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 06 April - 12 April 2009

• Big news this week was of course that Google App Engine now also supports Java, though still in closed beta. Other reports of this news can be found here, here, and this summary from the related Campfire '09. A nice two pager overview can be found here. Also immediately available is an Eclipse plugin. Groovy is supported too btw.
  
  Note that the Java 1.6 support is not (yet?) 100%:
  
  
  • It hasn't passed Sun's Java certification tests
  
  
  • Over 7 items of what's not supported are listed here.
  
  
  • 9 mostly similar are listed here.
  
  Here's a runthrough of getting a Wicket Hello World example running on GAE.
  


• Google also tries to introduce a new standard to easily take your contacts with you to other sites: Portable Contacts. It's used in combination with OAuth.
  


• Interesting, this opensource XSS bookmarklet (thus javascript) scans for potential XSS problems.
  
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• Talking about scanners and security, here's a free HP Flash .swf scanner that decompiles it and searches for well known leaks.
  


• Great survey results on Javascript/RIA frameworks. Questions surveyed were: which frameworks do you use the most, quality on documentation and community support, performance, ease of implementation, popularity, and 3rd party plugins quality.
  

Best of this Week Summary 20 - 26 May 2007

• This is a very interesting story about the the converging of the concepts closely related concepts SOA and Web 2.0.
  

  "The core principle of SOA is the decomposition of software into sets of
  services which can be used and composed into new applications that have a very high level of integration and reuse."

  "Web 2.0 is more of a pragmatic extraction of what actually works best in online product design than a rigorous a priori engineering exercise."

  A difference that is still there is that Web 2.0 sees data as the most important, in SOA services are the most important. The diagram in the post nicely shows the relationship between the two. It mentions also that it is interesting to see that the market chose REST as being web-oriented, not SOAP.
  Related to this, note this interesting new tool from Microsoft: Astoria (download). It allows any ADO compliant database (e.g MS SQL Server) to be accessible via REST, thus web-enabling it.
  
  
• Here is an interesting extract from Mark Hansen's book "SOA Using Java Web Services". It explains REST and SOAP and their differences. Then it describes the tools and techniques for implementing SOA Java components using the REST paradigm. As an example the integration of an Order Management System (e.g. SAP) with a Customer Service System (Siebel CRMA) is used. Both the client and server side are explained. The example is shown w/o JWS and then with JWS. For many decisions an explanation is given, some are very basic though (e.g why not to store redundant data). Data transformation via XSLT using the JAXP API is also described.
  
  One major tip: even for REST, use XML Schema (XSD) to define the message structure interface, such that client applications can comply to the valid message structure.
  
  
• A quick look at Guice , the dependency injection framework by Google. It discusses a google tech talk about Guice and then goes through some examples on how you would configure in Guice vs Spring. In Guice you configure everything with annotations instead of XML. The writer isn't convinced this is better, neither am I.
  
  
• A short description and list of 15 free SQL injection scanners. Amongst others for MySQL, MS SQLServer, Oracle.