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 09 February - 15 February 2009

• This week a new web-based online code editor from Mozilla Labs. Javascript, HTML and CSS support are in this first beta release. All made in Javascript and requires Canvas support. One of the goals is to create new useful functionality for the code editor. Check the video for a full introduction.
  


• You can now get your IBM licensed software on Amazon's EC2 AMIs. Development AMIs with IBM software on them are also available at no additional fee. In the future it will also be possible to purchase these services by the hour. Initially available are: IBM DB2, IBM Informix, WebSphere sMash, IBM Lotus Web Content Management, and IBM WebSphere Portal Server. No I'm not sponsored by IBM, but I do think it's a smart move.
  


• RWW is noticing there is a trend towards a different type of databases than relational databases. There's increased interest in key/value pair storage, e.g Distributed Hash Tables. Pros and cons are described. Example cloud initiatives of these key/value storages are: Google's AppEngine Datastore (built on BigTable), SimpleDB by Amazon and Microsoft's SQL Data Services.
  Non-cloud initiatives are CouchDB, Project Voldemort, Mongo and Drizzle (this last one is more or less a mix of the two paradigms).
  


• An application architecture pattern for RIA applications. At the end of the pattern the implementation is based on MS frameworks/tools but pattern is technology-agnostic.
  


• Summary of a SOA case study at Cisco.
  


• A nice set of coding tips for writing efficient Android code by Google, essential for Android since it runs on embedded systems. Still the tips are so generic you can apply quite a few of them in regular Java applications too.
  


• And as the last item for this week: an overview of the expected changes in Java EE 6.
  

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...