Best of this Week Summary 26 April - 02 May 2010

• Google's Chief Java Architect Josh Bloch "discusses many of the problems facing the Java community, including the ineffectiveness of J2ME, licensing problems, Java 7's late ship date, and even the JCP issues that James Gosling often opined about. He points out that these problems predate the Oracle acquisition of Sun, so everyone should just stop pointing their fingers at Larry Ellison."
  


• Another Getting Started blogpost for a Mahout-Taste based movie recommendation engine, which uses Wicket as presentation layer.
  


• Martin Fowler explaining Inversion of Control and suggesting to call it the Dependency Injection pattern. Notes that the Service Locator pattern can also remove the dependency, just as the DI pattern tries to. Describes which of these options to use. Finally he also gives pros/cons for constructor vs setter injection. Also pros/cons for configuration in the code or via configuration files.
  


• Several Javascript performance-optimization tips taken at JSConf 2010.
  


• An article "which looks at various storage mechanisms - JDBC, JPA, JavaSpaces, Java Content Repository, MongoDB, and DB4O, primarily - from the perspective of how good they are at CRUD operations and queries". The conclusion is that there is no one "best" mechanism, each has its own best application.
  

Best of this Week Summary 13 July - 19 July 2009

• Pretty basic SOAP monitor (proxy) that allows you to edit SOAP messages before sending them on. Does not support a proxy (yet).
  


• IBM recently released Milepost GCC (website has styling from 1998 ;), a "compiler which analyses the software and determines which code optimizations will be most effective during compilation using machine learning techniques. Experiments carried out with the compiler achieved an average 18% performance improvement. The compiler is expected to significantly reduce time-to-market of new software, because lengthy manual optimization can now be carried out by the compiler." Related to that is also the Collective Tuning wiki, dedicated to developing self-tuning computing systems.
  


• ZeroTurnaround "has released the results of their "Java EE Containers - Heaven or Hell" survey. Using responses from 700 respondents, they cover topics such as: containers most often used on large projects, fastest container, redeploy times and annual costs of redeployment in a series of charts and calculations. Both the charts and raw data are made available for your own analysis."
  


• Looking for petabyte and beyond scale storage? The opensource project Ceph might be an option: it is a distributed network file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability.
  


• Several basic and advanced JPA implementation patterns can be found here.