Best of this Week Summary 7 June - 13 June 2010

• When rewriting an app from scratch doesn't make sense, and when it might make sense.
  


• Java deadlocks through Cyclic Dependencies: title says it all.
  


• Carnegie Mellon University's CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) has released the Basic Fuzzing Framework (BFF), which is a simplified version of automated dumb fuzzing and includes a Linux virtual machine that has been optimized for fuzz testing and a set of scripts to implement a software test. It helps identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities from software products.
  


• A nice (external) analysis of the FIFA World Cup website against performance best practices.
  


• "Nokia's set of learning and teaching materials on Java in Mobile Devices (JME/MIDP). In fact, it is Forum Nokia’s most comprehensive set of information ever. Included are five courses, 23 lectures, 25 lab exercises with source code, and more than 1,200 slides with notes. The material has been designed for university instructors and students, developers, and self-learners. Five main topics are covered:
  
  
  • Java ME basics
    
  
  
  • Multimedia
    
  
  
  • Networking and messaging
    
  
  
  • Games and graphics
    
  
  
  • Security
    
  
  Of course JME is not so sexy as Android these days, but Nokia still has the largest number of mobile phones out there. And most (even quite low end) support JME, so from a market perspective the potential is much higher than building apps for Android phones...
  


• Several CSS reset examples, including a few really short ones.
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 March - 04 April 2010

• A short overview on what the differences are using Java in Google App Engine (and shortly mentioned in MS Azure) compared to "regular" JEE apps.
  


• Three Java serialization options compared: Java Serialization, JSON Serialization and Google Protocol Buffers. Check also the comments here. Another benchmarking set can be found here.
  The protocol buffers solution was fastest in this test.
  


• The third edition of Mastering EJB, is now available for free download off of TSS as PDF. The new edition includes more than 30 percent revised material and five new chapters covering security, integration, best practices, new EJB 2.1 features, as well as the latest open source Java solutions
  


• Interesting read on the IT infrastructure (most of the article) in F1 racing.
  Some quotes: "each car has roughly 100 sensors placed in key data capture positions and send anywhere up to 20 gigabyes of data back to the pits during a race."
  "They are collecting four to six megabytes per lap. It depends on the track layout and the quality of the coverage but we transfer about 70 per cent in real time to the garage or the pits". And, did you know there's a connection with the factory during the race?
  


• A funny observation that CSS has quite something in common with Aspect Oriented Programming! Includes a table which shows the similarities.
  

Best of this Week Summary 25 January - 31 January 2010

• Logging to syslog via Log4J. Too bad the example log4j configuration is in .properties format, instead of .xml format.
  


• A good selection of links regarding automated testing and refactoring.
  


• Handy tool for discovering/detecting unused CSS across pages on a website: Helium.
  

Best of this Week Summary 04 November - 16 November 2008

• Part 2 in a series on server load architectures: application-level load balancing, including client-stickiness.
  


• How to write maintainable CSS; a presentation by Natalie Downe.
  


• ProgrammableWeb is tracking APIs and has now reached the 1000 milestone. In the pie charts you can see the top 15 categories and which protocols they use: 63% of the APIs uses REST! 22% SOAP. The protocols diagram is shown below:
  
  


• Here's some more details on why Google forked OpenID. See my related post of two weeks ago.
  


• A presentation with the current state (it's growing big time!) of OpenSocial shown at OpenSocial's first birthday at MySpace's headquarters.
  


• I'm currently trying out Wicket with Spring and Hibernate, using AppFuse Light as a starting point. In case you're looking for an introduction to Wicket, check out this one that has been around for a while, and this new one that's been posted this week.
  

Best of this Week Summary 09 Sept - 16 Sept 2007

• Good discussion about the question whether CSS frameworks are useful.
  


• Quite basic but still interesting free online chapter "Beautiful tests" for a forthcoming book named "Beautiful Code". Interesting in it is that it shows that even the shortest piece of code can contain bugs, like a Binary Search implementation. Via TSS.
  


• Good tips (thoughts) on scalability of an application. Quite a large focus on threading and decoupling of tasks, and a bit on memory usage.
  


• Simple flexible little Java framework (I'd call it a pattern) to decouple event production and consumption. Check also this Ph. D thesis for an elaborate staged event-driven architecture.
  


• There's now a nice introduction with example code to create a sample application for AIR (previously Apollo), Silverlight and JavaFX. I've also added it to post where I compare these and Flash/Flex.

Best of this Week Summary 01 - 14 July 2007

• Last week GPL v3 has been released. This article gives a good overview of what has changed, with one of the major changes being the anti-"tivoization" provision. This ensures that the owner of a device that uses GPL software can change that software.
  When you are going to use open source tools that use this GPL3, it can have a serious impact the use of it on your project and product.
  


• This is a free downloadable handy Ruby tool that checks for a given CSS file whether the CSS statements are used in any of the supplied HTML pages. For large projects the CSS might have gotten so big that is too hard to check whether all selectors are actually used. CSS files are usually a significant part of any website page, so size does matter for CSS files. Removing any unused selectors is thus very useful excercise.

Comparison CSS cleanup tools

Interesting summary about CSS optimization/cleanup/compression tools here.