Best of this Week Summary 05 October - 11 October 2009

• A quite in-depth article on creating highly-scalable components in Java. Described are the ideas used to create the concurrent Java components in the Amino Library Project (a set of concurrent building blocks).
  


• Another SOA Design Pattern sample chapter from Thomas Erl' book "SOA Design Patterns": "Service Governance Patterns, comprising a number of 8 patters. Compatible Change and Version Identification deal with service versioning. Termination Notification addresses the final phase of a service, it’s retirement. Service Refactoring explains how to deal with changing service contracts. Service Decomposition, Proxy Capability, and Decomposed Capability include techniques needed to express coarse-grained services through multiple fine-grained ones. Distributed Capability helps increasing service scalability through processing deferral."
  


• To ESB or not to ESB? Including a nine points checklist. Note that the article is from the creator of Mule (a lightweight ESB). Check also the comments here.
  


• Interesting hack to reduce startup latency for mobile devices with HTML5: put the Javascript code in comments (thus /* */), such that is immediately downloaded but not evaluated. Then to load it when needed, parse the text, strip out the comment-tags & do an eval().
  

Best of this Week Summary 09 March - 15 March 2009

• A table-based quick review of the following RIA frameworks: GWT 1.5, Laszlo 4.2, pure Javascript and Flex 3.2.
  


• A short introduction on how ActionScript 3 differs (and not) from Java.
  


• A wiki constructed with over four dozen architects: 97 things every software architect should know. Also now available as a book. It includes advice such as:
  
  
  • Don't Put Your Resume Ahead of the Requirements (Nitin Borwankar)
    
  
  
  • Chances Are, Your Biggest Problem Isn't Technical (Mark Ramm)
    
  
  
  • Communication Is King; Clarity and Leadership, Its Humble Servants (Mark Richards)
    
  
  
  • Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse (Kevlin Henney)
    
  
  
  • For the End User, the Interface Is the System (Vinayak Hegde)
    
  
  
  • It's Never Too Early to Think About Performance (Rebecca Parsons)
    
  
  


• An introduction to Object Oriented CSS.
  


• Sample chapter from Thomas Erl's latest SOA Design Patterns book, and an interview with him. He "talks about the main benefits of having a pattern catalog, SOA and Web services, the current state of SOA, the difference between SOA and service orientation, and the role of patterns in SOA adoption".
  


• A series of five articles on setting up a Java Wicket project and implementing a frontend with it.
  


• Handy piece of (alpha) software to test IE8 RC1, IE7, IE6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP. Note that it looks like Microsoft is releasing IE8 this coming week, so get ready...
  

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.