Best of this Week Summary 30 May - 6 June 2010

• Google Web Toolkit vs. Smart GWT: Which should you choose as front-end? Start immediately with Smart GWT, or start with GWT and pick SGWT components when needed? Some insights here.
  Related to that, you might want to check Vaadin: "Vaadin is an open source web application framework for rich Internet applications. In contrast to Javascript libraries and browser-plugin based solutions it features a server-side architecture, which means that the majority of the logic runs on the servers. Ajax technology is used at the browser-side to ensure a rich and interactive user experience. On client-side Vaadin is built on top of and can be extended with Google Web Toolkit. Vaadin utilizes Google Web Toolkit for rendering the resulting web page. While Google Web Toolkit operates only client-side (i.e. a browser's JavaScript engine) – which could lead totrust issues – Vaadin adds server-side validation to all actions. This means that if the client data is tampered with, the server notices this and doesn't allow it.
  Historically, Vaadin has been compared to Echo and ZK frameworks that use similar of server-side programming model. The server-side APIs are quite similar providing both events and GUI components, but the client-side (i.e. web browser) interaction differs in the way that Vaadin uses Java programmed GWT widgets, while ZK is jQuery based, and Echo has its own implementation. Currently, the most frequently compared frameworks include Adobe Flex, Google Web Toolkit, Apache Wicket and ICEfaces."
  


• A new open spec collaboration has started: OExchange, which is an open protocol for sharing any URL with any service on the web. Bigger parties involved are LinkedIn, Microsoft, Google.
  


• A new way of phishing: TabNabbing - phishing by switching background tab content. Discovered by Firefox's creative lead Aza Raskin. Biggest challenge seems to get the malicious Javascript on a site the user goes to.
  


• Google announced a partnership with VMWare (and thus SpringSource and thus Spring) at I/O by adding its (GTW) widgets to Spring and deployment to the VMWare cloud. In marketing speak: "This is VMware and Google's view of the power of using Spring along with Google's presentation widgets to get apps started in hours, delivered in days, and deployed in minutes". Below it's shown in a diagram:
  
  
  


• The iPad isn't without "errors" in its usability (UI) according to Jakob Nielsen. For example: cross-app UI experience is inconsistent, and for some reason almost no app supports scrolling and shows information only per page.
  


• "An overview of how to design websites and optimise them for Maemo, iPhone, Android, and a variety of touch and non-touch devices based on S60 on Symbian OS. After reading the document, you will have the basic knowledge you need to start developing mobile web pages that provide cross-browser-compatible content in a user-friendly manner. Furthermore, with the tips and advice contained in the document, you can avoid making design choices that could eventually lead to a dead end or poor design, thus saving time in implementing and debugging features that will not work".
  


• Show Slow: an open source tool that helps monitor various website performance metrics over time. It captures the results of YSlow and Page Speed rankings and graphs them, to help you understand how various changes to your site affect its performance
  

Best of this Week Summary 8 December - 14 December 2008

• Spring's Web Flow 2 now lets you use JSF as view technology. It addresses a couple of the existing JSF issues and already some features only present in JSF 2.0.
  


• Microsoft (yes yes, don't stop reading immediately ;-) has published a How-To Design Using Agile Architecture guide which "will help you start the process of designing your application. It discusses the six main steps you should follow, and then discusses the issues involved in making logical choices. It also provides checklists to help you ensure that the proposed design will meet your requirements", including patterns, best practices and agile considerations. This is a quick summary of the guide.
  


• A tiny bit off-track, but still interesting to point out: of course you know Google's GWT, in which you can create a Javascript web front-end application in Java. But now this is also possible in Python (recently releasing version 3) with Pyamas! Pretty cool!
  


• Talking about software architecture, how would you document that correctly? Here's a bunch of good tips trying to answer that. It is a good high-level overview of what you should document in an application architecture. Focus is on UML 2.0, but what should be in the documentation is valid for any notation format.
  


• Here's the first list (and maybe last :-) I'll post on looking back @ 2008: on overview of what happened with Java in 2008.
  

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 06 October - 12 October 2008

• One of the many nice editions of The A-Z of Programming Languages series, this time on C#. Yes, yes, that word is not supposed to be on this blog, but this article is still interesting if you're into programming languages. For example the challenges when designing a language. Check also the other editions, for example about: AWK, Forth, Modula-3, Python and Javascript.
  


• An Amazon S3 introduction/beginners guide for setting up hosting of images.
  


• Four cases of CSRF attacks desribed, including one were it was possible to transfer money from a bank account! Check also the mentioned paper on how to prevent them: Cross-Site Request Forgeries: Exploitation and Prevention. The paper explains how to prevent CSRF in your web-application/frameworks: don't let a GET modify anything and pass a random number in the cookie and each form POST. It also describes XSS and the same-origine policy.
  

Best of this Week Summary 18 February - 23 February 2008

• Nice overview showing how a Ruby on Rails Facebook application named "Friends for Sale" scaled to handle 200 requests/second and 300M page views per month. Includes the used hardware, software, # of visitors etc.
  


• This is a short article describing Comet, one of the better known technologies to push events from the server to the browser client. Also explains the name Comet (I for example thought it was a software product, not a technology).
  


• Reference to a thorough thesis (conclusions in the article) on performance of AJAX applications for 12 frameworks on mobile devices. Also 5 larger AJAX websites on mobile devices were compared.
  


• Nice (but not very elaborate) comparison of 9 features and benchmark of four JEE 5 servers: JBoss 4.x (OSS), Glassfish 2.1 (OSS), WebSphere 2.0 CE (OSS) and WebLogic 10. Check the reference to the jRealBench (zip) benchmarking tool.
  


• IBM has just opened their Jazz tool for beta. This post is a short description of installing and using it. Jazz "is a collaborative development environment product based on Eclipse, designed to support the application of RUP, which is itself an interative software development process framework built around iterative". But as you can see in the comments, it's not really restricted to RUP.
  

Best of this Week Summary 26 November - 2 December 2007

• Nice article on designing to facilitate unittesting, e.g. using interfaces to decouple an implementation class from its dependency.
  


• Here's a couple of reasons when to use and when not to use stored procedures. Most of the time it is not such a good idea to use them, except for example when having data-intensive/abstract computations, or batch-oriented operations.
  


• Interesting post on how PayPal is transacting 1500 USD per second(!) every day, and that their system is completely build in-house, running on thousands single-rack Unity servers. By using this kind of chunks (instead of a mainframe approach) they can upgrade a lot cheaper, because the servers are so cheap. This distributed, highly redundant Linux approach make the system a lot less vunerable to failures. A big benefit they have using open source is that it is a lot cheaper to have a development environment that is exactly the same as the production environment, therefore reducing the chance of inconsistent results and bugs caused by difference in environments.