Best of this Week Summary 16 November - 22 November 2009

• Did you know Java 5 reached its End of Service Life last month? But luckily not if you've got Java SE for business (support).
  


• This week Google introduced the first version of its Chrome OS. Here's a pretty good explanation on how it differs from current operating systems. And here are 5 (other) points describing them:
  
  
  • "The browser is the OS",
    
  
  
  • "It’s designed to fix itself",
    
  
  
  • "All apps are web apps, no installations", (sounds like Citrix to me ;)
    
  
  
  • "Chrome OS doesn’t support drivers and will not run on your laptop",
    
  
  
  • "Super-fast startup speeds"
    
  
  


• A step-by-step tutorial on creating a CRUD Web application and run it on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The web application leverages Groovy, Spring, and Hibernate (via the Grails framework), MySQL and Tomcat. For deployment the Eclipse AWS-plugin is used.
  


• Great, here you can download chapters 20, 21, 22 for free from the book "Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA" by Thomas Erl, Anish Karmarkar, Priscilla Walmsley, Hugo Haas, L. Umit Yalcinalp, Canyang Kevin Liu, David Orchard, Andre Tost, James Pasley. These chapters address the issues related to service contract versioning. In those chapters described are versioning of WSDL and schema definitions.
  

Best of this Week Summary 06 July - 12 July 2009

• Pretty high impact news: The W3C standards organisation has decided to let XHTML 2 go in favor of HTML 5. XHTML 2 was a "cleaner and better-architected version of HTML" but not backwards compatible with the current HTML standards and current browsers. Incrementally improving the current standards is what is headed for now. W3C is already involved in HTML 5.
  


• YourKit described for finding Java memory leaks. Free for opensource projects, otherwise commercial licensing.
  


• Interesting piece on Twitter's evolving architecture presented during QCon London 2009, addressing:
  
  
  
  • Caching
    
  
  
  • Message queuing
    
  
  
  • Memcached client
    
  
  All slides can be found here.
  


• Of course the big news this week was Google's announcement of its Chrome OS. A quick bunch of FAQs from Google can be found here. Why Google Chrome? Well, why not? And finally, a funny reason why a within-seconds bootup time is a disadvantage ;) Couldn't agree more :)
  


• Virtual Javascript keyboard (API) such that different languages can be used as input, without the need for a special fysically present keyboard (e.g for arabic letters)).
  


• 10 criteria that can be used to determine whether a product has good code generation support.