Best of this Week Summary 16 March - 22 March 2009

• Great article by Dion Hinchcliffe with 10 emerging technologies every software architect has to know about. In short:
  
  
  1. Cloud computing
     
  
  
  2. Non-relational databases
     
  
  
  3. Next-generation distributed computing
     
  
  
  4. Web-oriented architecture (WOA)
     
  
  
  5. Mashups
     
  
  
  6. Open supply chains via APIs
     
  
  
  7. Dynamic languages (e.g Rails, PHP compared to Java/.Net)
     
  
  
  8. Social computing
     
  
  
  9. Crowdsourcing and peer production architectures
     
  
  
  10. New Application Models (e.g the symantic web, opensocial, widgets)
      


• Elaborate explanation of managing boilerplate text (e.g. titles, button labels, prompt, error messages, tool tips) in JSF applications. This includes more advanced locale requirements, like certain text that needs to be different when shown to junior and senior users.
  


• Here's a nice diagram with an overview of what activities are needed to create a website, from idea to support and everything in between.
  
  


• Always annoyed that you have to manually close a resource like InputStreams, Connections etc? And that the first exception might be surpressed by the second in the finally block? Here's a suggested solution: the Automatic Resource Management pattern by Joshua Bloch.
  


• Ten more Eclipse shortcuts you maybe didn't know...
  


• Of course you've heard/read that Microsoft has released IE8 last week. Here's a bunch of tips when migrating your site from IE7 to IE8.
  


• Ever need to create a UUID/GUID? Here's a few offline generators compared. uuidgen is an online UUID generator supporting version 1 and 4. A handy FAQ on UUIDs with some more depth can be found here.
  

Best of this Week Summary 20 January - 25 January 2009

• Five performance anti-patterns in the data-access layer in database-driven applications. The following are described:
  
  
  • Misuse of O/R Mappers: loading behaviour and loading time (e.g lazy loading)
  
  
  • Load More Data Then Needed
  
  
  • Inadequate Usage of Resources: database connections
  
  
  • One Bunch of Everything: all data access is treated equally (e.g access frequency)
  
  
  • Bad testing


• An investigation on how the front-end of iWork.com has been built. Used are SproutCore(Javascript framework), Prototype, WebDAV and JSON.
  


• 50 minutes video presentation on Orbitz.com's architecture. Brian Zimmer describes a search and booking example for seats and beds. Problems they came across for example are: i18n, distance estimations. Disclaimer: the architecture is not perfect and always in motion. Orbitz.com is a Java shop, amongst others they use: Spring, Spring Web Flow, Tomcat and Joda Time (side-step: much learned from the Joda Time project is being implemented in JSR 310, led by the Joda Time project lead), Log4J, searchable (query-like) complex event processing mainly for logging/monitoring(!) and throttling, multi-threading, caching, availability and Jini.
  


• Performance comparison of four JPA implementations: Hibernate, Toplink Essentials, OpenJPA and EclipseLink. Only JPA was used in the tests. Conclusion: there's no clear winner, all have good and bad things on different points like CPU or memory.
  


• Will building desktop Linux applications with Javascript be the next re/evolution for Javascript?