Best of this Week Summary 1 September - 7 September 2008

• An update how OpenSocial is doing...
  


• 12 good Hibernate tips you might not know.
  


• A list of the 10 worst scalability practices/anti-patterns for large distributed systems. The areas covered are: the golden hammer: use of only 1 technology, resource abuse, big ball of mud: bad versioning/deployment management, everything or something: packaging of the application, forgetting to check the time (did you know that only just recently, since JDK 1.5, you can set timeout on reads on HTTPURLConnection? And that DNS lookups in Java are cached for the lifetime of the JVM unless configured differently?), the hero pattern: one operational "do it all", not automating deployment, build etc, and finally: monitoring of the system.
  


• In case you lived under a rock the last week without Internet access :-), Google introduced its browser: Chrome.
  A couple of interesting things from posts around The Net: Chrome does a better job on the ACID test than the latest Firefox 3 build and IE 7.
  The first performances tests show that Chrome's performance is outperforming all the current browsers!
  Mozilla countered this with another test using their new javascript engine TraceMonkey, which should be released by the end of the year in Firefox 3.1. And this is the current standing in browser marketshare.
  Quite a big surprise is that it is currently only available for Windows. Clearly Google is going for marketshare by addressing the users of the most used operating system... And finally, below is an overview how Chrome got its logo (via neatorama, with custom edit):
  
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 25 August - 31 August 2008

• Water & Stone PDF with an analysis of 19 open source content management systems. WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal come out best.
  


• Recently released Keyczar is an open source cryptographic toolkit designed to make it easier and safer for developers to use cryptography in their applications. It supports authentication and encryption with both symmetric and asymmetric keys. Keyczar is designed to be open, extensible, and cross-platform compatible. It is not intended to replace existing cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL, PyCrypto, or the Java JCE, and in fact is built on these libraries.
  


• How to add custom columns to the association using Hibernate 3.2.5 (and Spring 2.5). Quite unbelievable that this has to be so complex. It's quite simple with a @ManyToMany or similar annotation if you don't want an extra column in the association (link table). But I think it's quite normal that you like to add more columns, for example a timestamp of when the record was created.
  


• Great summary of Eric Meyer's talk at An Event Apart San Francisco 2008 about 9 CSS frameworks: 960, Blueprint, Content With Style, That Standards Guy, YAML, YUI, Elements, Tripoli and WYMStyle. In short: CSS templates are a good starting point, but to make the design unique you will very likely have to modify the templates.
  

Best of this Week Summary 11 August - 17 August 2008

• Water & Stone survey of market share in the open source content management system market. Out of the 19 investigated, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal came out best.
  


• Tip for when you are losing your JRuby session in a clustered environment. You're probably using in-memory storage (:memory_store) for your session, while you should be using database storage (:active_record).
  


• Beginners tips for unit testing: why do you need to do them, how etc.
  


• Three extensive articles on Java runtime performance monitoring.
  


• Reaction on an article in the New York Times on three problems with OpenID: authentication, information cards, and no adoptation.
  


• This week Yahoo! opened its geolocation platform Fire Eagle to everybody. "Fire Eagle is a storehouse for personal location information. If you tell Fire Eagle where you are, or have applications or devices that can do so on your behalf, then other applications can grab that info (with your permission) and provide you geo-related services or social network features". Another explanation here.
  
  
• This IBM Alphaworks tool automaticly generates an Ant build file after analysing your project's structure. Finally! Amongst others an Eclipse plugin. Weird part: needs Microsoft Word!!
  

Best of this Week Summary 04 August - 10 August 2008

• Good article on the current status of Ajax frameworks. Most interesting is the notion that in 2005 there were already 48 Ajax frameworks and in 2007 there were already 240! Clearly the expected consolidation did not occur yet. Nice conclusion I agree with at the end: for Ajax use Prototype and script.aculo.us, they have been around for 3-4 years. For more heavyweight RIA applications use Flex (Silverlight is in a too early stage). What about AIR? I'd say the same. Though AIR needs its own runtime, so is a bit different.
  


• Good intro on google's recently introduced open sourced binary encoding format Protocol Buffers, including references to pros and cons articles.
  


• Recently the Open Web Foundation was launched. It "[...] will be focused on developing the technical specifications of protocols used for communication and inter-operability between applications on the web. The foundation will also set out the legal terms and best practices for the use and transport of both private and public data, and the usage of web services". Here's how it relates to the Data Portability Working Group and who's in it.
  


• Microsoft is now sponsoring the Apache Software Foundation. Note that is not a move away from IIS, as mentioned in the referred blog in the article.
  


• Drizzle is the name of the new lightweight MySQL spin-off, which aims at systems that have to process massive amounts of concurrency (mostly reads) on multicore systems. Think Cloud and Net(?) applications. Or, as they say it: "A High-Performance Microkernel DBMS for Scale-Out Applications ".
  


• Quite elaborate article and comparison on how secure the current major web frameworks are.
  Discussed are: Struts, Spring MVC 2, Struts2, Spring, Webwork, Stripes, JSF, MyFaces, Wicket and MS .Net.
  

Best of this Week Summary 28 July - 03 August 2008

• Introduction from google on OAuth and why you should/might want to use oAuth, including a few examples.
  


• A bit more than a week ago (July 20th to be exact), Amazon's S3 had a big outage of several hours, affecting many (startup) websites. Here's the explanation why, from Amazon. The short story: message corruption in server-to-server communication.
  


• In this blog I of course also take care of the starting software engineer :-), so here's ten concepts every software engineer should know.
  


• MySpace is now also supporting OpenID.
  


• Finally, Sun introduced the JavaFX preview SDK. Official announcement here. Below a screenshot of the demo application:
  
  
• In case you're not using it yet, definitely worth checking out this opensource LGPL static Java analyzing tool Findbugs.
  

Best of this Week Summary 15 July - 27 July 2008

• Part 2 of last week referenced, this time horizontally scaling JEE applications.
  


• "Microsoft has developed a new static code analysis tool for finding SQL Injection vulnerabilities in ASP code. Web developers can run the tool on their ASP source code to identify the root cause of the attack and address them to reduce their exposure to future attacks. The tool will scan ASP source code and generate warnings related to first order and second order SQL Injection vulnerabilities. The tool also provides annotation support that can be used to improve the analysis of the code."
  


• On the fun side: a Java based Massive Multiplayer Online Game with about 6 million unique active users per month.
  


• Detailed info on whether you are affected from the (Spring) source ;-) on last week's security problem in Spring MVC.
  


• Summary of Flickr Database Architecture presentation on how Flickr database scaling is implemented.
  

Best of this Week Summary 14 July - 20 July 2008

• Real world cases used to describe vertical scaling for Java EE applications. Definitely check also the comments.
  


• An interesting theory and technology: host-proof hosting. This is a technique where the browser encrypts the data to be stored on the server, such that the host (application) only sees encrypted data, thus completely preventing the host from seeing the actual contents of the user data. Thus enables for "zero knowledge web applications". Two examples of implementations are Clipperz (sourcecode partially AGPL v3) and Passpack (sourcecode MIT license).
  
  
• Visualize your code in CVS with this Visual Code Navigator. Too bad that's CVS, which is quite old. Hopefully there'll be an SVN version soon!
  


• Sun this week released their
  Sun Java Mobile Enterprise Platform 1.0: "MEP is a framework for developing mobile enterprise applications. Based on robust synchronization technologies, it enables enterprise users to synchronize enterprise data (from back-end systems like Siebel or SAP) with their mobile devices. In a nutshell, MEP enables enterprise users to carry the enterprise in their pockets". You can get a free evaluation here.
  

Best of this Week Summary 7 July - 13 July 2008

• Bjarne Stroustrup in an interview describing what every programmer and software engineer should know about C++.
  


• Browser memory performance comparison between Safari 3.1, Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.2, Opera 9.5 and IE 8.0 B1. Conclusion: Firefox 3 beats them all in memory efficoency.
  


• Definite interesting read this white paper from Kent Beck "Tools for Agility". On an invitation basis from Microsoft, he wrote "thoughts on the relationship between tools and agile software development. He looks at how tools have evolved in aiding software flow, efficient transition and team transparency". It includes what makes agile development different and difficult from other development-cycle approaches. For example the tools should support: even shorter development cycles, even more automated testing, much more transition between activities, transparency and real time collaboration, .
  


• Great list of eight REST anti-patterns.
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 June - 6 July 2008

• Top 10 SOA pitfalls.
  


• The TLS Report, a recently started website, is keeping track of how major sites have implemented TLS (Transport Layer Security, formerly SSL). Check the first surprising results of the best and worst here.
  


• Presentation from Jason Sobel, the manager of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, on how Facebook implements the storage of about 6.5B images (profile pics, regular photos) in 4 or 5 sizes, totalling about 30B files, 540TB and serving 475K images per second! Their servers (10K Apache webservers, PHP, Memcached, 1800 MySQL servers) can't handle that so they use CDNs.
  Here's a page from the presentation that shows the "read" setup:
  
  


• Adobe announced that they've created a special Flash player that runs on the server which allows search engines to better index Flash and Flex applications: Rich Media Search. The search engines are now supposed to "see" the Flash application just as the user does. Well, that's one reason less to not use Flash ;-) Google is also improving its Flash indexing by using this new searchable SWF library.
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 23 June - 28 June 2008

• This post summarizes the key parts of the LinkedIn architecture (40M pageviews/day). Full presentations also available. Lots of Java. Below an architecture overview diagram from one of the presentations:
  
  
• Overview of the plans of the BBC for their application/website infrastructure: moving it from mainly Perl and static files to SOA, Single SignOn, REST, Java and PHP.
  


• Orbitz (the online travel booking agency yes) is open sourcing their Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite this coming Monday. Here's why they're open sourcing their ERMA and Graphite, which are "part of a Complex Event Processing system designed to monitor large distributed applications, analyze the data that is gathered and display that data in real-time graphs."
  


• All of Google's Data APIs now support oAuth. So no need anymore to store a username and password in web applications that use one of Google's Data APIs. Recently also PhotoBucket and SmugMug announced oAuth support.
  

Best of this Week Summary 16 June - 22 June 2008

• Nice (basic) overview on the architectural challenges Twitter has regarding updating thousands of followers when a user posts a message.
  


• Ten good tips to improve your XML effectiveness and efficiency.
  


• References to good articles on scaling and performance tuning monitoring of MySQL.
  


• This article examines Firebug and YSlow as tools for analyzing and improving performance of Ajax applications.
  


• What are some of the the architectural challenges for mobile applications in the web 2.0 era?
  


• Examples of some major enterprises where Adobe AIR ("the cross-OS runtime that lets you run rich internet applications on your desktop") is already being used. They include Nasdaq, Deutsche Bank.
  

Best of this Week Summary 31 May - 08 June April 2008

• Interesting article on how to do estimates with Use Cases.
  


• The Google Ajax APIs will be available via cached versions for faster load times, stored at Google's servers. Hmmm, doubt that you want to depend on that...
  


• An insight in Google's datacenters. Definitely worth reading. Google's core software consists of: GFS, BigTable and MapReduce.
  


• The OpenAjax Alliance has created a set of papers "as a guide to help Web developers and IT managers understand and evaluate Ajax, define a successful Ajax strategy, and become familiar the important role OpenAjax plays in the development of the Ajax market". This one is an interesting one as it describes Ajax for mobile devides. On the other hand, browsers like Opera can already handle (some form) of regular Ajax, so is it worth making the distinction?
  

Best of this Week Summary 19 May - 25 May April 2008

• Wow, that's quick: Spring now already supports oAuth. For a refreshment on a practical example of oAuth, see this TSS article.
  


• Two great JavaOne2008 summaries here and here.
  


• Opera's answer to Firefox's Firebug: Dragonfly.
  
  
• MyOpenID now gives you the ability for an additional security check with your mobile phone(!) when logging in with your OpenID. When signing in, you'll instantly get a call on the phone number you setup at MyOpenID and you have to answer with pressing '#'. Nice!
  

Best of this Week Summary 12 May - 18 May April 2008

• How to setup Spring with Wicket. This is a "challenge" because Wicket is an unmanged framework, this in contrast to Spring. I'm personally now using the Annotation-based Approach.
  


• IBM developerWorks overview of services-based enterprise integration patterns, 3 parts.
  


• Interview with Donald Knuth regarding the success of open source, the problem with multicore architectures, reusable code and unit testing.
  


• Nice bunch of tips that can help you decide when to use ESB or BPEL in your solution.
  

Best of this Week Summary 05 May - 11 May 2008

• Free IBM Redbook with SOA and webservices patterns.
  


• Eclipse plugin Monkey to automate tasks like Java projects that don't have a Checkstyle configuration defined or find commented out code and defines tasks for them (TODO/FIXME),
  


• The potential doubts regarding REST in practice, mainly for designers/developers with a SOAP/WSDL background.
  


• An overview of Agile anti-patterns, like "keep refactoring for later" and "let's fix the testcase later, we'll uncomment it for now".
  

Best of this Week Summary 28 April - 04 May 2008

• Nice overview on how Dutch social network Hyves (> 5M users) uses Gentoo.
  


• An explanation how to setup soapUI with Maven for automated SOAP testing.
  


• Interesting rumor is that Twitter might be moving away from using Ruby on Rails; it might move to PHP or Java. The potential reason for switching is most likely scalability. Their system has to support about 3 million messages a day and has over a million users (march 2008 numbers).
  


• Springsource (the guys from Spring) introduced their beta Application Platform (aka S2AP). Summarizing: "an application platform, built on OSGi, that can resolve Spring bean references by looking up services through OSGi - all of the capabilities OSGi provides, without the headache of deployment. And it would be able to deploy .WAR files through the use of a Tomcat (or servlet container) service."
  

Best of this Week Summary 21 April - 27 April 2008

• How Yahoo! is transforming itself into an open and social platform, allowing developers access to internal assets of Yahoo. A first example of this is SearchMonkey. Below a screenshot of their new architecture Yahoo Open Strategy.
  
  
  
• Two initiatives that could improve the chances of OpenID becoming more mainstream: IDSelector (also mentioned here) and Confident's RecognitionAUTH, which you can see implemented at MyVidoop (mentioned in a previous post).
  


• Amazon announced its Fulfillment Web Service API, which allows merchants to automatically store inventory in Amazon's warehouses and ship orders to customers. Again, Amazon is one of the frontrunners in this area...
  

Best of this Week Summary 13 April - 20 April 2008

Not that much news this week (is it vacation already??? ;-)

• Great writeup (again) on how SOA can be introduced more successfully, especially in the area of design and implementation. Web 2.0's successes can be leveraged here to "learn from".
  


• Three SOA patterns described: data federation, data consolidation, and data cleansing.
  

Best of this Week Summary 7 April - 12 April 2008

• 12 great points you should know about WOA and REST. Note that these points are not all about technology only...
  


• Difference between WOA and SOA shortly discussed.
  


• New from Google: run your Python webapplication on their infrastructure with Google App Engine. Quite a contrast to Amazon's webservices approach S3, EC2 and SimpleDB.
  
• A status check on OpenID, including where you can get an OpenID (providers), resources and where you can use it (couple of major sites only).
  

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.