Best of this Week Summary 28 June - 18 July 2010

• How Google App Engine does session affinity explained. In short: as long as the requests from the client are within minutes (it seems) of each other, the requests will get send to the same node. If the time between two requests is longer, it might get sent to another node, potentially causing a noticable delay. A solution to prevent this is to send a 'ping' every minute from the client.
  


• Three Wicket unittesting tips.
  


• The CERT (Oracle) Secure Coding Standards for Java: "rules and recommended practices for secure programming in the Java Platform Standard Edition 6 environment. This is a work-in-progress and they actively seek your feedback and involvement in making this effort a success."
  


• Twitter was having problems deploying new versions of their site to thousands of servers. With a solution built on top of BitTornado (a modified version of Bittorrent), they were able to reduce deployment time from 40 minutes to 12 seconds! The solution named Murder (Python + Ruby) is available as open source.
  

Best of this Week Summary 20 October - 26 October 2008

• Good tips on how to write clean code.
  


• A high level comparison of JAX-RS (Java API for RESTful Web Services) four implementations: CXF (Apache), Jersey (Sun), RESTEasy (JBoss), and Restlet (open source). Here's how they integrate with Spring.
  


• Four approaches to get to a canonical message model (CMM) in an ESB. Check also the previous two articles in this series.
  

Google Friend Connect vs MySpace Data Availability vs Facebook Connect

More and more users are not spending time on one website anymore. And users are getting "tired" of entering their contacts ("social network") every time again and again. The big social websites are realizing that and have created their own solutions to that. Well, potentially not their own solutions, but more their own branded solutions for what's defined by the Dataportability group.

The three announcements were:

Google's FriendConnect. It should give users a shortcut to social connections they have built on different social networks. The user can login with their Facebook, Plaxo etc accounts, allow the FriendConnect enabled site to retrieve the friends on that site, and if they're online, the user can interact with them. FriendConnect will use open standards like OpenID and oAuth. Biggest disadvantage is that an iFrame will be provided as the solution, so no API will be made available. Note that this makes Google the big switch between all these social networks! Since they don't really have a (big) social network site, this is their way of getting a piece of the cake: sitting right between all the social network sites! Some other concerns can be found here.
MySpace Data Availability. A bunch of launch partners will be able to access MySpace user data and be able to present it outside the regular MySpace widgets. MySpace users should be able to revoke the rights of the third party anytime. The third party is not allowed to store the retrieved user data. The good thing here also is that it will be made available via a REST API.


Facebook Connect. In short, the new API will give third parties' users the ability to transport the relationships from their Facebook accounts to the third parties' website. Compare it with what's now already available for Facebook applications (running on the Facebook platform) being made available for third parties. Immediately a big "chick fight" broke out, because apperently Google's Friend Connect is not respecting Facebook's user privacy control, as Facebook blocked FriendConnect! But it might just be Facebook protecting it's own turf :-)


Relationship with Dataportability.org
"The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems."
So, let's hope the above initiatives will comply with the standards defined by the DataPortability Workgroup.


Relationship with OpenSocial
Both Google and MySpace are in the OpenSocial Foundation ("a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML"). For MySpace their Data Availability project is outside the OpenSocial framework, but will stay involved in it too and incorporate when available.


The current status
All three are announcements are kind of the "branded" version of DataPortability implementations within the respective organisation. The furthest seems to be MySpace:
Facebook: no technical specifications released
MySpace: rolling out with only a few launch-partners
Google: not ready to launch yet.

Best of this Week Summary 10 - 16 June 2007

• Good list of 30 questions you can ask when interviewing medium and senior Java developers for your team.
  
  
• Good comparison of three bugtracking systems: Bugzilla, Trac and Jira. Bugzilla and Trac are open source, Jira is commercial.
  Bugzilla: exists the longest. It is the hardest one to install. Not an intuitive user interface. Trac: open source with Subversion integration. Lightweight. Just like Bugzilla a bit harder to install. Uses Python, not as many features as Bugzilla. Wiki based.
  Jira: commercial. Installation wizard.
  Which one you really prefer is up to you and the specific project situation. Check also the comments for other suggestions of bugtracking tools like Eventum, Mantis, JTrac, Project Dune and Track+.
  
  
• Apollo has just been renamed to Apollo Integrated Runtime, or AIR for short. And it has gone into beta (was previously released in developer preview).
  
  


• Apple released Safari for windows this week, a public beta version. Ars Technica looked at it. In general, the result is that the differences are so small, it's not worth it (yet) to switch to it. Pros and cons found were:
  + A little bit faster page load.
  + The ability to resize textboxes on forms (just like the new, just released, Netscape browser which is based upon Mozilla).
  + Since it should run on the iPhone (soon to be released), it should be able to fully support AJAX on that mobile phone.
  - On day one of the release 0 day security exploits were discovered.
  - Unstable, sometimes even requiring a full system reset while it was being tested.
  - Cross platform inconsistencies in for example the keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs.
  An update that fixes most of the exploits has been released already.