Best of this Week Summary 26 October - 01 November 2009

• Another good summary how merging WOA with SOA could potentially solve (some) SOA problems.
  


• This post covers three major areas of JavaScript/AJAX performance: distributed communication, usability, memory leaks and anti-patterns.
  


• Several interesting details from Facebook’s VP of Engineering about the infrastructure of the company, and the massive scaling problems it has to support. Big role for memcached there. Full video presentation here.
  


• Presentation at Oracle Open World 2009 - how to turn any ADF application into a SaaS application - an application suitable for deployment on the cloud. Includes short description of a SaaS, benefits, concerns, and several requirements. These requirements include customisation of fields shown to the user (e.g show or not show depending on the user or location) and i18n. Technologies suggested to achieve this are Oracle EBR, (WSRP) portlets, WebCenter, deep linking (tricky in JSF) and ESB.
  

Best of this Week Summary 27 April - 03 May 2009

• Already the fifth entry in a series on Wicket patterns and pitfalls.
  
  A PDF of presentation during TSSJS March 30 2009 on architecting applications using Wicket. Includes a short comparison to JSF.
  
  Here's eight areas to look into when considering using Wicket. Definitely don't forget to read the comments, because not all eight reasons are that valid. The same blogger also responds with a new article why he prefers Stripes over Wicket.
  


• Here's a presentation of Facebook's application stack during QCon SF 2008. In short: "Facebook runs a typical LAMP setup where P stands for PHP with certain customizations, and back-end services that are written in C++ and Java. Facebook has released some of the infrastructure components into the open source community, including the Thrift RPC framework and Scribe distributed logging server". Summary via Slashdot.
  


• An interesting new opensource technique developed by the guys from Digg for optimizing delivery of AJAX-enabled pages regarding the many HTTP requests needed and caching challenges.
  


• Interesting: a collaborative code review plug-in for Eclipse.
  


• A summary writeup of the Architect Summit 2008 can be found here.
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 June - 6 July 2008

• Top 10 SOA pitfalls.
  


• The TLS Report, a recently started website, is keeping track of how major sites have implemented TLS (Transport Layer Security, formerly SSL). Check the first surprising results of the best and worst here.
  


• Presentation from Jason Sobel, the manager of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, on how Facebook implements the storage of about 6.5B images (profile pics, regular photos) in 4 or 5 sizes, totalling about 30B files, 540TB and serving 475K images per second! Their servers (10K Apache webservers, PHP, Memcached, 1800 MySQL servers) can't handle that so they use CDNs.
  Here's a page from the presentation that shows the "read" setup:
  
  


• Adobe announced that they've created a special Flash player that runs on the server which allows search engines to better index Flash and Flex applications: Rich Media Search. The search engines are now supposed to "see" the Flash application just as the user does. Well, that's one reason less to not use Flash ;-) Google is also improving its Flash indexing by using this new searchable SWF library.