Best of this Week Summary 04 May - 10 May 2009

• Reference to an AJAX framework analysis/comparison result by Matt Raible (for example known for his framework of frameworks: AppFuse). Compared were Dojo, Ext JS, GWT, and YUI. Check also the comments.
  


• Beginners level host and Java performance tuning concepts.
  


• Handy PHP profiler and debugging tool/library. Helps you with logging, memory usage, double includes, page execution time and database activity monitoring.
  


• Nice presentation on scalable web architectures from Cal Henderson, (ex) Flicker architect. Including horizontal vs vertical, architecture, sessions, load balancing, queuing, relational data, caching, H(ighly) A(vailable) data, federation, serving and storing files, CDN, real-world examples.
  


• SpringSource has created Roo, a sophisticated round-tripping code generator that should make it quicker and easier to create and evolve Spring applications.
  


• Funny: how to measure code quality: WTFs/minute :)
  
  
  Via.
  


• You as a developer can now go social on IBM's myDeveloperWorks, a social network spun off of developerWorks.
  


• An introduction on how one could formalize a SOA using WS-CDL, including a few real-world insurance based uses.
  


• Yahoo has just released a major update for their innovative YQL. "The Yahoo! Query Language lets you query, filter, and join data across any web data source or service on the web. Using our YQL web service, apps run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint. YQL uses a SQL-like language because it is a familiar and intuitive method for developers to access data. YQL treats the entire web as a source of table data, enabling developers to select * from Internet." The update adds "Execute", with which "developers now have full control of how the data is fetched into YQL and how it’s presented back to the user. With Open Data Tables, developers can build tables that manipulate, change, and sign the URLs to access almost any protected content, allowing YQL access and combining data across a variety of different authenticated services such as Netflix or Twitter. Developers can call multiple services and data sources within Execute to join and mashup data however they desire, letting Yahoo! do the work rather than their applications. Data can be tweaked and manipulated into an optimal format for applications to consume." Another example of what is possible can be found here. Check also this article for more explanations.
  

Best of this Week Summary 17 November - 30 November 2008

• Interesting recent long discussion (with a bit of framework flame-war in between) and tips on when to pick what web client framework. Tapestry, Wicket, Stripes, GWT, Flex seem to jump out.
  


• Interesting Javascript optimizer: Razor Optimizer. It dynamically analyzes the runtime profile information, trying to load each Javascript function only when needed, potentially creating 60-90% savings. It does require a client and server component. The question is: are you prepared to take a (small?) risk that your Javascript is dynamically modified?
  


• Good article that explains why Scrum often fails as implementation of Agile. Lots of times Scrum is only seen as fast Sprints and Scrums. But: "Don't leave out the 'regular' agile good engineering practices". Check also the comments for good tips.
  


• A good introduction to RESTful webservices.
  


• Great, soapUI 2.5 now also suppports testing RESTful webservices. It includes testing JSON output.
  

Best of this Week Summary 8 September - 14 September 2008

• An interview with leads of PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Tcl on the state of these dynamic scripting languages.
  


• Interesting technical development: IE8 and Google Chrome are putting tabs in new processes instead of threads. The main reason for creating threads used to be that it takes a relative long time to create a new process and inter-process communication is slow. But, these days the processor speeds are so fast (following Moore's Law etc), creating processes is a piece of cake/can be done really fast.
  


• How do individualism and teamwork go together in an Agile development project. Why type of roles should you have and what to expect from those roles.
  


• A short comparison of 8 java web frameworks: Struts 2, Spring MVC, Wicket, Tapestry, MyFaces, JSF, Grails and Rife.
  

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 19 November - 25 November 2007

• For software companies to test the security skills of their IT employees, the Secure Programming Council created this "Essential Skills for Secure Programmers Using Java/Java JEE". The draft is now open for public review for 60 days. Other languages like C++ and PHP will follow. Amongst the people in the Java steering committee are Ed Tracy and assisting them are for example people from the OWASP. Definitely a good initiative.
  


• In October W3C wrote a proposal to allow cross domain capabilities (same-origin-policy) for the XMLHttpRequest (XHR) object. This article summarizes it and also compares it with the JSONRequest proposal.
  


• Great presentations that contain comparisons of several Java web frameworks: JSF, Spring MVC, GWT, Seam, Stripes, Struts2, Tapestry and Wicket. Also included are Flex and Grails. Definitely a good starting point if you're starting with a web framework selection. Note that the general trend is that Tapestry is being used less and less, while Wicket is on the rise. GWT I would not use quickly for deployment on Internet sites since it creates quite large Javascript code. For intranet this constraint is a lot less serious. Note that soon you should be able to minimize the required Javascript libraries, thus improving download time. This is a presentation of Matt Raible where he compares a bunch of web frameworks in this 1 hour funny presentation, from a developer's point of view. He also asks who uses what (Hibernate, Websphere, Struts, JSF, Wicket etc). The above mentioned presentations are updated version of the one used in this presentation. His conclusion is that there is no real winner yet.
  


• A nice how-to on how you can write RESTful web services in Java that conform to the JAX-RS: Java API for RESTful Web Services (JSR-311) specification. This JSR should be in Java EE 6.