping the way in which we build RIA Web applications today. He talks about some of the new Flash authoring tools for the iPhone, the Open Screen Project, as well as the impact HTML 5 will have on Flash adoption." Transcription of the interview below the interview. Summary in four words: "Don't piss off users". He also mentions the Open Screen Project: "It is an industry-wide initiative, led by Adobe with the participation of other industry leaders, to enable the delivery of rich multiscreen experiences built on a consistent runtime environment for open web browsing and standalone applications."
  


• Blogpost using Ehcache and Spring 3 for implementing over 100K of RSS feeds, with certain feeds under very high load. A follow-up post describes the use of Ehcache DX Monitor Module (beta).
  


• Fun: a ZX-81 chess program in 1K. Actually only 672 bytes were available for the program!
  

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 27 April - 03 May 2009

• Already the fifth entry in a series on Wicket patterns and pitfalls.
  
  A PDF of presentation during TSSJS March 30 2009 on architecting applications using Wicket. Includes a short comparison to JSF.
  
  Here's eight areas to look into when considering using Wicket. Definitely don't forget to read the comments, because not all eight reasons are that valid. The same blogger also responds with a new article why he prefers Stripes over Wicket.
  


• Here's a presentation of Facebook's application stack during QCon SF 2008. In short: "Facebook runs a typical LAMP setup where P stands for PHP with certain customizations, and back-end services that are written in C++ and Java. Facebook has released some of the infrastructure components into the open source community, including the Thrift RPC framework and Scribe distributed logging server". Summary via Slashdot.
  


• An interesting new opensource technique developed by the guys from Digg for optimizing delivery of AJAX-enabled pages regarding the many HTTP requests needed and caching challenges.
  


• Interesting: a collaborative code review plug-in for Eclipse.
  


• A summary writeup of the Architect Summit 2008 can be found here.
  

Best of this Week Summary 03 December - 09 December 2007

• Interview with Bruce Schneider, Internet security guru on security (duh), privacy, electronic voting, encryption, passwords and more. One of the ways to attack identity theft is to not rely on authenticating the person, but on authenticating the transaction, as credit card companies do. Another thing he mentions is to *write down your passwords*, which is contradictionary to what you read everywhere; but he says, just put the paper in a safe place like your wallet! And because you write it down, you will more likely pick a strong password.
  


• Summary of this week's held Google Web Toolkit conference "Voices that matter".
  


• Nice inside view on how BT uses social software like RSS, Wiki, Podcasts etc. on their intranet.
  


• Pattern specification of the requester side caching pattern and its implementation.

  The requester side caching pattern is one of mediating the interaction between one or more clients and one or more data providers. The mediation consists of holding data items that have been produced by the provider(s) and using them to support requests from the client(s).



• Finally the OpenID 2.0 specifications have been made final and released!
  

Best of this Week Summary 22 Oct - 28 Oct 2007

• Nice article (but quite high-level) on how HP is transforming its IT (hardware and software) into a Servce Oriented Architecture using governance, Struts, SOAP, WSRP4J (portlets) and the Spring Portlet MVC. They are reducing the number of datacenters from 85 to 6, and each application that wants to be released gets a review whether it complies to the published standards for those datacenters.
  


• Eoin Woods, one of the IASA Fellows has written this article on the top ten software architecture mistakes. Most are quite obvious, but getting reminded of them can't do any harm! If you're in a hurry, here's short summary.
  


• Ten Java Open Source caching solutions shortly described. Different types of caching mechanism are shown: distributed, local, in-memory. Hmm, who was first...