Best of this Week Summary 5 April - 11 April 2010

• Google recently released SkipFish, a free, open source, fully automated, active web application security reconnaissance tool/scanner. "It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments."
  
  


• Great, lessons learned/experiences/comparison on using Wicket and GWT. Definitely also check the comments.
  


• Tim O'Reilly's interesting attempt on defining the internet operating system. What is it, what does it do etc.
  


• Seven tips on how to make your API more successful from NPR's Director of Application Development.
  


• Five myths about old developers (40+?) debunked.
  


• A interesting comparison between Oracle Coherence & GigaSpaces XAP from about a year ago. More feedback also here. OC and GX are two of the largest Java data/computing grid solutions.
  


• And yes it's true, James "Java" Gosling has also left Oracle, after Jonathan Schwartz already did earlier.
  

Best of this Week Summary 30 November - 06 December 2009

• A top 10 of SOA myths revisited.
  


• Google is slowly pulling the plug on Gears (mainly used as offline browser storage) in favor of HTML5; see the posts for a bunch of reasons. Google: "We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."
  


• A couple of interesting Java topics found during Devoxx 2009: Kanban, Spring-ActionScript (Spring-Flex integration), and a couple of technologies to detect and prevent coding errors before they actually happen.
  


• True or false: if the comments are ugly, the code is ugly? I agree: if your comments are sloppy, you very likely also will be in the actual code?
  Don't forget to read the referenced "three rules" C post.