Best of this Week Summary 17 May - 23 May 2010

• Codelab ("tutorial") from Google that "shows how web application vulnerabilities can be exploited and how to defend against these attacks. The best way to learn things is by doing, so you'll get a chance to do some real penetration testing, actually exploiting a real application. The codelab is built around Jarlsberg, a small, cheesy web application that allows its users to publish snippets of text and store assorted files. "Unfortunately," Jarlsberg has multiple security bugs ranging from cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery, to information disclosure, denial of service, and remote code execution. The goal of this codelab is to guide you through discovering some of these bugs and learning ways to fix them both in Jarlsberg and in general."
  


• A new IBM Redbook on WebSphere Messaging and High Availability has just been released.
  


• A cool Android with Hudson continuous integration. Led on mobile phone changes color depending on the build status. Remember the Lava Lamps version?
  


• Java dynamic proxies explained. They are for example used in Hibernate for lazy loading entities and in Spring for AOP. Also explains what CGLib proxies are for.
  

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 15 - 21 July 2007

Related to this posting which mentions a good article about Continous Integration (CI), I found this interesting article which compares four open source CI tools: CruiseControl, Continuum, Luntbuild and Hudson. In short it is telling you:

CruiseControl:
+ Open source
+ Actively checks your source control system (SCM) for changes
+ Good notification options (including RSS)
- Bit more complex to setup
- Wrapper Ant build script/Maven SCM plugin needed
- Inter-project dependencies not a strong point

Continuum:
+ Open source
+ Easy setup
+ Strong Maven integration
+ Good notification options (though no RSS notification)
- Less extensive list of suppored SCM
- Checks SCM changes on user defined scheduled times (so not actively)
- Inter-project dependencies not a strong point

Luntbuild:
+ Open source
+ Easy setup
+ Most feature-richh of the OSS versions
+ Supports inter-project dependencies
+ Supports many SCMs
+ Separation of build scripts and schedulers
- Not so many notification options
- Checks SCM changes on user defined scheduled times (so not actively)

Hudson:
+ Easy setup (war deployment)
+ Scheduling and ability to poll SCM for changes
+ Good built-in JUnit support
+ Unique fingerprint per build so you can easily find out what was in that build
+ Supports inter-project dependencies
- Not so many notification options (but RSS is available)
- Supports not so many SCMs
- Lack of flexibility (e.g Ant build.xml has to be in your project's root directory)

Conclusion
Looking at the above +s and -s, my conclusion is that for smaller projects where inter-project dependencies are not important, CruiseControl or Continuum can be used. For larger projects with inter-project dependencies, Luntbuild and Hudson are a good option, though you really have to evaluate whether the new kid on the block Hudson is currently mature enough to be used in large projects.