Best of this Week Summary 14 September - 26 September 2010

• A set of best practices for Collections, including multi-threading support.
  


• Good source to get you started with HTML5.
  
  


• A short overview of the current state of Model Driven Development and a couple of lessons learned.
  


• And lastly: a couple of summaries on Thomas Kurian's keynote of last week's JavaOne 2010 on Oracle's plans with Java, and a summary of the General Technical Session regarding the future of Java SE, EE and embedded.
  

Best of this Week Summary 06 September - 12 September 2010

• Small tuturial for sending emails with Spring Framework, which provides some abstraction from the underlying mailing system.
  


• Nice: "HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional badass's base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site.
  After more than two years in iterative development, you get the best of the best practices baked in: cross-browser normalization, performance optimizations, even optional features like cross-domain ajax and flash. A starter apache .htaccess config file hooks you the eff up with caching rules and preps your site to serve HTML5 video, use @font-face, and get your gzip zipple on.
  Boilerplate is not a framework, nor does it prescribe any philosophy of development, it's just got some tricks to get your project off the ground quickly and right-footed."
  


• Different existing logging strategies described and a new one: grammar based event logging.
  


• Be cautious to not over-engineer your software solutions...
  
  
  
• Are Spock, Geb and WebDriver the future of functional web testing?
  

Best of this Week Summary 30 August - 05 September 2010

• A "series of (currently 5) articles introduces Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE (CDI), a key part of the Java EE 6 platform. Standardized via JSR 299, CDI is the de-facto API for comprehensive next-generation type-safe dependency injection as well as robust context management for Java EE. Led by Gavin King, JSR 299 aims to synthesize the best-of-breed features from solutions like Seam, Guice and Spring while adding many useful innovations of its own".
  


• An extensive tutorial on creating a Spring MVC based mobile web application using MyEclipse. The IDE has already an iPhone skinned version built in, this tutorial shows how to add other mobile handsets like Android and Palm Pre. Basically: providing another style :)
  
  
  
• How to use Apache ActiveMQ in combination with Spring.
  


• Why ACID is hard to scale. and an argument that NoSQL/NoACID is the lazy way around these difficulties. Here's a post considering the performance argument for switching to a NoSQL database.
  


• Great interesting series on the progress of converting the native code BBC News iPhone/iPad app to a web app using HTML5.
  

Best of this Week Summary 16 August - 22 August 2010

• Great performance analysis (PDF) between Java IO and Java NIO by Google engineer Paul Tyma. Java IO is performing about 25% better.
  


• Of course I have to mention Oracle's Java lawsuit against Google. Several viewpoints can be found here (more on the profit/free markets) and here (more elaborate and technical details) and here (Android == Java?).
  


• A short comparison between Spring Web Services and Apache CXF.
  


• Several short HTML5 tutorials by Bob Leah from IBM collected at one place.
  


• Five things you might not know about .jar files.
  
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 2 August - 8 August 2010

• How to utilize Externalization (faster, less flexible) for high performance applications instead of Serialization (slower, more flexible).
  


• A bunch of pros and cons of Wicket.
  


• An extensive tutorial on how to work with XML, JSON and Google's protocol buffers within Android applications. It shows how to "develop a Web service that converts CSV data into XML, JSON, and protocol-buffers formats. Then you'll build a sample Android application that can pull the data from the Web service in any of these formats and parse it for display to the user". Assumes Froyo 2.2. Also shows a short comparison in performance between the three protocols.
  


• A five part introduction to HTML5 focusing on the mobile web.
  


• Highlights from Black Hat and Defcon 2010. That means security stuff :).
  
  


• A list of (mostly obvious) performance problems identified at Zappos, Monster etc.
  


• A pretty comprehensive overview of Java code obfuscating including these types: name, strings, code and flow, incremental, watermarking etc.
  

Best of this Week Summary 03 May - 09 May 2010

• Nice overview of what's new in HTML5 on html, css and Javascript APIs.
  


• "Principles and best practices for building high performing and highly resilient WebSphere eXtreme Scale applications" or "How IBM Supports High Volume and High SLA Applications". Compare for example with GigaSpaces.
  


• What's the current standing of SOA after five years?
  


• An interesting project DIME which provides Dependency Injection for Java ME. Compare with Spring ME.
  


• Mod4j (Modeling for Java): an open source DSL-based environment for developing administrative enterprise applications. The DSL helps you generate the basic CRUD and code for defined business rules.
  

Best of this Week Summary 15 March - 21 March 2010

• Twitter and Digg are moving from MySQL to Cassandra (a highly scalable second-generation distributed database, bringing together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model; a Facebook opensourced project). The reason for Digg for the move "is the increasing difficulty of building a high-performance, write-intensive application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced them into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead".
  Twitter has about the same reason: "No single points of failure", "Highly scalable writes (we have highly variable write traffic)", and "A healthy and productive open source community".
  Twitter tried HBase, Voldemort, MongoDB, MemcacheDB, Redis, Cassandra, and HyperTable amongst others before deciding to go with Cassandra. Interesting to read is how they slowly rollout Cassandra to limited sets of users.
  An introduction to Cassandra to get it up and running can be found here.
  
  


• A short post on how to implement Automatic testing Oracle Service Bus using Hudson, Maven and SoapUI.
  


• What to expect from HTML5 for webdevelopers.
  

Best of this Week Summary 30 November - 06 December 2009

• A top 10 of SOA myths revisited.
  


• Google is slowly pulling the plug on Gears (mainly used as offline browser storage) in favor of HTML5; see the posts for a bunch of reasons. Google: "We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."
  


• A couple of interesting Java topics found during Devoxx 2009: Kanban, Spring-ActionScript (Spring-Flex integration), and a couple of technologies to detect and prevent coding errors before they actually happen.
  


• True or false: if the comments are ugly, the code is ugly? I agree: if your comments are sloppy, you very likely also will be in the actual code?
  Don't forget to read the referenced "three rules" C post.
  

Best of this Week Summary 05 October - 11 October 2009

• A quite in-depth article on creating highly-scalable components in Java. Described are the ideas used to create the concurrent Java components in the Amino Library Project (a set of concurrent building blocks).
  


• Another SOA Design Pattern sample chapter from Thomas Erl' book "SOA Design Patterns": "Service Governance Patterns, comprising a number of 8 patters. Compatible Change and Version Identification deal with service versioning. Termination Notification addresses the final phase of a service, it’s retirement. Service Refactoring explains how to deal with changing service contracts. Service Decomposition, Proxy Capability, and Decomposed Capability include techniques needed to express coarse-grained services through multiple fine-grained ones. Distributed Capability helps increasing service scalability through processing deferral."
  


• To ESB or not to ESB? Including a nine points checklist. Note that the article is from the creator of Mule (a lightweight ESB). Check also the comments here.
  


• Interesting hack to reduce startup latency for mobile devices with HTML5: put the Javascript code in comments (thus /* */), such that is immediately downloaded but not evaluated. Then to load it when needed, parse the text, strip out the comment-tags & do an eval().