Tech Team Lead News: cloud

Showing posts with label cloud. Show all posts

Sunday, April 18, 2010

A few pros/cons on when you'd want to use Amazon's EC2, Google's App Engine or maybe RackspaceCloud.
TweetDeck uses GAE (Python) for some parts of their system, e.g sending emails, in combination with EC2.

John Resig on improving the Javascript in your web app. Video & full transcript, including new features now available in jQuery 1.4. Mentioned are: delegation, live events, html fragments, javascript from CDN, additional header in Ajax calls, custom events, special events, themeability and customizability, i18n, and IE6 support.

An older but still interesting PDF on Scrum and XP experience in a project of 40 people. They experimented for about a year on different team sizes, different sprint lenghts etc.

Here's a basic list of software architecture review guidelines. You can definitely also use it as a starting point for your documentation, or to see if your documentation is covering it all.

Shame on me: forgot to mention last week the VMWare acquisition of SpringSource! Basically the CTO says "the aim of this acquisition is to provide a comprehensive platform as a service (PaaS)". Here's a view on it from a technical level by Adrian Colver (SpringSource), and here's one from Frank Cohen.

And related to the previous one, here's a short summary with interesting results on stress testing the Amazon EC2, Google AppLogic and Microsoft Azure cloud solutions. Bascically, the performance quite varied and response times varied by a factor of 20! And good to know: on Google AppEngine, any task can not last longer than 30 seconds!

Need to know "everything" about Java Generics? Then this large PDF Java Generics FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions is for you. Think you know everything about Generics? It still might be for you. For example, do you know what this says: "Enum<E extends Enum<E>>"? Or can you follow this one: "Can I use the type parameter of an outer type as part of the bounds of the type parameter of an inner type or a method?"? :)

Good article on the current status of Ajax frameworks. Most interesting is the notion that in 2005 there were already 48 Ajax frameworks and in 2007 there were already 240! Clearly the expected consolidation did not occur yet. Nice conclusion I agree with at the end: for Ajax use Prototype and script.aculo.us, they have been around for 3-4 years. For more heavyweight RIA applications use Flex (Silverlight is in a too early stage). What about AIR? I'd say the same. Though AIR needs its own runtime, so is a bit different.

Good intro on google's recently introduced open sourced binary encoding format Protocol Buffers, including references to pros and cons articles.

Recently the Open Web Foundation was launched. It "[...] will be focused on developing the technical specifications of protocols used for communication and inter-operability between applications on the web. The foundation will also set out the legal terms and best practices for the use and transport of both private and public data, and the usage of web services". Here's how it relates to the Data Portability Working Group and who's in it.

Microsoft is now sponsoring the Apache Software Foundation. Note that is not a move away from IIS, as mentioned in the referred blog in the article.

Drizzle is the name of the new lightweight MySQL spin-off, which aims at systems that have to process massive amounts of concurrency (mostly reads) on multicore systems. Think Cloud and Net(?) applications. Or, as they say it: "A High-Performance Microkernel DBMS for Scale-Out Applications ".

Quite elaborate article and comparison on how secure the current major web frameworks are.
Discussed are: Struts, Spring MVC 2, Struts2, Spring, Webwork, Stripes, JSF, MyFaces, Wicket and MS .Net.