Best of this Week Summary 26 October - 01 November 2009

• Another good summary how merging WOA with SOA could potentially solve (some) SOA problems.
  


• This post covers three major areas of JavaScript/AJAX performance: distributed communication, usability, memory leaks and anti-patterns.
  


• Several interesting details from Facebook’s VP of Engineering about the infrastructure of the company, and the massive scaling problems it has to support. Big role for memcached there. Full video presentation here.
  


• Presentation at Oracle Open World 2009 - how to turn any ADF application into a SaaS application - an application suitable for deployment on the cloud. Includes short description of a SaaS, benefits, concerns, and several requirements. These requirements include customisation of fields shown to the user (e.g show or not show depending on the user or location) and i18n. Technologies suggested to achieve this are Oracle EBR, (WSRP) portlets, WebCenter, deep linking (tricky in JSF) and ESB.
  

Best of this Week Summary 12 January - 19 January 2009

• A couple of tips on Building Super-Scalable Web Systems with REST. All the client wanted was a getLocalWeather webservice for their 10M+ users website. At first it was implemented with a regular (MS WCF) webserivce, but for scalability they switched to resource-based REST.
  


• How to get rid of the Javascript splash screen in Oracle ADF Faces 11g Rich Client, and how to reduce the initial Javascript download size on the first page in an ADF application. Described is a currently undocumented feature that sets Context Parameters in web.xml, performing compression and only downloading the Javascript that is needed on the current page. Amazing for such an essential element to be an undocumented feature, because the default complete ADF RC Javascript libs can be up to 2M in size.
  


• A post with a summary of points on the question how secure cloud computing is. Quite related to my own recent tutorial on setting up an Amazon AMI with Java and MySQL on EBS using the AWS Management Console.
  


• Interesting white paper which "presents an overview of the architecture and configuration of the Sun Blogs web site, a blogging service dedicated to Sun employees worldwide. It also provides usage statistics and information about the system administrator's experience managing one of the busiest externally facing Web 2.0 site deployments at Sun".
  
  "Blogs.sun.com is powered by Sun Java™ System Web Server 7.0 Update 2 (hereafter, Web Server) running on a pair of Sun Fire™ T2000 servers with UltraSPARC® T2 processors. The site also uses a custom version of the open source blogging server Apache Roller Weblogger Version 4.0.0.12 (http://rollerweblogger.org/project/), MySQL™ database server, and Memcached. The service is integrated with Sun's secure single sign-on identity system backed by a worldwide employee LDAP directory for authentication and authorization."
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 June - 6 July 2008

• Top 10 SOA pitfalls.
  


• The TLS Report, a recently started website, is keeping track of how major sites have implemented TLS (Transport Layer Security, formerly SSL). Check the first surprising results of the best and worst here.
  


• Presentation from Jason Sobel, the manager of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, on how Facebook implements the storage of about 6.5B images (profile pics, regular photos) in 4 or 5 sizes, totalling about 30B files, 540TB and serving 475K images per second! Their servers (10K Apache webservers, PHP, Memcached, 1800 MySQL servers) can't handle that so they use CDNs.
  Here's a page from the presentation that shows the "read" setup:
  
  


• Adobe announced that they've created a special Flash player that runs on the server which allows search engines to better index Flash and Flex applications: Rich Media Search. The search engines are now supposed to "see" the Flash application just as the user does. Well, that's one reason less to not use Flash ;-) Google is also improving its Flash indexing by using this new searchable SWF library.
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 17 December - 29 December 2007

• Always interesting, a look inside "the kitchen of": the people from 37signals.com have provided some inside-info on the architecture of some of their sites: Backpack en Basecamp. For
  example they are using RoR, MySQL, S3 and memcached.
  


• Post (related to the ESB entry in my post last week) regarding the rise of Tomcat as "application" server, in relation with the rise of Spring. Comparing Tomcat with WebLogic and WebSphere is more like comparing Oracle with MySQL. Tomcat is still not at the same level in certain areas as WebLogic and WebSphere, though it is making progress in these areas: clustering and high availability.
  


• There's a new revised version of the free e-book from Microsoft on the most important security engineering activities that you should have in your development process: The Developer Highway Code. Written by Paul Maher (Microsoft UK) and Alex Mackman (CM Group Ltd).
  


• Great news, version 2.0 of SoapIU has just been released. Improvements include webservice WSDL coverage and WS-Security completely refactored.