Best of this Week Summary 03 May - 09 June 2007

• An interview with writers of new book about REST. One free chapter for download. Interesting is the interview with the writers were they explain why they think REST is great and (when) preferable above WS-* (SOAP).
  
• An overview of nine free virtualization environments. Plus one free spreadsheet to compute the TCO of virtualization.
  
• Interest points made about what Google Gears does not yet support out-of-the-box, like synchronization strategies. But as mentioned already a little bit in the article, the correct synchronization strategy depends on the application you are building. So maybe Gears could (should?) have contained already one or two simple syncing strategies. Also, I think saying it replaces one problem with another is a not really correct. I'd say Gears is a starting point in providing a full offline library/framework solution, but it does not solve all problems at this point in time.
  
• The writers of the book "GWT in Action" answered a couple of questions on their impression is on GWT after a year.
  
  Most important points made:
  - Regarding debugging: most of the time you don't need to go into the generated Javascript,
  - The great fact that you can re-use all your Java knowledge and tools,
  - That for simple apps it would still be too heavy-weight (overkill),
  - How GWT tries to make the generated Javascript as little as bloated as possible,
  - That the generated Javascript code can be output in pretty, more readable Javascript,
  - A GWT application can mix Javascript and Java (so it is not that "crippled" as it seems),
  - There are wrappers available for Scriptaculous, JSCalendar etc,
  - Javascript files are provided per browser type, instead of one big file that handles all browsers,
  - Changing locale can require you to switch to a dynamic approach, losing GWT stripping,
  - Modularization can be improved; now you have to always download all modules that your application uses.

Best of this Week Summary 12 - 19 May 2007

• A "Performance Evaluation of Virtualization Technologies for Server Consolidation" which compares Xen and OpenVZ virtualization. Published by the University of Michigan and HP labs. One of the tentative conclusions seems that OpenVZ is scaling better than Xen.
  
  
• The Java Performance Group homepage regarding the whole application stack: from hardware level via the desktop to grid level.
  
  
• A bit older this article which I discovered this week. It gives a good short overview of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) which is getting more and more attention these days, for example at JavaOne. This line summarizes it all:

  "SCA emphasizes the decoupling of service implementation and of service assembly from the details of infrastructure capabilities and from the details of the access methods used to invoke services. SCA components operate at a business level and use a minimum of middleware APIs."

  
  The specification supports implementations written in languages like Java and PHP, and also XML-like languages like BPEL and XSLT. Even SQL and XQuery are supported. The complete specifications are available here.
  An open source runtime and Eclipse plugin are also listed.
  
  
• The MS official final version of the IE toolbar has been released. Not as near as much possibilities as FF's Firebug and WebDeveloper, but it's a start! 624K so not that big. I managed to get IE7 crash 2 times in 60 seconds... This is not really workabable. This is the link to the blog, which contains a link to the download page.