Best of this Week Summary 14 June - 20 June 2010

• A short comparison between Wicket and Rails.
  


• "A step by step guide of how to develop a simple web application using Google's Web Toolkit (GWT) for the rich client and Spring as the back – end, server side framework: GWT 2, Spring 3, JPA2, Hibernate 3.5. The sample web application will provide functionality to make CRUD (Create Retrieve Update Delete) operations to a database. For the data access layer we will use JPA over Hibernate and for a database we will use Hypersonic. Of course you can change the configuration and use whatever you like. We will deploy the web application to an Apache – Tomcat instance."
  


• Nice bunch of steps on how to setup an Android project that works in Eclipse and builds via Ant on the commandline. Anybody got a Maven variant of this?
  


• This might be the reason why the iPad and iPhone (< iPhone 4) don't support multitasking right now: there's no swap.
  On a side note: Objective-C (programming language for iPhone+iPad) has entered the programming language top 10, up from 45! Not really suprising with 200K+ apps in its app stores and Apple's Mac OSX share increasing. Java still on top but decreasing.
  

Best of this Week Summary 11 May - 17 May 2009

• About three weeks ago, a serious vulnerability was detected in OAuth: a Session Fixation Attack. This article describes how the hole was handled by the 30 or so companies offering OAuth, and how Twitter took the heat for it.
  


• More on OAuth: how to get OpenID and OAuth working on Google App Engine.
  


• Here's an interview with Bruce Eckel regarding his thoughts on the RIA landscape.
  


• A short implementation guide on how to integrate performance management into development - or more specifically Continuous Integration.
  


• Which webframework is the Dutch software company JTeam using for what type of application?
  
  
  
  • Rich Internet Application: GWT and Flex
    
  
  
  • General-purpose, public website: Wicket
    
  
  
  • Miscellaneous website: Spring MVC
    
  
  Focus of the article is on why they pick Wicket for the second category of websites.
  


• A great insight in the BBC's iPlayer innerworkings and data usage. E.g, during peak hours, it streams 12G of data per second, making a total of seven PetaByte a month! For streaming CDNs are used, and each program is created in about 14 formats.
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 October - 02 November 2008

• Lots of OpenID news this week: Microsoft Live ID will be an OpenID provider. It is still in a testing phase; you can already try it out. Google is also going to be an OpenID provider, including the use of OAuth. But that looks less promising when looking carefully: the implementation is not completely following the OpenID standards! See step 3 and 4 in the image below.
  
  A clarification on why Google has done this can be found here. Basically, two reasons:
  
  1. this way users can use their Gmail accounts instead of the normally required URLs. But a URL does exist in the form of 'https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id'.
     
  2. Google doesn't allow OpenID for users at sign-in, because its federated login would break many of their rich-client applications. Google is working on this one.


• Whitepaper on how the JTeam company has implemented Continous Integration. Their complete list of CI tools is described; handy when you're looking for inspiration.
  


• Things to think about when considering Maven as your build tool (different angle on the post :-)
  


• Interesting posts from the Google Chrome team on the decisions they made creating the browser.
  

Best of this Week Summary 12 May - 18 May April 2008

• How to setup Spring with Wicket. This is a "challenge" because Wicket is an unmanged framework, this in contrast to Spring. I'm personally now using the Annotation-based Approach.
  


• IBM developerWorks overview of services-based enterprise integration patterns, 3 parts.
  


• Interview with Donald Knuth regarding the success of open source, the problem with multicore architectures, reusable code and unit testing.
  


• Nice bunch of tips that can help you decide when to use ESB or BPEL in your solution.
  

Best of this Week Summary 03 March - 09 March 2008

• Good article on Premature Code Optimization and the often made (invalid) conclusion: 'as a developer I don't need to optimize until the code is finished'.
  


• Practical use of Java in four web conferencing products described. Including integration with Flash.
  


• A talk with the director of engineering at Google about OpenSocial. Most interesting point is that indeed OpenSocial is not to interconnect social networks. Unless they are Social Graph enabled, but there is no site that supports it yet. Google also released the Contacts API this week.
  


• Related to that is Higgins: "An open identity framework designed to integrate identity, profile and social relationship information across multiple sites, applications and devices. Supports multiple identities because you don't want to use the same identity for MySpace as for your financial sites." Contributors include the big names like Google, IBM and Oracle.
  

Best of this Week Summary 28 January - 10 February 2008

• Interesting idea mentioned in this post: the very basic site inursite.com validates your markup daily and you get sent the result via email or RSS. Of course during the building your site should already validate, but this site can help for Continous Integration of your front-end.
  


• Great overview of Javascript/AJAX performance issues in all major browsers (except Opera). You can use this information to know where to focus your Javascript optimizations on.
  


• This week several BIG names joined OpenID: Google, Verisign and IBM.
  


• Google's just released Social Graph API. It tries to find public relationships between people's accounts.
  

Best of this Week Summary 15 - 21 July 2007

Related to this posting which mentions a good article about Continous Integration (CI), I found this interesting article which compares four open source CI tools: CruiseControl, Continuum, Luntbuild and Hudson. In short it is telling you:

CruiseControl:
+ Open source
+ Actively checks your source control system (SCM) for changes
+ Good notification options (including RSS)
- Bit more complex to setup
- Wrapper Ant build script/Maven SCM plugin needed
- Inter-project dependencies not a strong point

Continuum:
+ Open source
+ Easy setup
+ Strong Maven integration
+ Good notification options (though no RSS notification)
- Less extensive list of suppored SCM
- Checks SCM changes on user defined scheduled times (so not actively)
- Inter-project dependencies not a strong point

Luntbuild:
+ Open source
+ Easy setup
+ Most feature-richh of the OSS versions
+ Supports inter-project dependencies
+ Supports many SCMs
+ Separation of build scripts and schedulers
- Not so many notification options
- Checks SCM changes on user defined scheduled times (so not actively)

Hudson:
+ Easy setup (war deployment)
+ Scheduling and ability to poll SCM for changes
+ Good built-in JUnit support
+ Unique fingerprint per build so you can easily find out what was in that build
+ Supports inter-project dependencies
- Not so many notification options (but RSS is available)
- Supports not so many SCMs
- Lack of flexibility (e.g Ant build.xml has to be in your project's root directory)

Conclusion
Looking at the above +s and -s, my conclusion is that for smaller projects where inter-project dependencies are not important, CruiseControl or Continuum can be used. For larger projects with inter-project dependencies, Luntbuild and Hudson are a good option, though you really have to evaluate whether the new kid on the block Hudson is currently mature enough to be used in large projects.

Best of this Week Summary 17 - 23 June 2007

• Good introduction to Continuous Integration on software projects. Excerpt from the book "Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk". It includes:
  - What is the value of CI?
  - What prevents teams from using CI?
  - How one gets to CI?
  - When and how should project implement CI?
  - How does it relate to other development practices like coding standards, refactoring and iterative development?
  
  
• Another excerpt, this time from the book "SOA Using Java Web Services". It walks you through code for building an Ajax application that consumes RESTful Java Web services endpoints. Mainly useful for creating mashups, since enterprises usually use WSDL and SOAP. Section 10.4 is the most interesting with a list of conclusions. Regarding point 4 in that section, I rather recommend using soapUI as tool to explore service interface data, instead of building your own AJAX frontend, which can be a significant effort.