Best of this Week Summary 02 February - 08 February 2009

• In SOA lessons learned for Web 2.0 "two experienced SOA architects look at the new world of Web 2.0 technologies with a critical eye and present five best practices that can help you be more successful in adopting Ajax, REST, and other Web 2.0 technologies as part of your SOA."
  


• A quick comparison between Echo2 and GWT. Both enable you to create a rich internet application with only Java using a component-based approach. Wicket is also component based, but requires still to work with HTML; not necessarily a negative thing! For example, how will you split the work between the user interface designer and developers with Echo2 and GWT?
  


• A nice extensive summary of Model Driven Development misperceptions and challenges. Five challenges and five misconceptions in total.
  


• A whitepaper named "Centralized Service-Oriented Architectures without ESB" which shows how to create service-oriented architecture in a Google-like way, that is services around huge data repository, but without ESB. It is based on experience of the writers in data warehouses, Wiki and telecommunication systems. Thus, proposed is not really an ESB, but an architecture that's more like a centralised repository with distributed caching. Of course this comes with its own set of pros and cons, as mentioned in the whitepaper.
  

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 17 December - 29 December 2007

• Always interesting, a look inside "the kitchen of": the people from 37signals.com have provided some inside-info on the architecture of some of their sites: Backpack en Basecamp. For
  example they are using RoR, MySQL, S3 and memcached.
  


• Post (related to the ESB entry in my post last week) regarding the rise of Tomcat as "application" server, in relation with the rise of Spring. Comparing Tomcat with WebLogic and WebSphere is more like comparing Oracle with MySQL. Tomcat is still not at the same level in certain areas as WebLogic and WebSphere, though it is making progress in these areas: clustering and high availability.
  


• There's a new revised version of the free e-book from Microsoft on the most important security engineering activities that you should have in your development process: The Developer Highway Code. Written by Paul Maher (Microsoft UK) and Alex Mackman (CM Group Ltd).
  


• Great news, version 2.0 of SoapIU has just been released. Improvements include webservice WSDL coverage and WS-Security completely refactored.
  

Best of this Week Summary 14 Oct - 21 Oct 2007

• Very interesting post about the Fotolog architecture. Note that they re-implemented a PHP part of the site in Java to improve performance! And they have to be scalable regarding these numbers for example: "300 Million photos and over 500,000 photos are uploaded each day. Over 30,000 new members are added each day and attracts more than 4.6 million daily users."
  


• This is a good comparison and overview of 4 open source version control systems: CVS, SVN, Bazaar and Mercurial. The last two take a distributed repository approach, in contrast to a central repository approach like CVS and SVN.
  


• Good high level overview of the history of software development. From the Waterfall Model to the current Agile (Iterative) Model. The main gain in all these years is that now it is possible to create quite complex systems with significant less persons because of the progress modern program languages and libraries have made. All of which you already knew of course, even if you didn't start in the 70's... ;-)
  


• James Gosling made the (quite logical) announcement earlier this week that in the future (mobile) devices will get so powerful there won't be the need for a separate Java Micro Edition anymore; there will be only one Java SE (Standard Edition). Also a few interesting points about the upcoming Java 6 update N (preload of the Consumer Java Runtime at computer boot), which should be available a few months into 2008, preparing the desktops for JavaFX.
  

Best of this Week Summary 30 Sept - 07 Oct 2007

• Interesting and provocative point of view in this blog "Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java". Quite an extensive discussion can be followed in this TSS refering post. I think the main reason is that the use of the programming language and stack depends on the requirements of the application. Most of the example websites given do not have serious transactional requirements, including transactions that would run over multiple systems, requiring XA. For those example websites no real big harm is done when a transaction occasionally fails. Note also that most Java/JEE implementations use at least some part of the LAMP stack, like Linux and Apache. See here for other reasons.
  


• Danny Ayers is wondering whether JSON is missing a DTD or XSD. Because if you take an arbitrary JSON document from the Internet, you can't tell what it is containing; and usually you can't find it out either. Is that a good or bad thing? I'd say you've got XML and its associated XSD or DTD for interfaces that require a well-defined interface that can be passed on to other, potentially external, 3rd parties without too much effort. For interfaces that stay internal to your system (for example an AJAX call from the browser to the server), adding the extra overhead of some validation format like an XSD or DTD causes just too much overhead, losing the gain of the compactness of JSON. Data is validated anyway by the frontend and backend, though with a bit more programming effort.

Best of this Week Summary 29 July - 04 August 2007

• This is a very interesting overview (basically a summary) of YouTube's architecture and how it handles scalability. Python is used all over the place. Includes lessons learned! Of course YouTube does not need heavy business-logic nor a solid transaction-architecture as mentioned here too. This makes scaling a little less of a challenge; but since the numbers are so huge, the challenges are nevertheless large.
  This (a bit older) article describes how Digg handles scalability. Definitely interesting too.
  And here's the inside scoop on MySpace architecture and scalability.
  Here are details on Google's file system GFS and how it helps solve them scalability.
  This PDF shows how Japan's largest social networking site (SNS) Mixi is handling scalability with MySQL.
  Finally, interesting regarding scalability and availability is this architecture "mashup": Java JVM is used to improve scalability in Drupal.
  
  
• This looks like an interesting upcoming feature in HTMLUnit for unittesting AJAX enabled web-applications. It will actually re-synchronize AJAX calls that should run asynchronously.

Service Oriented Architecture diagram template

In a past project I had to create a Service Oriented Architecture diagram. Before I created it, I searched on the internet to find a template I could re-use.That I couldn't find anywhere. As next best solution, I used many diagrams as inspiration to come up with my version.

Since I believe in re-use, I wanted to share my knowledge and give others a headstart by providing the the diagram I created online. The actual diagram from the project I couldn't use, so I recreated a new diagram from scratch. Below you see the final version and a link to the editable(!) actual .odg document you can download. It has been created in OpenOffice 2.1 Draw.

The diagram is free for you to use, just as long as you refer to were you got it from: http://ttlnews.blogspot.com/

And this is the link to the actual document.

Hope you find it useful. Comments/feedback/tips are of course welcome too!