Best of this Week Summary 09 March - 15 March 2009

• A table-based quick review of the following RIA frameworks: GWT 1.5, Laszlo 4.2, pure Javascript and Flex 3.2.
  


• A short introduction on how ActionScript 3 differs (and not) from Java.
  


• A wiki constructed with over four dozen architects: 97 things every software architect should know. Also now available as a book. It includes advice such as:
  
  
  • Don't Put Your Resume Ahead of the Requirements (Nitin Borwankar)
    
  
  
  • Chances Are, Your Biggest Problem Isn't Technical (Mark Ramm)
    
  
  
  • Communication Is King; Clarity and Leadership, Its Humble Servants (Mark Richards)
    
  
  
  • Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse (Kevlin Henney)
    
  
  
  • For the End User, the Interface Is the System (Vinayak Hegde)
    
  
  
  • It's Never Too Early to Think About Performance (Rebecca Parsons)
    
  
  


• An introduction to Object Oriented CSS.
  


• Sample chapter from Thomas Erl's latest SOA Design Patterns book, and an interview with him. He "talks about the main benefits of having a pattern catalog, SOA and Web services, the current state of SOA, the difference between SOA and service orientation, and the role of patterns in SOA adoption".
  


• A series of five articles on setting up a Java Wicket project and implementing a frontend with it.
  


• Handy piece of (alpha) software to test IE8 RC1, IE7, IE6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP. Note that it looks like Microsoft is releasing IE8 this coming week, so get ready...
  

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.