Best of this Week Summary 30 November - 06 December 2009

• A top 10 of SOA myths revisited.
  


• Google is slowly pulling the plug on Gears (mainly used as offline browser storage) in favor of HTML5; see the posts for a bunch of reasons. Google: "We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."
  


• A couple of interesting Java topics found during Devoxx 2009: Kanban, Spring-ActionScript (Spring-Flex integration), and a couple of technologies to detect and prevent coding errors before they actually happen.
  


• True or false: if the comments are ugly, the code is ugly? I agree: if your comments are sloppy, you very likely also will be in the actual code?
  Don't forget to read the referenced "three rules" C post.
  

Best of this Week Summary 15 June - 20 June 2009

• Finally I found a good summary of JavaOne 2009 (PDF) by Frank Cohen.
  Two other pretty good summaries can be found here and here. Both are split into days, so some browsing required :)
  


• This blogpost describes how's the opensource project MySQL fork Drizzle handling code contributions and testing. Some rules for the 100+ contributors are:
  
  
  • No code will be accepted that works by disabling any existing tests
  
  
  • It is not allowed to contribute code that causes a compiler warning
  
  


• Here's a nice summary of Google Wave's architecture.
  


• This week I performed a short research on tools being able to generate Java classes from XSDs. All I wanted to use it for is generate my domainmodel classes, nothing more, nothing less. No need for Java <--> XML binding/conversions. Another requirement was that the generated code should not contain any dependencies on that tool. Finally, it has to run under JDK 1.4 too :( Because of that last requirement, this summary was already quite handy. Well, I thought the research would be pretty easy, but it wasn't. Actually, in the end I didn't succeed. None of the below tools generate code that has no tool-specific imports. Do you know of any tool that should do it? Let me (us :) know in the comments! Below a summary of my findings:
  
  
  • Castor 0.9.x and 1.3: generates classes (no interfaces), with matching Descriptor classes per class that can be used to validate the created object. Imports org.castor.* stuff.
  
  
  • XMLBeans 2.4.0 generates interfaces and implementing classes. Both import xmlbeans classes.
  
  
  • JAXB 1.0 generates interfaces, implementing classes and runtime classes (haven't figured out what that is exactly). Imports JAXB classes/interfaces.
  
  
  • XMLSpy 2006 Enterprise Edition: generates classes. Looks more like you expect, "one class per type". But also needs com.altova.* imports.
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 14 July - 20 July 2008

• Real world cases used to describe vertical scaling for Java EE applications. Definitely check also the comments.
  


• An interesting theory and technology: host-proof hosting. This is a technique where the browser encrypts the data to be stored on the server, such that the host (application) only sees encrypted data, thus completely preventing the host from seeing the actual contents of the user data. Thus enables for "zero knowledge web applications". Two examples of implementations are Clipperz (sourcecode partially AGPL v3) and Passpack (sourcecode MIT license).
  
  
• Visualize your code in CVS with this Visual Code Navigator. Too bad that's CVS, which is quite old. Hopefully there'll be an SVN version soon!
  


• Sun this week released their
  Sun Java Mobile Enterprise Platform 1.0: "MEP is a framework for developing mobile enterprise applications. Based on robust synchronization technologies, it enables enterprise users to synchronize enterprise data (from back-end systems like Siebel or SAP) with their mobile devices. In a nutshell, MEP enables enterprise users to carry the enterprise in their pockets". You can get a free evaluation here.