Best of this Week Summary 29 September - 05 October 2008

• Check the elaborate 95 slides comparison of Javascript libraries at the bottom of this post. It's a presentation by John Resig, Mr JQuery. The presentation is very objective. Compared are: Prototype, jQuery, Yahoo UI, Dojo and Mootools. Another short comparison of 14 RIA/Ajax/Javascript frameworks shows jQuery as the winner, as seen by the User eXperience reviewer. Great news for jQuery this week anyway: both Nokia and Microsoft are adopting it as part of their official application development platform.
  


• Can't get enough of these RIA frameworks comparisons? Here's another one, which is a short comparison/intro of three Rich Internet Application frameworks: Adobe AIR, Google Gears and Silverlight. See also my (bit older) post here, which also includes JavaFX.
  


• Summary of an article by Martin Fowler on how Agile can be used in building SOA implementations. The answer: yes you can quickly get value out of it. The biggest proof is the internet: loosely coupled and many unexpected changes.
  


• Quick-start JSF book free for download. Only 65 pages. Beginners level, step-by-step. With some mixed "infomercials" about the soon to be open source Eclipse IDE extension Exadel Studio Pro, but not in an annoying way.
  


• Key API design points from Joshua Bloch, Chief Java Architect at Google
  


• An explanation why a canonical message model (CMM) is a "good thing" in SOA and ESB.
  


• How to manage and lead geeks in a team. For technical and non-technical teamleaders.
  

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.