Best of this Week Summary 19 October - 25 October 2009

• Opening up your data as a company is great for potentially generating new business. But how to secure them? Here's a summary of references on how to secure APIs and mashups.
  


• "The Java EE Container Redeploy & Restart Report comes from a survey conducted over the summer, with over 1100 Java EE developer respondents. It analyzes time spent on the Redeploy and Restart process, and compares the following containers: GlassFish, Jetty, Tomcat, WebSphere and WebLogic. Among other results, this report shows that Java EE developers are spending 3 to 7 work weeks a year on redeploys and restarts, depending on their container of choice." Check also the comments here
  Great reference in the comments for fast-change+ctrl-s+reload-browser experience with Weblogic FastSwap and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse.
  


• The IntelliJ IDEA has gone open source for its Community Edition.
  


• How you could setup your support and maintenance solving the problem of keeping the knowledge and keeping it interesting for the people involved.
  


• Performance considerations and 4 anti-patterns in distributed applications.
  


• A review of some Java concurrency tips from Joshua Bloch, Brian Goetz and others.
  

Best of this Week Summary 05 October - 11 October 2009

• A quite in-depth article on creating highly-scalable components in Java. Described are the ideas used to create the concurrent Java components in the Amino Library Project (a set of concurrent building blocks).
  


• Another SOA Design Pattern sample chapter from Thomas Erl' book "SOA Design Patterns": "Service Governance Patterns, comprising a number of 8 patters. Compatible Change and Version Identification deal with service versioning. Termination Notification addresses the final phase of a service, it’s retirement. Service Refactoring explains how to deal with changing service contracts. Service Decomposition, Proxy Capability, and Decomposed Capability include techniques needed to express coarse-grained services through multiple fine-grained ones. Distributed Capability helps increasing service scalability through processing deferral."
  


• To ESB or not to ESB? Including a nine points checklist. Note that the article is from the creator of Mule (a lightweight ESB). Check also the comments here.
  


• Interesting hack to reduce startup latency for mobile devices with HTML5: put the Javascript code in comments (thus /* */), such that is immediately downloaded but not evaluated. Then to load it when needed, parse the text, strip out the comment-tags & do an eval().
  

Best of this Week Summary 04 August - 10 August 2008

• 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.