Best of this Week Summary 12 April - 18 April 2010

• An advanced article on Spring Security regarding namespaces.
  


• A few pros/cons on when you'd want to use Amazon's EC2, Google's App Engine or maybe RackspaceCloud.
  TweetDeck uses GAE (Python) for some parts of their system, e.g sending emails, in combination with EC2.
  


• John Resig on improving the Javascript in your web app. Video & full transcript, including new features now available in jQuery 1.4. Mentioned are: delegation, live events, html fragments, javascript from CDN, additional header in Ajax calls, custom events, special events, themeability and customizability, i18n, and IE6 support.
  


• An older but still interesting PDF on Scrum and XP experience in a project of 40 people. They experimented for about a year on different team sizes, different sprint lenghts etc.
  

Best of this Week Summary 10 August - 16 August 2009

• Always interesting the Gartner 2009 Hype Cycle. For example, Web 2.0 is already on the way up again, while microblogging (e.g Twitter) is starting its downward trend.
  


• Code review tools Review Board: "is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process." Downloadable.
  


• Great description on how full-scale Scrum was applied at a JTeam project. It includes answer to the why and what went well and what can be improved. Also shortly the used technologies are described (Spring, Spring WS, Spring MVC, JPA, JExcelApi, Apache Commons for FTP, iText for addresslabels with bar codes, jQuery and Google Maps, Mockito (see this post on why they switched from EasyMock), MockFTPServer and Subethamail Wiser for email integration testing. Again, great that they share this publicly.
  


• Discussion of the quality assurance/testing challenges to be addressed with a SOA adoption, recommended best practices, and lessons learned.
  


• More or less a beginner's introduction to the Java Collections framework and algorithms. Sample chapter from "Core Java 2, Volume II - Advanced Features 7th Edition". Uses CircularArrayQueue and LinkedListQueue as examples (how often have you used those two? ;)
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 June - 05 July 2009

• Here's a Getting Started and bunch of Case Studies for Google App Engine with Java: case study 1, case study 2 and case study 3. Main things to take away:
  
  
  
  • GAE does not support the whole JEE API nor all regular frameworks.
    
  
  
  • Google's database for GAE is non-relational(!) but an object store
    
  
  


• A collection of web 2.0 architecture articles every software/application architect should know about, collected over the years by Dion Hinchcliffe.
  


• Great extensive article from Martin Fowler on the Scrum daily stand-up meetings, including tips on: benefits and consequences of common practices for daily stand-ups, how to run them effectively, stand-up patterns, what to talk about, when to run them, and the goals, to help beginners and remind experienced practitioners.
  


• A few weeks ago Google introduced Speed, its open source effort to all make the web faster. Looking at some of the feedback, it seems to currently contain only basic best-practices tips.
  


• Great long article on the history of Javascript and what hopefully awaits us in the future.
  

Best of this Week Summary 21 June - 28 June 2009

• Misunderstandings of Domain Driven Design described. DDD = "Domain Driven Design is an approach that describes the approach to designing the business layer".
  


• A Google site dedicated to deploying Google Apps in an enterprise (more than 100 users).
  


• Which on is the best of these agile methodologies: Scrum or Kanban? Differences and similarities are described. The unsurprising answer: it depends on the situation :) My conclusion: Kanban has less "rules" to follow and thus might be a better suit for experienced agile developers.
  


• A handy opensource Java library (no i18n yet) for showing real user friendly times, like "in 3 minutes", formats you see on many social sites like Digg and Facebook: PrettyTime.
  


• And what is your programming personality style? For me it's DoerHighlevelSololiBeral...
  

Best of this Week Summary 1 December - 7 November 2008

• Post from UI expert Jakob Nielsen on what to think about regarding user interaction and usability when using an Agile methodology (like Scrum).
  


• This week, Sun released version 1.0 of JavaFX, their RIA platform. Too late or just in time? The competion Smooth animation demo here. Quite some reactions here.
  


• These days you see quite some integration happening with Flex at the front-end and Java at the back-end of a web applications. There are a couple of things to consider whether you might want to choose Flex or not.
  


• Tips to help you pass the SCBCD (Sun Certified Business Component Developer) exam.
  

Best of this Week Summary 17 November - 30 November 2008

• Interesting recent long discussion (with a bit of framework flame-war in between) and tips on when to pick what web client framework. Tapestry, Wicket, Stripes, GWT, Flex seem to jump out.
  


• Interesting Javascript optimizer: Razor Optimizer. It dynamically analyzes the runtime profile information, trying to load each Javascript function only when needed, potentially creating 60-90% savings. It does require a client and server component. The question is: are you prepared to take a (small?) risk that your Javascript is dynamically modified?
  


• Good article that explains why Scrum often fails as implementation of Agile. Lots of times Scrum is only seen as fast Sprints and Scrums. But: "Don't leave out the 'regular' agile good engineering practices". Check also the comments for good tips.
  


• A good introduction to RESTful webservices.
  


• Great, soapUI 2.5 now also suppports testing RESTful webservices. It includes testing JSON output.
  

Best of this Week Summary 18 August - 24 August 2008

• Patterns-based Evaluation of Open Source BPM Systems: jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark. Report's conclusion: "Overall one can conclude that the open source systems are geared more towards developers than business analysts. If one is proficient with Java, jBPM may be a good choice, although if not, choosing jBPM is less advisable. Similarly, whilst OpenWFE has a powerful language for workflow specification in terms of its support for the workflow patterns, we postulate that it will be difficult to understand by non-programmers. Finally, Endydra Shark’s minimalistic support for the workflow patterns may require complicated work-arounds for capturing nontrivial business scenarios."
  


• As part of their EC2 offering, Amazon introduced this week their Elastic Block Store, enabling you to mount an EBS and format it or setup a database on it. S3 is not really intended for database-like storage. Here's another introduction, including a link to an article on how to setup MySQL on EBS. Here's ESB explained, including some diagrams.
  


• Article on the succesful execution of a large project (20 man years, 100.000+ lines of code) with an Agile approach using Scrum, with developers from India and The Netherlands. Includes lessons learned. Technologies used: Java, Spring, Hibernate, WebLogic, Oracle, Swing (UI) and Flex (for the displays) and Bamboo (continuous integration).
  


• Handy short comparison between LWUIT (recently open sourced by Sun) and JavaFX Mobile. Here's another comparison from Sun.