Best of this Week Summary 09 March - 15 March 2009

• A table-based quick review of the following RIA frameworks: GWT 1.5, Laszlo 4.2, pure Javascript and Flex 3.2.
  


• A short introduction on how ActionScript 3 differs (and not) from Java.
  


• A wiki constructed with over four dozen architects: 97 things every software architect should know. Also now available as a book. It includes advice such as:
  
  
  • Don't Put Your Resume Ahead of the Requirements (Nitin Borwankar)
    
  
  
  • Chances Are, Your Biggest Problem Isn't Technical (Mark Ramm)
    
  
  
  • Communication Is King; Clarity and Leadership, Its Humble Servants (Mark Richards)
    
  
  
  • Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse (Kevlin Henney)
    
  
  
  • For the End User, the Interface Is the System (Vinayak Hegde)
    
  
  
  • It's Never Too Early to Think About Performance (Rebecca Parsons)
    
  
  


• An introduction to Object Oriented CSS.
  


• Sample chapter from Thomas Erl's latest SOA Design Patterns book, and an interview with him. He "talks about the main benefits of having a pattern catalog, SOA and Web services, the current state of SOA, the difference between SOA and service orientation, and the role of patterns in SOA adoption".
  


• A series of five articles on setting up a Java Wicket project and implementing a frontend with it.
  


• Handy piece of (alpha) software to test IE8 RC1, IE7, IE6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP. Note that it looks like Microsoft is releasing IE8 this coming week, so get ready...
  

Best of this Week Summary 07 January - 13 January 2008

• The DataPortability.org is a quite recently started organisation that is trying to define the end-to-end data portability of identity, making use of existing technologies (like RSS, OpenID etc) as much as possible. Biggies that joined this organisation already are for example Google, Facebook and Plaxo.
  


• Great article on the motivations and issues on the apparent move to the new web development platforms and architectures like PHP, Ruby, RoR, REST and WOA. Also includes a simple example how you can really quickly create a RoR application and use its auto-generated REST API.
  


• Nice story/blog of a (Ror) webapp Pulse (it is a web-based cash flow management tool that allows you to easily monitor the heartbeat of your small business -- your cash) that was built in one month. Includes tools used etc. They used Basecamp to communicate and collaborate between teammembers during the project.
  


• Here's a good bunch of Javascript optimalisation tips for IE from Cyra Richardson, Senior Program Manager Lead on the IE team.
  


• Impressive stats on the data Google processes using MapReduce technologies for their indexing and searching.
  


• Short piece on how The Burton Group sees REST might be replacing SOA. Interesting is the example that explains how REST requires a different way of thinking (though I don't agree you should completely let the OO mindset go):
  Quote: "A REST application to turn on and off the lights in your building will require you to design a URI for every light bulb and then you send it on/off messages," [...] "It's not like I have a single service that manages all my light bulbs. It's a very different approach to designing a system. And it's going to be really hard for developers to get their hands around it."
  

Best of this Week Summary 12 - 19 May 2007

• A "Performance Evaluation of Virtualization Technologies for Server Consolidation" which compares Xen and OpenVZ virtualization. Published by the University of Michigan and HP labs. One of the tentative conclusions seems that OpenVZ is scaling better than Xen.
  
  
• The Java Performance Group homepage regarding the whole application stack: from hardware level via the desktop to grid level.
  
  
• A bit older this article which I discovered this week. It gives a good short overview of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) which is getting more and more attention these days, for example at JavaOne. This line summarizes it all:

  "SCA emphasizes the decoupling of service implementation and of service assembly from the details of infrastructure capabilities and from the details of the access methods used to invoke services. SCA components operate at a business level and use a minimum of middleware APIs."

  
  The specification supports implementations written in languages like Java and PHP, and also XML-like languages like BPEL and XSLT. Even SQL and XQuery are supported. The complete specifications are available here.
  An open source runtime and Eclipse plugin are also listed.
  
  
• The MS official final version of the IE toolbar has been released. Not as near as much possibilities as FF's Firebug and WebDeveloper, but it's a start! 624K so not that big. I managed to get IE7 crash 2 times in 60 seconds... This is not really workabable. This is the link to the blog, which contains a link to the download page.