Best of this Week Summary 13 April - 19 April 2009

• To build an OpenSocial application, you no longer need an online a (test) container, because now there is the OpenSocial Development Environment (OSDE) for Eclipse.
  


• "Jitr (pronounced "jitter") is a JUnit Integration Test Runner. It allows your web application integration tests to easily run against a lightweight web container in the same JVM as your tests."
  


• Twitter has been starting to replace some Ruby on Rails backend functionality with Scala (which has Java compatibility) on a JVM. Read here in detail why. In short:
  
  
  • Better support for long-lived processes
    
  • Static typing
    
  • Better thread support
    
  
  The article also lists lessons learned and the "good and the bad" of Scala. One of the interviewed guys also did a presentation on why you should (could) use Scala for building web 2.0 applications.
  


• Twelve steps on how to introduce OSGi on an existing application without having to write the whole application.
  


• Summary of a one hour presentation on 10 ways to improve your code.
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 December - 11 January 2009

• Interesting comparison whether and when to use SOAP or REST.
  


• OpenSocial now has Java, PHP, Ruby and Python client libraries available.
  


• A few weeks ago, PKI which uses MD5 as cryptographic hash function, has now officially been broken at the hackers convention Chaos Communication Congress 2008. Six Certificate Authorities still give out MD5-signed certificates as mentioned in the article. Since 2004 it is already known that MD5-collisions can be created for different data. Therefore, certificates should be issued with at least SHA-1 encryption. Here's a summary of what an MD5 collision is and what Mozilla and Microsoft issued as advisories. Additionally some (other) SSL issues are described.
  


• Nice summary of lessons learned during a project using GWT, Axis and JPA. Some more comments here.
  


• Paper by Kate McKinley (a researcher at iSec Partners, a San Francisco security firm) on the privacy protection mechanisms of FireFox, Chrome, IE and Safari. Conclusion: "We find current browsers are unable to extend tracking protection to third party plug-ins such as Google Gears and Adobe Flash. Some of these require no user prompting under common configurations and even expose tracking data saved with one browser sites visited by a different browser. [...] Safari on Windows fared the worst of all in these tests with respect to private browsing, and did not clear any data at all, either before entering or after exiting the private mode. On OS X, Safari’s behavior was quirky; in no case was the HTML 5 database storage cleared before or after private browsing.".
  

Best of this Week Summary 04 November - 16 November 2008

• Part 2 in a series on server load architectures: application-level load balancing, including client-stickiness.
  


• How to write maintainable CSS; a presentation by Natalie Downe.
  


• ProgrammableWeb is tracking APIs and has now reached the 1000 milestone. In the pie charts you can see the top 15 categories and which protocols they use: 63% of the APIs uses REST! 22% SOAP. The protocols diagram is shown below:
  
  


• Here's some more details on why Google forked OpenID. See my related post of two weeks ago.
  


• A presentation with the current state (it's growing big time!) of OpenSocial shown at OpenSocial's first birthday at MySpace's headquarters.
  


• I'm currently trying out Wicket with Spring and Hibernate, using AppFuse Light as a starting point. In case you're looking for an introduction to Wicket, check out this one that has been around for a while, and this new one that's been posted this week.
  

Best of this Week Summary 1 September - 7 September 2008

• An update how OpenSocial is doing...
  


• 12 good Hibernate tips you might not know.
  


• A list of the 10 worst scalability practices/anti-patterns for large distributed systems. The areas covered are: the golden hammer: use of only 1 technology, resource abuse, big ball of mud: bad versioning/deployment management, everything or something: packaging of the application, forgetting to check the time (did you know that only just recently, since JDK 1.5, you can set timeout on reads on HTTPURLConnection? And that DNS lookups in Java are cached for the lifetime of the JVM unless configured differently?), the hero pattern: one operational "do it all", not automating deployment, build etc, and finally: monitoring of the system.
  


• In case you lived under a rock the last week without Internet access :-), Google introduced its browser: Chrome.
  A couple of interesting things from posts around The Net: Chrome does a better job on the ACID test than the latest Firefox 3 build and IE 7.
  The first performances tests show that Chrome's performance is outperforming all the current browsers!
  Mozilla countered this with another test using their new javascript engine TraceMonkey, which should be released by the end of the year in Firefox 3.1. And this is the current standing in browser marketshare.
  Quite a big surprise is that it is currently only available for Windows. Clearly Google is going for marketshare by addressing the users of the most used operating system... And finally, below is an overview how Chrome got its logo (via neatorama, with custom edit):
  
  
  

Google Friend Connect vs MySpace Data Availability vs Facebook Connect

More and more users are not spending time on one website anymore. And users are getting "tired" of entering their contacts ("social network") every time again and again. The big social websites are realizing that and have created their own solutions to that. Well, potentially not their own solutions, but more their own branded solutions for what's defined by the Dataportability group.

The three announcements were:

Google's FriendConnect. It should give users a shortcut to social connections they have built on different social networks. The user can login with their Facebook, Plaxo etc accounts, allow the FriendConnect enabled site to retrieve the friends on that site, and if they're online, the user can interact with them. FriendConnect will use open standards like OpenID and oAuth. Biggest disadvantage is that an iFrame will be provided as the solution, so no API will be made available. Note that this makes Google the big switch between all these social networks! Since they don't really have a (big) social network site, this is their way of getting a piece of the cake: sitting right between all the social network sites! Some other concerns can be found here.
MySpace Data Availability. A bunch of launch partners will be able to access MySpace user data and be able to present it outside the regular MySpace widgets. MySpace users should be able to revoke the rights of the third party anytime. The third party is not allowed to store the retrieved user data. The good thing here also is that it will be made available via a REST API.


Facebook Connect. In short, the new API will give third parties' users the ability to transport the relationships from their Facebook accounts to the third parties' website. Compare it with what's now already available for Facebook applications (running on the Facebook platform) being made available for third parties. Immediately a big "chick fight" broke out, because apperently Google's Friend Connect is not respecting Facebook's user privacy control, as Facebook blocked FriendConnect! But it might just be Facebook protecting it's own turf :-)


Relationship with Dataportability.org
"The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems."
So, let's hope the above initiatives will comply with the standards defined by the DataPortability Workgroup.


Relationship with OpenSocial
Both Google and MySpace are in the OpenSocial Foundation ("a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML"). For MySpace their Data Availability project is outside the OpenSocial framework, but will stay involved in it too and incorporate when available.


The current status
All three are announcements are kind of the "branded" version of DataPortability implementations within the respective organisation. The furthest seems to be MySpace:
Facebook: no technical specifications released
MySpace: rolling out with only a few launch-partners
Google: not ready to launch yet.

Best of this Week Summary 31 March - 6 April 2008

• Good explanation on how to integrate Eclipse WTP with Maven2.
  


• Great article focused on SOA Testing model, methodology, types, tools etc, but also explains the terms clearly, including related terms like SOA Governance. Does not go into the details on *how* you exactly test all the mentioned types of tests.
  


• Interesting insight in the design of Audiogalaxy.com's high performance MySQL search engine. As an indication: "At peak times, the search engine needed to handle 1500-2000 searches every second against a MySQL database with about 200 million rows."
  


• Downloadable from IBM Alphaworks: a wiki for architectural decision knowledge.
  


• How to retag a version in Subversion. Basically you first have to delete the old tag.
  
  
  
• Google, Yahoo and MySpace recently formed the OpenSocial Foundation, thus even more forces behind Google's OpenSocial initiative.
  

Best of this Week Summary 03 March - 09 March 2008

• Good article on Premature Code Optimization and the often made (invalid) conclusion: 'as a developer I don't need to optimize until the code is finished'.
  


• Practical use of Java in four web conferencing products described. Including integration with Flash.
  


• A talk with the director of engineering at Google about OpenSocial. Most interesting point is that indeed OpenSocial is not to interconnect social networks. Unless they are Social Graph enabled, but there is no site that supports it yet. Google also released the Contacts API this week.
  


• Related to that is Higgins: "An open identity framework designed to integrate identity, profile and social relationship information across multiple sites, applications and devices. Supports multiple identities because you don't want to use the same identity for MySpace as for your financial sites." Contributors include the big names like Google, IBM and Oracle.
  

Best of this Week Summary 12 November - 18 November 2007

• Ten tools to manage your SOA in the area of governance, quality and management. For each of the tools it shortly describes what the tool does does, who's behind it and which companies are using it.
  


• Seven good tips and overview on how to make your Javascript unobtrusive.
  


• Jilles van Gurp (who works at Nokia) describes his initial impressions on Google's Android SDK, a platform aimed at mobile devices, released earlier this week. Main thing to note is that Google has built their own JVM Dalvik and it is another Java spin-off; it is not JME. Here's why this is not such a good thing. And here's some points why it should be better than JME. Note also that Nokia is not (yet?) part of the Open Handset Alliance.
  
  


• Here's a Javascript library that "solves" the same-origin-policy problem I mentioned in a previous post on OpenSocial by using _IG_FetchContent, which goes via a proxy server. Check also his other 2 posts (First and Second step), providing a higher level wrapper library (API) on top of OpenSocial.
  

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...
  

OpenSocial: the harder technical outstanding questions

This week anybody following technical news cannot have missed the announcement of the Google OpenSocial initiative.



Here is a short introduction. A bunch of live examples can be found here.

Basically it is a widgets (gadgets) API specification, built in Javascript and XML that anybody can plugin on a social network page (like MySpace, Plaxo) to show relevant social information (e.g who are my friends in this social network).
Most posts were positive and only looked at potential positive uses. It took about half a day before the first more critical posts showed up.
With this post I'd like to provide you the current outstanding technical questions and issues with the OpenSocial API. First I'll list the posts I found until now, then my own outstanding questions.

Note: don't misunderstand me, I like the initiative, trying to get the so-called social graph standardized. But a careful examination is definitely relevant if you want to introduce it on your site.

• Good points (not only technical) what is not yet so good about OpenSocial
  


• This a good pretty good technical overview and points of critique which the above post mentions. Btw: I disagree with this statement definitly: "if REST APIs are so simple why do developers feel the need to hide them behind object models?". Object model abstraction can still be needed/desired to acquire the best level of abstraction.
  


• Note that the container API itself is not there yet...
  


• In the FAQ there is the question: "Can OpenSocial apps interact with other websites?". The answer is "Yes, social apps have the ability to fully interact with outside 3rd party applications using standard web protocols." But how does it then avoid the same origin policy for Javascript? Would the calls go via Google? How does it work with Google Gadgets (iGoogle), where you can specify any feed URL? My guess for this last one: via a Google proxy as provided in the Google Feed API... At the moment there exists no OpenSocial gadget that implements accessing data from multiple social networks.
  


• Why are technologies like Microformats and APML used? My guess for now: those "standards" are too much in an initial phase. An API with Javascript and XML are based on standardized technologies and immediately available.
  


• Really pay attention to the authentication mechanism described for the People Data , which all go through a Google account (or you can always use an email-address and password). Check the first details on this issue here.
  

Update: here's some sort of answer to some of the above questions.

Update: Google released version 0.5 of the OpenSocial Service Provider API (the container API). Very alpha.

Update: Here's a Javascript library that "solves" the same-origin-policy.