Best of this Week Summary 14 September - 20 September 2009

• Scala is slowly getting some more and more traction lately. Is it a potential long term replacement for Java?
  Interview with Scala creator Martin Odersky where he tells its history, future and why it's so interesting (like combining OO- and functional techniques).
  


• Six valid "takeaways on what most REST adopters can and should do to get the most from their use of this increasingly popular architectural style" summarised by Dion Hinchcliffe.
  


• Article that describes using Benerator, which is a data generator tool that can be used to feed database with pseudo-random test data.
  


• Tip that shows you how to implement composite keys with JPA and Hibernate. Check also the comments here.
  

Best of this Week Summary 25 August - 31 August 2008

• Water & Stone PDF with an analysis of 19 open source content management systems. WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal come out best.
  


• Recently released Keyczar is an open source cryptographic toolkit designed to make it easier and safer for developers to use cryptography in their applications. It supports authentication and encryption with both symmetric and asymmetric keys. Keyczar is designed to be open, extensible, and cross-platform compatible. It is not intended to replace existing cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL, PyCrypto, or the Java JCE, and in fact is built on these libraries.
  


• How to add custom columns to the association using Hibernate 3.2.5 (and Spring 2.5). Quite unbelievable that this has to be so complex. It's quite simple with a @ManyToMany or similar annotation if you don't want an extra column in the association (link table). But I think it's quite normal that you like to add more columns, for example a timestamp of when the record was created.
  


• Great summary of Eric Meyer's talk at An Event Apart San Francisco 2008 about 9 CSS frameworks: 960, Blueprint, Content With Style, That Standards Guy, YAML, YUI, Elements, Tripoli and WYMStyle. In short: CSS templates are a good starting point, but to make the design unique you will very likely have to modify the templates.