Best of this Week Summary 22 February - 28 February 2010

• A real life example on using Spring Integration to migrate content from multiple websites into Hippo CMS, handle errors, measure performance and deal with the fact that content could contain references to other content that is not imported yet.
  


• Summary of this article, which suggests rules for designing standard authentication schemes for REST API’s.
  


• Did you know JavaFX is already used on a big site like the Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010?
  


• Ten useful Java programming tips, maybe there are a few you don't know yet...
  

Best of this Week Summary 16 February - 22 February 2009

• JavaFX SDK 1.1 has been released last week including mobile support. Some first impressions can be found here. There've been already over 80000 downloads of the SDK and over 100 million downloads of the runtime. The last number is technically correct, but doesn't say much about the real usage: JavaFX is bundled with the 1.6uXX runtime, so you get it whether you use it or not.
  Here's a tutorial on creating a mashup with JavaFX and a Flickr webservice.
  
  (No it will not win the beauty contest in UI design ;-)
  


• A nice collection of Java resources on the net, from websites to tools and trends. Useful for newbies, but also for experienced Java professionals: maybe there's something in there you did't yet know about!
  


• So how are we going to port applications that you built on a cloud like Amazon's EC2 to run on another cloud like Microsoft's Azure? And what about migrating data stored in a cloud? For that the Unified Cloud Interface project has started recently: "The concept is to provide a single interface that can be used to retrieve a unified representation of all multi-cloud resources and to control these resources as needed." Looking for an overview of cloud-providers out there? Check this list.
  


• First article Understanding transaction pitfalls when using JPA (EJB 3.0) or Spring in a series on developing an effective transaction strategy for the Java platform.
  


• More than 30 US and international cyber security organizations jointly released the consensus list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors that lead to security bugs and that enable cyber espionage and cyber crime. Among the experts were also members from OWASP, known for their top 10 web application vulnerabilities. Here´s seven ways to avoid those 25 programming errors.
  

Best of this Week Summary 1 December - 7 November 2008

• Post from UI expert Jakob Nielsen on what to think about regarding user interaction and usability when using an Agile methodology (like Scrum).
  


• This week, Sun released version 1.0 of JavaFX, their RIA platform. Too late or just in time? The competion Smooth animation demo here. Quite some reactions here.
  


• These days you see quite some integration happening with Flex at the front-end and Java at the back-end of a web applications. There are a couple of things to consider whether you might want to choose Flex or not.
  


• Tips to help you pass the SCBCD (Sun Certified Business Component Developer) exam.
  

Best of this Week Summary 03 November - 09 November 2008

• Three reasons why you could switch from Subversion to Git (distributed source code management tool, created by Linux Torvalds). Here's a quite extensive comparison and here you can compare it yourself.
  


• What makes good REST? Roy Fielding lists a couple of criteria.
  


• Tips and Q&A on optimizing and tuning Apache Tomcat.
  


• Yahoo! opened up its open strategy platform: Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP), and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). All services are accessed via oAuth.
  


• Is the Sun (pun intended ;-) setting for Swing in favor of JavaFX???
  

Best of this Week Summary 18 August - 24 August 2008

• Patterns-based Evaluation of Open Source BPM Systems: jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark. Report's conclusion: "Overall one can conclude that the open source systems are geared more towards developers than business analysts. If one is proficient with Java, jBPM may be a good choice, although if not, choosing jBPM is less advisable. Similarly, whilst OpenWFE has a powerful language for workflow specification in terms of its support for the workflow patterns, we postulate that it will be difficult to understand by non-programmers. Finally, Endydra Shark’s minimalistic support for the workflow patterns may require complicated work-arounds for capturing nontrivial business scenarios."
  


• As part of their EC2 offering, Amazon introduced this week their Elastic Block Store, enabling you to mount an EBS and format it or setup a database on it. S3 is not really intended for database-like storage. Here's another introduction, including a link to an article on how to setup MySQL on EBS. Here's ESB explained, including some diagrams.
  


• Article on the succesful execution of a large project (20 man years, 100.000+ lines of code) with an Agile approach using Scrum, with developers from India and The Netherlands. Includes lessons learned. Technologies used: Java, Spring, Hibernate, WebLogic, Oracle, Swing (UI) and Flex (for the displays) and Bamboo (continuous integration).
  


• Handy short comparison between LWUIT (recently open sourced by Sun) and JavaFX Mobile. Here's another comparison from Sun.
  

Best of this Week Summary 28 July - 03 August 2008

• Introduction from google on OAuth and why you should/might want to use oAuth, including a few examples.
  


• A bit more than a week ago (July 20th to be exact), Amazon's S3 had a big outage of several hours, affecting many (startup) websites. Here's the explanation why, from Amazon. The short story: message corruption in server-to-server communication.
  


• In this blog I of course also take care of the starting software engineer :-), so here's ten concepts every software engineer should know.
  


• MySpace is now also supporting OpenID.
  


• Finally, Sun introduced the JavaFX preview SDK. Official announcement here. Below a screenshot of the demo application:
  
  
• In case you're not using it yet, definitely worth checking out this opensource LGPL static Java analyzing tool Findbugs.
  

Best of this Week Summary 6 Nov - 11 Nov 2007

• This is a good blog to get you started on JavaFX and related technologies. See this post on what's been covered until now.
  


• Madly interesting is this technical posting about Amazon's Dynamo, which is a their internal distributed storage system in which the data is stored and looked up via a key, with a put() and get() interface. Sounds quite similar to the put() and get() for a Hashtable in Java right? ;-) Actually Dynamo is built in Java, so I guess that's no coincidence! The posting gives you quite some details on Amazon's internal infrastructure, and introduces interesting new terms like that it is an "eventually consistent storage system". What is also cool is that each of Amazon's internal applications can setup their own SLA with Dynamo. This SLA defines the amount of delays and data discrepancy the application will tolerate from Dynamo. The fact that Amazon is opening up its services (with S3 and EC2), makes it a huge differentiator from companies like Google and Microsoft, which don't open up their systems (some Google GFS info you can find here). Related to this the new term that is being coined recently: HaaS (Hardware as a Service). No time to read the whole paper? A summary you can find here. Compare it with Hadoop and CouchDB.
  


• Related to my last week's post about OpenSocial, this week the (very) alpha version 0.5 of the Container API has been released.
  


• Note: I turned on moderation for comments this week because of a big spamming "effort"... Thanks whoever you are...
  

A perspective on Apollo vs Silverlight vs JavaFX vs Flash/Flex

Introduction
In the last few weeks, quite a few RIA framework announcements and/or rebrandings were announced:

• Apollo from Adobe, which is a runtime to be able to enable richer RIA applications on your desktop.
  
  
• Silverlight from Microsoft, which is a browser plugin to provide a richer RIA browser experience.
  



• JavaFX from Sun, which is also a a runtime to enable richer RIA applications on your desktop.
  

These three frameworks are all in some way also related to Flash/Flex from Adobe.

In this article, I'll be making a first stab at comparing these four frameworks. It should help you to get some perspective and initial understanding on the differences and the similarities.

The goal of all these frameworks is be able to build Rich Internet Applications more easily and to make the user experience as rich as possible. Currently a lot of this kind of functionality is being built with AJAX (asynchronous Javascript, CSS, DOM manipulation and XML) and Flash/Flex. Manual construction of applications with the four AJAX components is quite a pain, and thus companies are trying to create the silver bullet for easy creation of RIA applications. Creating applications with Flash/Flex is relatively easy and makes the applications really rich, but it is vendor-specific (Adobe). Note that recently Adobe made Flex open source (note that this is not the same as the Flash runtime, which stays closed source). Some of the newly announced frameworks are more open source (JavaFX) than others (Silverlight).

To make the comparison easier, I've created a table that lists different aspects of the frameworks I found interesting to have detailed out, and for each of those aspects, how the four frameworks fit in.

	Apollo	Silverlight	JavaFX	Flash/Flex
Definition	"Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop." "[Apollo is] a runtime complementary to the browser, to bring webapps to the desktop, so richer and more interactive RIAs"	"Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web"	“JavaFX Script takes advantage of the Java Runtime Environment's (JRE) ubiquity across devices and enables creative professionals to begin building applications based on their current knowledge base. It also uses Java technology's "write once, run anywhere" capability to help realize a future where consumers can access content whenever and wherever on any Java-powered device.”	Flash: "[...] is software for creating rich, interactive content for digital, web, and mobile platforms." “[...] it provides the tools you need to deliver an engaging user experience.” Flex: “[...] it is an application development solution for creating and delivering cross-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs) within the enterprise and across the web.” It has a client-runtime which is based upon the Flash Player. How is Flex different from Flash: “Flex and Flash have complementary strengths. Flash is the leading authoring tool for web developers, multimedia professionals, animators, and videographers who want to create rich interactive content. Flex 2 products enable more application developers to leverage the powerful Flash runtime to create data-driven RIAs. In addition, developers can use Flash and Flex Builder together to add rich interactive elements to a structured, Flex based application.”
Status	Alpha, public beta in US summer, v1.0 early winter 2007	1.0 beta	Super alpha	Flash: version CS3 Flex: version 2
Runtime	6MB	About 2-4MB	2-4MB maybe	Flash: client-runtime uses Adobe Flash Player 9: 1.1MB. Flex: client-runtime uses Adobe Flash Player 9, 1.1MB.
Technologies	Runtime outside browser	Plugin for browser + based upon existing WPF/E (.NET based) platform for Windows and Mac	New language F3+runtime outside browser+java webstart/applets+Swing+Java2D	Flash: IDE to build Flash applications with ActionScript. Flex: "The Flex [UI] application framework consists of MXML, ActionScript 3.0, and the Flex class library. Developers use MXML to declaratively define the application user interface elements and use ActionScript for client logic and procedural control. Developers write MXML and ActionScript source code using the Adobe Flex Builder™ IDE or a standard text editor."
Platform	Windows + Linux + Mac	Windows browser + Mac browser	Windows + Linux + Mac	Flash/Flex player client-runtime: Windows + linux + mac
Licensing	Licensed (not opensource)	Licensed	OSS (GPL)	Flash: closed, Flex: OSS
Interesting links	Sample Apollo apps: Apollohunter		Open source JavaFX wiki: wiki

Conclusions

Since Silverlight is meant to be running in the browser, it should be seen much more as a competitor to Flash/Flex than to the Adobe and Sun solutions, which are runtimes running outside the browser. Currently Flash/Flex has of course a large installed base already. Silverlight has the advantage it can easily be put on every Windows computer by letting it piggy-back with some automatic Windows update. The Apollo and JavaFX solutions are a very interesting new development where much richer internet applications can be built, because they run outside the browser, thus giving much more freedom to build richer GUIs. Some interesting questions that remain for these runtimes are:

• Are users willing to wait for 4-6 MB downloads?
• Are we now again moving away from making the browser the platform? Notice that Mozilla is extending the browser even more via XUL to become one RIA platform. See here for some more info on that.

Finally, here are a few other interesting developments in this area:

• The Mono project is going to try to port Silverlight to Linux.
• MS just announced a new Silverlight app Popfly that allows users to create mashups (like Y! Pipes).
• A lightweight JRE for Java 6 is indeed not a rumor and thus the amount of runtime to download is significantly reduced.

Sources

Sources for this article were:

• Understanding Apollo
• Good grief
• Sun announces JavaFX
• Microsoft Silverlight: Light Up the web
• Adobe Labs - Apollo
• Sun JavaFX
• Adobe Flash
• Adobe Flex
• FlexBlog » Rich Internet Applications: State of the Union

Other Resources

For more detailed information see:

• Rich Media Platform Comparison: : a table showing the comparison between Silverlight, .Net and Flash/Flex.
• Silverlight vs. Flash: The Developer Story: A lower level comparison of the two, with Silverlight being the winner for the author.
• JavaFX in perspective: some good points about JavaFX relative to Silverlight and Flash/Flex.

Update 02 June 2007:

• This week of course Google Gears came out. Here's shortly how it relates to Apollo and Dojo offline. Google is working with Adobe to get it integrated with Apollo. Together with Adobe and Mozilla it is also trying to make Gears an industry standard. Note that you can use each of the 3 components also seperately, you don't need to only use it for writing synchronzation software.
• Here's another overview of these three and how they relate: Apollo, Silverlight, Gears.
• Here's a good landscape overview of RIA tools and why Flex could be a good way of building user interfaces, even to Java developers.
• As John said in the comments, don't forget Java Applets (aren't they extinct? ;-) and XUL.

Sun announces JavaFX at JavaOne 2007

Looking at this post, I totally agree that it remains to be seen whether JavaFX is going to be the winner of the three technologies: Apollo (Flex), Silverlight and JavaFX.
Most promising of it all looks the scripting language (code name was F3).

Here's the homepage of JavaFX btw.

This post is *not* so sure a new language is the way to go. I think an abstraction layer in some form (new language or library/components layer) is definitely needed. Maybe not in this combination as Sun proposes it, but we need more abstraction to be able to build RIAs more easily, less error prone.