Best of this Week Summary 15 June - 20 June 2009

• Finally I found a good summary of JavaOne 2009 (PDF) by Frank Cohen.
  Two other pretty good summaries can be found here and here. Both are split into days, so some browsing required :)
  


• This blogpost describes how's the opensource project MySQL fork Drizzle handling code contributions and testing. Some rules for the 100+ contributors are:
  
  
  • No code will be accepted that works by disabling any existing tests
  
  
  • It is not allowed to contribute code that causes a compiler warning
  
  


• Here's a nice summary of Google Wave's architecture.
  


• This week I performed a short research on tools being able to generate Java classes from XSDs. All I wanted to use it for is generate my domainmodel classes, nothing more, nothing less. No need for Java <--> XML binding/conversions. Another requirement was that the generated code should not contain any dependencies on that tool. Finally, it has to run under JDK 1.4 too :( Because of that last requirement, this summary was already quite handy. Well, I thought the research would be pretty easy, but it wasn't. Actually, in the end I didn't succeed. None of the below tools generate code that has no tool-specific imports. Do you know of any tool that should do it? Let me (us :) know in the comments! Below a summary of my findings:
  
  
  • Castor 0.9.x and 1.3: generates classes (no interfaces), with matching Descriptor classes per class that can be used to validate the created object. Imports org.castor.* stuff.
  
  
  • XMLBeans 2.4.0 generates interfaces and implementing classes. Both import xmlbeans classes.
  
  
  • JAXB 1.0 generates interfaces, implementing classes and runtime classes (haven't figured out what that is exactly). Imports JAXB classes/interfaces.
  
  
  • XMLSpy 2006 Enterprise Edition: generates classes. Looks more like you expect, "one class per type". But also needs com.altova.* imports.
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 25 May - 31 May 2009

• Facebook is now also supporting registration/login via a GMail account and OpenID, see the image below. I especially like that they've implemented it with a lightbox ("popup") so the user doesn't get as much confused anymore, as was the case in the old/standard implementation where the user is completely redirected to Google or the OpenID provider's website. Note that it is actually more "Facebook Connect" like this way! See here another example where OpenID is combined with OAuth to enable a popup login.
  
  
  
• Understanding how the JVM uses native memory on Windows and Linux. The extensive article explains what native memory is, how the Java runtime uses it, what running out of it looks like (so you're not running out of heap space!), and how to debug a native OutOfMemoryError on Windows and Linux. A companion article covers the same topics for AIX systems.
  


• Quite big news was of course Google's announcement of Google Wave at the Google I/O conference. It has been built with GWT. A good description can be found here. It's open source with plugin-like APIs with many integration possibilities. See the 80 minutes video for the full details. It hopes to become the replacement for email... Servers can be run by anybody. Wonder how Google is thinking of making money with it. Ads, just like in GMail? Maybe they are going to charge you for using their Wave server instances (SAAS version)? An interview with Wave's creators can be found here. And six reasons why Wave could be game-changing.
  


• Eight generic best practices for scalable high performance systems.
  


• Are you any of these two tools with almnost the exact same name? SonarJ is a plug-in for Eclipse that helps you validate your code against a software architecture, using static analysis (free for projects up to 500 classes). And now for the confusion: check also Sonar: enables to collect, analyze and report metrics on source code. It leverages the existing ecosystem of quality open source tools (ex. Checkstyle, PMD, Maven, Cobertura …), to offer a fully integrated solution to development environments and continuous integration tools.