Best of this Week Summary 26 January - 01 February 2009

• Part 1 of a series on how to represent XML schema types taking into account the mismatch between XML and the datatypes of a programming language.
  


• Nice non-techie explanation of what OAuth is. Plaxo and Google are now trying out a combination of OpenID for federated authentication and OAuth for the authorization process, and including the Google Contacts API in the workflow. Thus, more and more towards the Open Stack.
  


• A great series of SOA Patterns by Thomas Erl. This is the first one, a Service Façade.
  


• An interesting opensource effort to make consuming REST services more object oriented and Rails ActiveResource like with Rapa. "Rapa uses the tried and tested Jakarta Commons HttpClient and JAXB."
  


• And as the last item this week, get ready to test your websites with Internet Explorer 8, RC1 can be downloaded now and should be nearly identical to the final version.
  

Best of this Week Summary 15 December - 21 December 2008

• A nice and simple logical diagram of the "open stack" for the social web and how the different technologies relate, including OpenID and oAuth.
  
  
• Mostly quite valid points of criticism on the currently available Java persistence frameworks. Some more comments on the article on TSS.
  


• A bit off-track interview with Bjarne Stroustrup (designer of C++) on educating software developers and the fact that companies are complaining about the lack of skills of current computer science university graduates. Especially in the area of writing maintanable code.
  


• Google just released the free Browser Security Handbook whitepaper, which is "meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers".
  


• Awesome, unit testing for Javascript with FireUnit is now available, a Firebug/Firefox extension.