Best of this Week Summary 07 September - 13 September 2009

• Wondering whether you should add this new piece of functionality quick & dirty or take a bit longer, but cleaner? Taking the first one sets you up for a Technical Debt, as some more explained by Martin Fowler.
  


• "Test logic can be buried in this unrelated code, which has nothing to do with test logic itself, making test code hard to read and maintain. In this article, the layered architecture of test automation is presented to solve this problem. In this layered architecture, the test automation code is divided into three layers: (1) test cases, focusing on the test logic of the application, (2) the domain layer, modeling the system under test in domain terms, encapsulating http requests, browser control, result parsing logic and providing an interface for the test cases layer, (3) the system under test, which layer 2 will operate directly on."
  


• A good explanation of the Canonical Message Model in the context of an ESB, and why you'd need one within an SOA. Great description of different approaches for implementing a CMM in an ESB and their pros and cons.
  A short introduction to CMM modelling (data model and message model) is described here.
  


• From The Open Group two free PDF books: "The Open Group SOA Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) provides consultants and IT practitioners with a means to assess an organization’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) maturity level."
  "This document describes a framework that provides context and definitions to enable organizations to understand and deploy SOA Governance."
  


• The JavaServer Faces 2.0 specification (included in JEE6) got finalised last May. Here's a reference to it and a set of references related to this specification.
  

Best of this Week Summary 27 July - 2 August 2009

• "A discussion on the lifecycle processes of SOA governance, how SOA governance can become more mature, and how a maturity model can be used to support this growth, and the role of the architect in SOA governance, providing some practical guidelines for architects in a maturing SOA environment."
  


• Two great interviews with Jeff Davis about his "Open Source SOA" book, recently released. The first interview has mainly questions about the book itself. The second interview has quite some questions about stuff not in the book. A free excerpt of 1 chapter of the book is also available for download! The book itself describes many open source SOA products, helping you in selecting the right one and how/where to use it. Btw, CEP = Complex Event Processing. See for more here.
  


• jQuery 1.3 optimisation & advanced tips including example code on: unbind(), live()/die(), Ajax Queue and Ajax Sync, and Namespaces.
  


• Summary of implementations of the Builder pattern suggested by Joshua Blog during JavaOne 2007. Note that it is different from the GoF pattern.
  Related: interview with Joshua Bloch with many tips and best practices, most referring to Effictive Java 2nd Edition. E.g: generics, enums, annotataions, wildcards, lazy initialisation, strange things about Java.
  


• Kind of obvious observation (but still worth mentioning :) viewpoint on scalable web architectures and application state: don't store everything in the database, but treat (and "store") application state, cached data, and persistent data differently, using dedicated tools to manage these.
  


• This week Wicket 1.4 has been released.