• What is Apache Hadoop? – A look at the components and functions of the Hadoop ecosystem – What is Apache Hadoop? – A look at the components and functions of the Hadoop ecosystem
• Ext GWT 3.0 State API | Blog | Sencha – The Ext GWT 3.0 State API provides the ability to persist state information. The API supports saving state data to different persistence providers. These include providers based on cookies and HTML5 local storage.
• PhoneGap Releases Version 1.3 With Full Windows Phone Support – PhoneGap is turning 1.3 today. There are a plethora of new features, tools and controls across five platforms in the new PhoneGap release. Biggest among these is Windows Phone's support of all PhoneGap features, a first for any mobile platform that is not iOS or Android.
• Dive into DataView with Sencha Touch 2 Beta 2 | Blog | Sencha – The enhanced DataView in Sencha Touch 2 Beta 2 makes it easy to build complex data bound lists.
• HeapAudit – JVM Memory Profiler for the Real World | Foursquare Engineering Blog – HeapAudit is not a monitoring tool, but rather an engineering tool that collects actionable data – information sufficient for directly making code change improvements. It is created for the real world, applicable to live running production servers.
• App Economy has created almost half a million jobs — Tech News and Analysis – A new report suggests that the nascent app economy spurred on by iOS, Android and Facebook apps has generated 466,000 jobs in the U.S. economy since 2007.
• Spring Mobile 1.0.0.RC1 Released | SpringSource.org – Spring Mobile provides extensions to Spring MVC that aid in the development of cross-platform mobile web applications. The 1.0.0.RC1 release ships a general facility for user site preference management that can be used independently or in conjunction with the mobile site switcher
• Ruby Trick Shots: A Video of 24 Ruby Tips and Tricks – Over the years, I've saved the Ruby techniques that have surprised other Rubyists I know. Now past 100, I'm making an e-book of them! It'll be free in all forms
• InfoQ: The Seven Deadly Sins of Enterprise Agile Adoption – Sanjiv Augustine and Arlen Bankston discuss the Seven Deadly Sins that organizations repeatedly make so you can steer clear of them and benefit from a successful Enterprise Agile Adoption.
• The Object Network: Linking up our APIs – Instead of writing a whole new, dedicated HTTP API to your site, publish your data using common JSON object formats, and link your data up, both within your own sites and to other sites. Become part of a global Object Network!
• InfoQ: Questions for an Enterprise Architect – Erik Dörnenburg answers: What is Enterprise and Evolutionary Architecture?, discussing 4 issues: Turning strategy into execution, Ensuring conformance, Where do the architects sit? Buying or building?
• InfoQ: Writing Applications for Cloud Foundry Using Spring and MongoDB – Thomas Risberg and Jared Rosoff show how to create Spring applications using Spring Data and MongoDB, applications deployed on Cloud Foundry.
• Bootstrap, from Twitter – HTML, CSS, and JS toolkit from Twitter – Bootstrap is Twitter's toolkit for kickstarting CSS for websites, apps, and more. It includes base CSS styles for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, alerts, and more.

Links for February 1st through February 9th

• InfoQ: The Rise of OAuth – Craig Walls talks about securing the modern web and how OAuth can help with that, showing how to secure and consume resources with OAuth.
• This guide introduces you to Spring Data Neo4j – This guide introduces you to Spring Data Neo4j, using the fast, powerful and scalable graph database Neo4j to enjoy the benefits of having good relationships in your data.
• Google Guava EventBus – an easy and elegant way for your publisher – subscriber use cases | Tomasz Dziurko – Google Guava in version number 10 introduced new package eventbus with a few very interesting classes to deal with listener (or publisher – subscriber) use case. Below I present my short introduction to EventBus class and its family.
• The Elegant Ruby Web Framework – Padrino Ruby Web Framework – Padrino is a ruby framework built upon the Sinatra web library. Sinatra is a DSL for creating simple web applications in Ruby. Padrino was created to make it fun and easy to code more advanced web applications while still adhering to the spirit that makes Sinatra great!
• InfoQ: The Open Group Releases Standards for SOA Architects, Cloud Service Providers – The Open Group recently published three standards that aid organizations that are building infrastructure-as-a-service offerings and service oriented architectures. In addition to releasing the Service Oriented Architecture Reference Architecture (SOA RA) and Service Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure Framework (SOCCI), the Open Group also updated their Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM). In concert, these standards provide expert advice in the form of best practices, questionnaires, and templates for SOA and cloud-scale infrastructure architecture.
• MongoDB for Analytics // MongoTips by John Nunemaker – Just over a month ago, I presented on storing stats in MongoDB at MongoChi 2011. 10Gen posted the video recently, so I thought I would share it here.
• paperplanes. A Tour of Amazon’s DynamoDB – Sorted range keys, conditional updates, atomic counters, structured data and multi-valued data types, fetching and updating single attributes, strong consistency, and no explicit way to handle and resolve conflicts other than conditions. A lot of features DynamoDB has to offer remind me of everything that's great about wide column stores like Cassandra, but even more so of HBase
• Announcing Sencha Designer 2 Beta | Blog | Sencha – We’re thrilled to announce that Sencha Designer 2 Beta is available for download! Designer 2 makes it easier than ever to build desktop and mobile applications using Ext JS and Sencha Touch.
• The Five Stages of Hosting (Pinboard Blog) – I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of 'cloudiness'. People who aren't interested in this kind of minutia would be wise to pull the rip cord right here.
• Q&A: An Introduction to the Scala Programming Language — Enterprise Systems – We explore what the Scala programming language can do for your organization with the language’s inventor.

Links for January 27th through January 31st

• InfoQ: Mobile Web Development with HTML5 – Keith Donald and Josh Long discuss the mobile browsers, the hardware constraints, the existing simulators, emulators and JavaScript frameworks, and the HTML5 support for doing mobile development.
• The Persistence Layer with Spring Data JPA | Javalobby – This is the forth of a series of articles about Persistence with Spring. This article will focus on the configuration and implementation of the persistence layer with Spring 3.1, JPA and Spring Data.
• Concordion is an open source tool for writing automated acceptance tests in Java* – Concordion is an open source tool for writing automated acceptance tests in Java
• Three years later, Mr. Moore is still letting us punt on database sharding – (37signals) – We’ve grown enormously over the last three years but RAM keeps getting cheaper and FusionIO SSD’s keep getting faster. If anything, it seems like recent advances in SSD technology are accelerating and it’s ever more unlikely that we’ll need to shard Basecamp.
• Scaling GitHub – A month after launching, GitHub hosted one thousand repositories. Three years later, we host over three million. In the same time we've gone from one thousand users to over a million. I'll dig into our development workflow and how we address concepts like scaling, deployment, code review, and testing.
• The Little Redis Book – Redis is wonderfully simple, which makes it awesome to use, but I thought it would turn any book into little more than reference material. Well, I decided to give it a try and hopefully you'll agree with me that The Little Redis Book is a solid addition to the Little family
• gitextensions – Git Extensions is the only graphical user interface for Git that allows you control Git without using the commandline. It comes with a manual and video tutorials to get you started quickly. – Google Project Hosting – Git Extensions is the only graphical user interface for Git that allows you control Git without using the commandline. It comes with a manual and video tutorials to get you started quickly.
• Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 5) – JDK Tools | Plumbr – Today we will talk about the command line tools that are bundled with the Oracle JDK and can be used to find memory leaks. The benefit of knowing the bundled tooling is obvious: they are available everywhere where Oracle's Java is installed

Links for January 22nd through January 27th

• How to build a simple GWT event bus using Generators | North Concepts – In his Google I/O session Best Practices For Architecting Your GWT App, Ray Ryan discusses the benefits of using an event bus in GWT (Google Web Toolkit) applications. Inspired by this talk, I decided to try my hand at building a simple GWT event bus modeled after our pure java event bus.
• InfoQ: How to get the most out of Spring and Google App Engine – Chris Ramsdale will get you up and running building Spring apps on Google App Engine. He'll go step-by-step building a real Spring app and identify not only the basics of App Engine, but more advanced topics such as integrating with Google's SQL Service and using App Engine's "Always on" feature to ensure high performance.
• The Persistence Layer with Spring Data JPA | Javalobby – This is the forth of a series of articles about Persistence with Spring. This article will focus on the configuration and implementation of the persistence layer with Spring 3.1, JPA and Spring Data
• Big data market survey: Hadoop solutions – O’Reilly Radar – Apache Hadoop is unquestionably the center of the latest iteration of big data solutions. At its heart, Hadoop is a system for distributing computation among commodity servers. It is often used with the Hadoop Hive project, which layers data warehouse technology on top of Hadoop, enabling ad-hoc analytical queries.
• Sensei DB – Open-source, distributed, realtime, semi-structured database – Sensei is both a search engine and a database. Sensei is designed to query and navigate through documents with parts that contain text and are unstructured, as well as parts containing meta information that have well-formed structures.
• Cloud Computing Has Become a Dominant Force in Financial Services – Wall Street & Technology – Cloud computing is emerging as a dominant technology category in the financial services industry, and investment banks, brokers, market makers and asset managers all will look to push more sophisticated applications into the private cloud.
• Amazon DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service Designed for Internet Scale Applications – All Things Distributed – Amazon DynamoDB is designed to maintain predictably high performance and to be highly cost efficient for workloads of any scale, from the smallest to the largest internet-scale applications.
• Managing User Presence, Software Caches, Counters, Sessions among other things using Redis – As a software architect, the hardest thing to do is pick the right tool for the job while balancing complexity, cost, performance and learning. And if there is one tool I never forget and keep on getting back to is redis which is an intentionally kept simple but superb artifact of the KISS principle.
• A technology decision making process: Java EE 6 vs. Spring Framework | Javalobby – There is a long list of parameters when you decide what technology stack to use. Those I have described in this article were very imprtant ones in our decision making process. Our conclusion is that the best way forward for now is to use a mixed technology stack
• InfoQ: RESTful SOA in the Real World – Sastry Malladi presents different ways used by the industry to implement a RESTful SOA, detailing how eBay did it in order to achieve performance, and what lessons can be taken from that.
• InfoQ: Large Scale Integration in Financial Services – John Davies addresses some of the difficulties dealing with FIX, FpML, SWIFT and integration in financial services software industry, challenging some of the canonical models existing today.
• InfoQ: Service-Oriented Architecture Maturity – An SOA maturity model must incorporate both perspec­tive and execution maturity. Progress must be made across a 3D space, with movement from an IT-driven perspective toward an enterprise-transformation outlook – embracing governance, metrics, drivers, and even terminology – likely trumping execution refinements within a particular perspective.

Links for January 15th through January 21st

• MongoDB Rocks My World | Javalobby – What I like the most is that you can organize your data the way you want to without a lot of restrictions forced on you by the DBMS you're using. For those who don't know, MongoDB is what's called a 'document-oriented' database. Rather than storing "rows" in "tables" like you do in a relational database, you store "documents" in "collections."
• JRuby and Jelastic : Sweetness « Jelastic – In this tutorial we will show you how easy it is to run JRuby apps with Jelastic PaaS.
• Cloud Computing: Ticket to the Corner Office? – Forbes – Rather than replace IT jobs, cloud may be having another effect. In many cases, it is elevating the role of IT-savvy managers within many enterprises.
• git – the simple guide – no deep shit! – Just a simple guide for getting started with git
• Learn Ruby The Hard Way – Welcome to Learn Ruby the hard way. This is a translation of "Learn Python The Hard Way" to teach total beginners Ruby. It's in the same style, and the content is nearly the same, but it will teach you Ruby
• Countdowner is a native iOS 5.0+ application that allows a user to set a timer. It is for educational purpose – Countdowner is a simple countdown application for iOS 5.0+. This is for educational purposes as my brother is learning how to program (specifically for iOS) and was looking for a starting point.
• jOOQ – jOOQ : A peace treaty between SQL and Java – jOOQ : A peace treaty between SQL and Java
• A Depressive Journey With MongoDB – You are about to read a long story on how I got burnt with MongoDB and depressed with it. I am not blaming MongoDB, anyone using, advocating or developing it. I am blaming myself for this. MongoDB is a good tool. You can use it but just make sure it is what you need and it handles your requirements very well. This is not specific to MongoDB but applies to every tool we use.
• AT&T offers HTML5 SDK for third-party mobile Web app developers – HTML rendering implementations are improving all the time and frameworks like Sencha Touch are getting better at abstracting away the differences.

Links for January 12th through January 15th

• WordPress has left the building – WordPress is the best blogging platform I, or indeed we, have ever used… but as a CMS is falling far behind the alternatives.
• Enterprise Will Spend $19 Billion on Apple Hardware in 2012 – John Paczkowski – Enterprise – AllThingsD – Apple is expected to sell $10 billion worth of iPads and $9 billion of Macs to business customers in 2012, according to Forrester’s latest Global Tech Market Outlook. Those are 68 percent and 45 percent increases, respectively, over 2011.
• MongoSV Live-Blog: Schema Design by Example – Kyle’s strategy is to start with a normalized representation and then embed for simplicity and optimization. This reminds me of our data-modeling post.
• InfoQ: Running Spring Java and Scala Apps on Heroku – James Ward demoes building a Spring Roo application and a Grails one, deploying them on Heroku.
• 10 BI Trends for 2012 According to Tableau Software • myNoSQL – 10 BI Trends for 2012 According to Tableau Software
• From the Mule’s Mouth » Enterprise IT predictions for 2012 – 2012 is here. And while we’ve seen a number of exciting developments in enterprise IT in 2011, it was just the beginning. There’s a lot in store next year, here are 6 key developments to look out for in 2012
• Recap: Improving Hadoop Performance by (up to) 1000x | LinkedIn Engineering – Daniel Abadi recently visited LinkedIn and talked about "Improving Hadoop Performance by (up to) 1000x."

Links for January 4th through January 10th

• InfoQ: Graeme Rocher on Grails 2.0 and Polyglot Persistence – In this interview recorded at JavaOne 2011 Conference, Srini Penchikala talks to Grails project lead Graeme Rocher about Grails 2.0 features, polyglot persistence paradigm and how Grails supports it. Graeme also talks about the tool support and the upcoming features in Grails 3.0 release.
• Spring / GWT Software Architecture for scalable applications – Part 2 « Fancy UI – During this article you will learn how to build efficiently and quickly the backend (based upon the solution described on part one) that is going to be used later by any kind of clients (GWT, Android,…). My aim is to guide step by step on building an example application and gives you all the best practices on each step to achieve high quality code.
• InfoQ: Keynote: Predictability and Measurement with Kanban – David J. Anderson explains how to use predictability, measurement and change management to balance the factors of observed capability, staffing, and delivery targets to achieve predictable outcomes.
• InfoQ: SOA and Cloud: What is in store for 2012? – Traditionally on the brink of a new year, independent analysts and experts share their predictions and this time around we are sharing some relevant ones in the SOA and Cloud space for 2012. This year the common themes underpinning all SOA and Cloud predictions are the rapid changes occuring in Big Data and the consumerization of IT through mobile and open APIs.
• InfoQ: Things I Wish I’d Known – Rod Johnson shares some of the lessons he learned as an entrepreneur – Things I Wish I'd Known – Rod Johnson shares some of the lessons he learned as an entrepreneur
• davidsalter.com: VMware Introduces vFabric 5, an Integrated Application Platform for Virtual and Cloud Environments – vFabric reportedly allows developers to build cloud applications up to 50% faster with Spring that can be run on premise or in the cloud.
• InfoQ: Navigating the Maze of EA Certifications – There are over a dozen Enterprise Architecture certifications available and they are becoming increasingly critical when hiring and evaluating architects. Microsoft’s Mike Walker categorized these certifications into a Reference Guide that can help architects better understand which certification(s) to pursue.
• Mike’s Site: Unit Testing Named Queues: Spring 3+maven2+Google App Engine – Problem, you have a task that you know can take more than 30 seconds to complete, what do you do? What if this task needs to be triggered every day at a specific time? Google provides several mechanisms to to solve just this problem, queues and scheduled task, respectively.
• Just a little Python: MongoDB’s Write Lock – I was curious about the performance impact of the write lock and the improvement of lock-with-yield, so I decided to do a little benchmark, MongoDB 1.8 versus MongoDB 2.0
• Dropbox Automator Is Like IFTTT For Dropbox | TechCrunch – Like IFTTT, Dropbox Automator is capable of triggering a similar series of actions, based on what kind of files have been added to your Dropbox folders.
• Dropbox: the new file system of the web | Collaborable – The Dropbox REST API is going to forever change the way people interact with web apps for business. It allows your web app to put and pull data from any user’s desktop or mobile device.

Links for December 29th through January 3rd

• Transaction configuration with JPA and Spring 3.1 – This is the fifth of a series of articles about Persistence with Spring. This article will focus on the configuration of transactions with Spring 3.1 and JPA.
• Java 7: Understanding the Phaser, a flexible thread synchronization mechanism – Java 7 introduces a flexible thread synchronization mechanism called Phaser. If you need to wait for threads to arrive before you can continue or start another set of tasks, then Phaser is a good choice.
• CloudTMP » How to deploy a neo4j instance in Amazon EC2 in 10 minutes – Neo4j is a high-performance, NOSQL graph database with all the features of a mature and robust database. In this post I will explain how to deploy a neo4j instance in Amazon EC2 web service.
• Significant Software Development Developments of 2011 | Javalobby – 2011 was yet another year that saw significant developments and advances in the software development industry. The lists compiled in this post indicate how broadly spread these advances were, affecting different programming languages, different deployment environments, and different stakeholders.
• Groovy, the Python of Java – Groovy is respectful of and cooperative with Java itself. One of its primary design goals is to live alongside existing Java code, even while Groovy’s syntax far surpasses that of Java. In this respect, Groovy plays a very similar role in the Java ecosystem that Python plays in the C ecosystem
• InfoQ: Apache Tika 1.0 Allows Easy Text Extraction for Java – The Apache Tika project aims to provide a single API for extracting data and detecting language from arbitrary input formats, such as text documents, spreadsheets, PDFs or images. Even audio or video input formats are supported to a certain degree.
• InfoQ: Concurrent Caching at Google – Charles Fry presents MapMaker, an in-memory caching solution on the JVM, discussing its API and implementation evolution along with internal details.
• 5 Reasons why the technical debt in Java EE projects is much higher than in COBOL projects – The CodeBrickie – While the basic notion of higher technical debt in Java projects compared to COBOL may be certainly true at the time the snapshot was taken for some good reasons, I doubt the reliability of an almighty automatic code analysis tool which is able to produce such testimonies about overall quality of projects with very different technical and organizational backgrounds.
• Jodd | Jerry – The Unbearable Lightness of Java – Jerry is a jQuery in Java. Jerry is a fast and concise Java Library that simplifies HTML document parsing, traversing and manipulating. Jerry is designed to change the way that you parse HTML content
• Facebook Poised to Lead Biggest U.S. Internet IPO Year Since 1999 Bubble – Bloomberg – With Facebook considering the largest Internet IPO on record and regulatory filings showing that at least 14 other Web-related companies are planning sales, the industry may raise $11 billion next year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That would be the most since $18.5 billion of IPOs in 1999, just before the dot-com bubble burst.
• URI.js – URLs in Javascript – URI.js is a javascript library for working with URLs. It offers a "jQuery-style" API (Fluent Interface, Method Chaining) to read and write all regular components and a number of convenience methods like .directory() and .authority().
• Microsoft in a better place than many people think, concludes Bernstein report – GeekWire – A recent Bernstein Research report says that Microsoft is actually in a good position to manage threats such as tablets and cloud computing and avoid a "doomsday" situation
• Coming to Terms with the Consumerization of IT – R “Ray” Wang – Harvard Business Review – IT and business leaders need to work together and operate in parallel. If IT slows down the business capability to innovate, the company will suffer as new business models emerge and infrastructure will fail to keep up. If business moves ahead of IT in technology, then the company fails because IT will spend years cleaning up technology messes
• Oh, Charlie, you should have been here for Christmas — Scobleizer – It shows why Charlie is so wrong: apps do matter and matter big time and TODAY matter more than carriers.

Links for December 27th through December 28th

• For Start-Ups, Sorting the Data Cloud Is the Next Big Thing – NYTimes.com – The amount of data being generated globally increases by 40 percent a year, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, the consulting firm’s research arm. And while Splunk has a lead in selling software to analyze machine data, big data is big enough to create new opportunities for a multitude of start-ups, many of them using the open-source software Hadoop.
• The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value – Forbes – The recognition that maximizing shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world is an obvious but still a radical idea. Like all obvious, radical ideas, in the first instance it will be rejected. Then it will be ridiculed. Finally it will be self-evident and no one will be able to remember why anyone ever thought otherwise.
• Words of wisdom from John Gruber in this holiday season. – How much will I be willing to pay then to be able to go back in time, for one day, to now, when he’s eight years old, he wants to go to movies and play games and build Lego kits with me, and he believes in magic?
• Spring Data Neo4j – The Best NoSQL database for Spring – Spring Data Neo4j enables POJO based development for graph databases like Neo4j. It extends annotated entity classes with transparent mapping functionality. Spring Data Neo4j is part of the bigger Spring Data project which aims to provide convenient support for NOSQL databases.
• Java 8 Status Updates | Johannes Thönes – The two big new language features of the upcoming Java SE 8 release are Lambda Expressions and Modularity. For both, status updates have been released these days. I’ll share the links with you, so you might read through them over the holidays
• Microcaching: Speed your app up 250x with no new code – Fenn Bailey – The idea behind microcaching is to cap the amount of requests that can make it through to your app by letting nginx bear the brunt of your pageviews by caching content for a very small amounts of time (ie: 1 second or less).
• Berkeley Explains Why Google Trumps Microsoft | Wired Enterprise – The University of California at Berkeley has chosen Google over Microsoft for its campus-wide email and calendar services, and it will tell you why — in great detail.
• It’s Always Sunny in Silicon Valley – Businessweek – The Valley's techies live in a bubble of prosperity. Optimism has its advantages, but some worry the region may lose touch with the rest of the world
• Windows 8 picture password is ‘Fisher-Price toy’ says father of 2-factor authentication – The Windows 8 feature that logs users in if they touch certain points in a photo in the right order might be fun, but it's not very good security, according to the inventor of RSA's SecurID token.

Links for December 23rd through December 26th

• The Lives They Lived – Dennis Ritchie, b. 1941 – In a sense, Ritchie has enabled us to all become programmers. And this alone should give us the power to create our own digital future.

  Hello, new world.

• InfoQ: Code2Cloud: Automating The Whole Software Dev/Deploy Cycle – Ryan Slobojan presents Code2Cloud used to automatically set up a number of tools useful for development and deployment: Hudson, Git, task repository, wiki, Cloud Foundry Deployment Services and Maven
• InfoQ: Implementing Scalable HA Architectures with Spring Integration – Gary Russell and David Turanski discuss creating HA architectures with Spring Integration using Cluster Controller and Strict Message Ordering, accompanied by demoes
• NoSQL at Twitter: Why / How they use Scribe, Hadoop/Pig, HBase, Cassandra, and FlockDB for data analytics? | Javalobby – Here’s some interesting NoSQL stuff guys. It’s a presentation about how Twitter uses NoSQL for analytics by Kevin Weil (@kevinweil), Analytics Lead, Twitter.
• High Scalability – How Twitter Stores 250 Million Tweets a Day Using MySQL – One of the interesting stories he told was of the transition from Twitter's old way of storing tweets using temporal sharding, to a more distributed approach using a new tweet store called T-bird, which is built on top of Gizzard, which is built using MySQL.
• Design an SOA solution using a reference architecture – The long-term goal of the SOA solution stack is to provide templates and guidelines to help architects facilitate and automate the process of modeling and documenting the architectural layers, building blocks, options, product mappings, and architectural and design decisions that contribute to the creation of an SOA.

Links for December 22nd

• Linux: 20 Iptables Examples For New SysAdmins – This post list most common iptables solutions required by a new Linux user to secure his or her Linux operating system from intruders
• InfoQ: WebStorm 3.0: JetBrains Provides a More Complete JavaScript IDE – WebStorm 3.0 adds support for Node.js, CoffeeScript, JSLint, JavaScript Unit Testing and includes enhancements of the JavaScript and XSLT debuggers.
• Intro to GWT4Touch 2.0 | Javalobby – GWT4Touch is a mobile framework that gives you the ability to write mobile applications based on HTML5. The framework internally leverage the industry leading HTML5 mobile framework application
• Spring Framework moves to GitHub | SpringSource Team Blog – Today we're happy to announce that the Spring Framework has moved to GitHub!
• 10 MongoDB Tips From Engine Yard Data Team | Engine Yard Blog – 10 MongoDB Tips From Engine Yard Data Team
• HtmlStapler is a nice tool for automatic packaging of web resources – HtmlStapler is a nice tool for automatic packaging of web resources included by HTML page: javascript and CSS files. Just by enabling HtmlStapler in your web application, all multiple resource (javascript and css) links will be automatically and transparently replaced by a single link(s)
• Show and Tell: MongoDB at foursquare | Foursquare Engineering Blog – On Friday 12/9, @cooperb gave a talk at the MongoSV 2011 conference covering our experiences deploying MongoDB on Amazon Web Services, including some of the operational tricks we use to keep our database servers highly performant.
• SOPA Is The Problem And Not The Solution. – SOPA Bill is trying to prevent intellectual property piracy which is a legitimate goal, but the way it is going about it will break the Internet and may cause economic calamity.
• The golden age of the developer – David Haywood Smith – The Kernel – There's never been a better time to be a developer. Thanks to an unprecedented range of open-source software, learning resources and useful web services at our disposal, we can learn new languages, get help, collaborate with others and, if our ideas win traction, there’s now a multitude of investors waiting in the wings to help us build companies around our products.
• My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition) — carpeaqua by Justin Williams – This is the third installment of my must have must have list of tools and utilities as a Mac and iOS developer.
• The Spark micro framework | Web Builder Zone – Spark is a Sinatra inspired micro web framework for quickly creating web applications in Java with minimal effort.
• Creating a JDBC driver for Neo4j | Stuck in the middle – While most NOSQL databases, such as Neo4j, provide a non-relational way to store and query data, in this case it was possible to create a JDBC driver that can expose that non-relational data in a way that works reasonably well with the JDBC API

Links for December 20th through December 21st

• What Happened To The 9 Programming Languages To Watch in 2011 | Javalobby – Last year, I wrote a post entitled 9 Programming Languages To Watch In 2011. Now that 2011 is basically over, let’s see what happened to these languages over the course of the year.
• Video: Dart – A Language For Structured Web Programming – Marakana – Seth Ladd, Developer Advocate at Google, introduces us to Dart at the Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group meetup on December 7th, 2011.
• StatHat – Invent stats on the fly. Track data instantly, up to the minute, accurately. – StatHat is a tool to track statistics and events in your code. In just one line, you can track any number and StatHat will generate graphs instantly, send you alerts, and let you embed the graphs on your own site.
• Introducing Siesta: A Testing Tool for Ext JS | Blog | Sencha – Testing your code brings lots of advantages, perhaps the biggest one is that it increases your confidence in your codebase. How do you know your code actually works? How do you know if a small change in the core of your application is safe or if it breaks some feature? The only way is to actually manually verify each and every feature of your system—but that’s not realistic unless you have a test suite.
• Partychat — migrating from Google App Engine to EC2 « Vijay Pandurangan’s blog – Google App Engine’s insistence on a different paradigm for development makes migration extremely difficult, since moving to a new platform requires rearchitecting code
• ios 5 – How does iOS 5’s iMessage know that the recipient is an iOS 5 device? – Apple – Stack Exchange – When you send a message using the Messages app, iOS seems to magically figure out that the recipient is on iOS 5 and automatically switches over to iMessage (blue messages instead of green SMSs).
• InfoQ: JSR 107, JSR 347, Infinispan, NoSQL, Hot Rod, Memcached, CDI and Beyond – InfoQ catches up with Manik Surtani to discuss JSR 347, data grids and Inifinispan. Manik dicusses overlap with NoSQL and support for Memcached and HotRod wire protocol as well.
• Connecting a HTML5 application to a MongoDB instance via MongoLab REST API | Tweetegy – I needed a free, document based, online data store so that I could quickly build a HTML5 prototype. As an exercise, I quickly whipped up a simple application that can store basic contact details of people.
• MapReduce for the Masses: Zero to Hadoop in Five Minutes with Common Crawl | CommonCrawl – Common Crawl aims to change the big data game with our repository of over 40 terabytes of high-quality web crawl information into the Amazon cloud, the net total of 5 billion crawled pages

Links for December 16th through December 19th

• Chrome 15 puts IE8 in rear-view mirror, takes No. 1 spot – Google's Chrome 15 has jumped into the number one spot, replacing Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as the world's most popular browser edition.
• The 10 Most Important Open Source Projects of 2011 | Linux.com – It turns out that 2011 was a banner year for open source projects. And now, in no particular order, the 10 most important projects of 2011.
• The Persistence Layer with Spring 3.1 and JPA – Java Code Geeks – This is the third of a series of articles about Persistence with Spring. This article will focus on the configuration and implementation of the persistence layer with Spring 3.1 and JPA
• It’s Big. It’s Free. It’s MongoDB on OpenShift – YouTube – In this video OpenShift Paas Master Issac Roth details the new MongoDB features in OpenShift
• Joyent Announces SmartMachine Appliance for MongoDB – MarketWatch – Joyent, the global provider of cloud computing software and services, today is launching its SmartMachine Appliance for MongoDB to serve the fast growing market for MongoDB products in the online game, mobile, social network and e-commerce sectors
• Google Zeitgeist 2011 – How the World Searched – What mattered in 2011? Zeitgeist sorted billions of Google searches to capture the year's 10 fastest-rising global queries and the rest of the spirit of 2011.
• Google is using GWT – and you? – People sometimes ask me why Google itself doesn't use GWT, but many people don't realize that many of Google's newer services are written using it. Some Google products that use Google Web Toolkit that you may not know about:
• Anyone can build a Messenger client—with open standards access via XMPP – Today we’re taking another step, with the public availability of access to the Messenger network via XMPP, an open standard. This means that anyone can build innovative messaging clients—either stand-alone or built into their devices—that include access to Messenger’s 300 million active users.
• Java Tip: When to use ForkJoinPool vs ExecutorService – JavaWorld – The Fork/Join library introduced in Java 7 extends the existing Java concurrency package with support for hardware parallelism, a key feature of multicore systems
• Spring Framework 3.1 goes GA – It is my pleasure to announce that Spring Framework 3.1 becomes generally available today! This release delivers several key features that make Spring ready for the challenges of 2012 and beyond:
• Busy Java Developers Guide to NoSQL by Ted Neward at JAX London Nov 2011 – YouTube – In this session Ted examines the NoSQL ecosystem, looks at the major players, how they compare and contrast, and what sort of architectural implications they have for software systems in general.
• JPdfUnit homepage, framework for testing generated pdf document – JpdfUnit is a framework for testing a generated pdf document with the JUnit test framework so JPdfUnit is a high level api. The framework is designed for an easy access to the PDFBox library

Links for December 10th through December 15th

• Five Step Illustrated Guide to Setup a Kanban System in an Enterprise Organization – If your about to kick-off a Kanban adoption in an enterprise IT organization or in the midst of one and struggling, you may find this useful. It's a simple 5 step approach that has always produced good outcomes for us while respecting the pace of change a typical IT organization can absorb.
• InfoQ: Forrester CEO: The Web is a Software Architecture and the App Internet is the Next Wave – Forrester CEO: The Web is a Software Architecture and the App Internet is the Next Wave
• Video: SpringOne 2GX – Introduction to Spring Data Neo4J – This video presentation is by Michael Hunger, Software Developer for Neo4J Technologies, and he provides an Introduction to Spring Data Neo4J. Michael covers
• Video: SpringOne 2GX – Messaging for Modern Applications – This video presentation is by Tom McCuch, Senior Sales Engineer for SpringSource, and he discusses Messaging for Modern Applications.
• Bill Gates to return as Microsoft’s white knight? | ZDNet – Summary: Could and should Bill Gates return to day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft? Fortune is reporting there’s a rumor to that effect.
• Treasure Data Blog • Real-Time Log Collection with Fluentd and MongoDB – This post shows how to use Fluentd-MongoDB plugin to aggregate semi-structured logs in real-time.
• Why I choose CouchDB over MongoDB | Chris Allnutt – Use MongoDB only if you don’t care about the state of the data, but want to sling it out distributed as fast as possible. If you’re willing to wait an extra millisecond to ensure that that save and replication actually happens, and when it fails you just use the last valid version use CouchDB
• The Durable Document Store You Didn’t Know You Had, But Did – As it turns out, PostgreSQL has a number of ways of storing loosely structured data — documents — in a column on a table.
• 11 programming trends to watch | Application Development – InfoWorld – From JavaScript everywhere to everything on the JVM, new tools, techniques, and troubles are changing how developers work
• Instagram Engineering • What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies – We thought it would be fun to give a sense of all the systems that power Instagram, at a high-level; you can look forward to more in-depth descriptions of some of these systems in the future.
• The Bastards Book of Ruby – A Programming Primer for Counting and Other Unconventional Tasks – The Bastards Book of Ruby is an introduction to programming and its practical uses for journalists, researchers, scientists, analysts, and anyone else whose job is to seek out, make sense from, and show the hard-to-find data.
• InfoQ: MongoGraph Brings Semantic Web Features to MongoDB Developers – Using this approach JSON objects are automatically translated into triples and both the MongoDB query language and SPARQL work against these objects. Another goal of MongoGraph is to make the freetext engine of their graph database easy to search as Solr/Lucene.
• Unit Testing for SQL Server with SQL Test – SQL Test is a unit test plug-in for SQL Server Management Studio.
• MongoDB: The New M in Your LAMP Stack – MongoDB: The New M in Your LAMP Stack – Mathias Stearn & Nosh Petigara

Links for December 4th through December 9th

• The death of Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs and America’s decline | The Economist – There are lots of things it could do to improve the ability of and incentives for American companies and workers to innovate and grow, whether it’s taxing fossil fuels, giving more green cards to foreign scientists and engineers or simplifying the tax code. These days, however, that seems a fantasy compared to more prosaic demands such as, don’t shut down the government, starve critical government agencies of funds or default on the national debt.
• cmdln.org (a sysadmin blog) » Blog Archive » Install git on CentOS cpanel server – cpanel has blocked all perl packages from being installed or updated because they don’t want updates to break or conflict with their packages. Thankfully yum provides a nice one time workaround for this kind of situation.
• Niklas’ Blog: Java 7: Project Coin in code examples – This blog introduces – by code examples – some new Java 7 features summarized under the term Project Coin. The goal of Project Coin is to add a set of small language changes to JDK 7.
• Moving from SVN to Git in 1,000 easy steps! « Code as Craft – This past summer we completed a project that spanned several months of planning and preparation – moving our source control from Subversion to Git. The code that runs our search engine, front-end web stack, support/admin tools, API, configuration management, and more are now stored in and deployed from Git. We thought some of you might find our approach migrating an 80-100 person engineering team interesting and possibly instructive.
• A Look at the NoSQL Landscape | Javalobby – Take a look at the current landscape of NoSQL stores and figure out why you might need NoSQL in this recent podcast where Bruce Elgort talks with Mark Myers from the London Developer Co-op.
• scribe-java – The simple OAuth Java lib! – Welcome to the home of Scribe, the simple OAuth Java lib!
• ql.io – A declarative, data-retrieval and aggregation gateway for quickly consuming HTTP apis – ql.io combines SQL, JSON, and a few procedural style constructs into a compact language. Scripts written in this language can make HTTP requests to retrieve data, perform joins between API responses, project responses, or even make requests in a loop. But note that ql.io's scripting language is not SQL – it is SQL inspired
• InfoQ: SpringOne 2GX Keynote: Next Generation Applications – Ben Alex along with a SpringSource team present the future of mobile applications, authorization, data, and application architecture as seen by VMware.
• InfoQ: Scala+GWT Brings Scala to the Browser, New Documentation Site and Scala Days 2012 Announced – Grzegorz Kossakowski has recently released the third milestone version of Scala+GWT. Scala+GWT allows you to write Scala code and then run it in the browser by compiling it to JavaScript via Google's Web Toolkit. This allows you to write statically checked code but with less boilerplate than Java requires.
• Running Ext GWT 2 and 3 Together | Learn | Sencha – As a migration strategy, both Ext GWT 2 and 3 can be used at the same time. This allows an application to be upgraded to v3 over time, rather than all at once.
• Move The Web Forward | Guide to getting involved with standards and browser development – Whether you're a talented web developer, web-slinging since the days of tables and font tags, or you're a hobbyist hacker, there are a number ways for you to give back. Below, we list some of the ways that anyone can contribute back to the web platform.

Links for November 30th through December 3rd

• Upgrading to Sencha Touch 2 PR2 | Learn | Sencha – This has been a brief introduction to some of the updates you should be aware of when using Sencha Touch 2 PR2, and hopefully you enjoy working with it and benefiting from the major enhancements these small changes on your part can bring.
• VMware’s Cloud Foundry Ranked Top Developer Platform – New VMware kid on the PaaS block takes "best overall" honors, while Google App Engine is best public and IBM SmartCloud best private cloud platform in Evans Data survey.
• Following Digital Breadcrumbs To ‘Big Data’ Gold : NPR – What do Facebook, Groupon and biotech firm Human Genome Sciences have in common? They all rely on massive amounts of data to design their products. Terabytes and even zettabytes of information about consumers or about genetic sequences can be harnessed and crunched.
• The Twelve-Factor App – In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service. The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps that
• Humane JS – A simple, modern, framework-independent, well-tested, unobtrusive, notification system. – Humane JS – A simple, modern, framework-independent, well-tested, unobtrusive, notification system.
• Learn, build, and deploy Ruby web apps using Rails and Sinatra – We're going to teach you how to build your first Ruby web application in 3 minutes and deploy it live to the internet. Don't worry, you won't have to install or setup anything. We'll take care of all those pesky little details: Ruby, Rails, Git, Gems, configuring SSH keys, and deploying your application to a server
• Don’t Send That Email. Pick up the Phone! – Anthony Tjan – Harvard Business Review – As digital communication accelerates the pace at which people form and broaden relationships, it is also decreasing the rate at which people are willing to resolve issues professionally and directly in-person
• I Write Like – Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
• Inside McKinsey – FT.com – The world’s most prestigious consultancy prides itself on its intellectual prowess and ethical standards. But this year, an insider trading scandal surrounding former McKinsey luminaries has left staff and alumni reeling
• Freakonomics » The Way We Teach Math, Sciences, and Languages Is Wrong – Despite spending 5 percent of the hours that I spent in school, with the self-study method I became far more competent in the language.
• Codes from the Underground – What if SMTP and Sinatra Had a Baby? – smtproutes is what you’d get if Sinatra and SMTP had a baby. It’s not an email server with a capital S. smtproutes is a lightweight framework for rapidly prototyping web-services on top of SMTP.

Links for November 27th through November 30th

• Errai is a framework for building GWT applications – JBoss Community – Errai offers a set of components that simplify building rich web applications using The Google Web Toolkit. The framework provides a concise programming model for powerful client-server communication and extension points that bring Java Enterprise standards to GWT clients.
• Errai Developer Blog: Setting the Record Straight on GWT – Since joining the Errai team, I've been telling lots of people about our project. Every time I do this, I find myself dispelling some common misconceptions about what GWT is and how it can be used.
• Canonical dropping CouchDB from Ubuntu One – The H Open Source: News and Features – Canonical is discontinuing its use of CouchDB as part of its Ubuntu One data synchronisation service. The announcement was made by John Lenton, Senior Engineering Manager at Canonical. CouchDB has been used in Ubuntu One to provide a synchronisable way of storing and distributing arbitrary structured data which included contacts, notes and playlists.
• Apache considered harmful – People have a great capacity for change. Those people can and will continue to lead us as our institutions fail and eventually harm us.
• Heroku launches SQL Database-as-a-Service — Cloud Computing News – The new service, aptly called Heroku Postgres, is a commercial version of what Heroku has been providing to its own developers for years, only it’s now available to all developers regardless where they host their applications.
• Video: Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j | SpringSource.org – The Spring Data Neo4j project has evolved to support the Neo4j graph data store within the Spring paradigm. Neo4j expert, Michael Hunger, provides a guided tour of the technology and provides details on how to get started in this Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j.
• simple-spring-memcached – A drop-in library to enable memcached caching in Spring beans via annotations for some simple use cases – Distributed caching can be a big, hairy, intricate, and complex proposition when using it extensively. Simple-Spring-Memcached (SSM) attempts to simplify implementation for several basic use cases. This project enables caching in Spring-managed beans, by using Java 5 Annotations and Spring/AspectJ AOP on top of the spymemcached client.
• Picking the top 10: Technologies vs. trends | Application development – InfoWorld – No one can tell for sure which emerging technologies will have the greatest impact on the enterprise, but we're giving it our best shot
• Google Just Snuck Most of Chrome OS Onto the iPad – The Next Web – With the announcement of its new Search app, Google gave iPad users more than just a slick and well-made native search app that bests the experience on any Android tablet. It also managed to squeeze the core elements of Chrome OS into Apple’s ecosystem.
• Bezos Gone Wild! Amazon Selling Every Non-iPhone Smartphone for One Penny – LAUNCH - – Through next Monday, Amazon is selling all non-iPhones for one penny with a new two-year contract. Smartphones on sale for $0.01 include the Motorola Droid Razr, which Verizon sells for $299 with a two-year contract, the Samsung Galaxy S II, Epic 4G Touch, which Spring sells for $199 with a two-year contract, and the BlackBerry Torch 4G, which AT&T sells for $99 with a two-year contract.

Links for November 21st through November 25th

• Data-Driven Documents – D3.js is a small, free JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data – Data-Driven Documents – D3.js is a small, free JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data
• Java Concurrent Animated – This presentation consists of a series of animations that visualize the functionality of the components in the java.util.concurrent library. Each animation features buttons that correspond to the method calls in that component. Each click of a button shows how the threads interact in real time. The animations are controlled by the actual Java concurrent component they are illustrating, so the animation is not only a visual demonstration, it’s also a code sample.
• A human review of the Kindle Fire – Marco.org – The Fire is an Android version, sort of, of the iPod Touch. It’s the first device available that’s inexpensive and offers Android in a somewhat reasonable package without a cellular contract.
• WWW: World Wide Wait – A Performance Comparison of Java Web Frameworks – Devoxx 2011 – In this talk we let 4 frameworks compete for the title of fastest and most scalable java web framework: JSF, GWT, SpringMVC and Wicket.

Links for November 19th through November 20th

• Google Guava – Synchronization with Monitor – The Google Guava project is a collection of libraries that every Java developer should become familiar with. The Guava libraries cover I/O, collections, string manipulation, and concurrency just to name a few
• First look: Oracle NoSQL Database | Data Explosion – InfoWorld – Oracle's take on the distributed key-value data store is fast, flexible, and enterprise-grade serious
• BlueEyes is a lightweight web 3.0 framework for the Scala programming language. – A lightweight Web 3.0 framework for Scala, featuring a purely asynchronous architecture, extremely high-performance, massive scalability, high usability, and a functional, composable design.
• Martin Fowler on Polyglot Persistence | Architects Zone – What all of this means is that if you're working in the enterprise application world, now is the time to start familiarizing yourself with alternative data storage options. This won't be a fast revolution, but I do believe the next decade will see the database thaw progress rapidly.
• InfoQ: The Kotlin Programming Language – Andrey Breslav introduces the upcoming Kotlin language created by JetBrains, a general purpose JVM-based language, statically typed, object-oriented, and meant to be more concise than Java.
• iPad and iPhone Application Development (HD) – Download free content from Stanford on iTunes – Tools and APIs required to build applications for the iPhone platform using the iPhone SDK, Objective-C programming language. iPhone APIs and tools including Xcode
• How StackOverflow Scales with SQL Server (Video) with Brent Ozar – The most popular tech Q&A site in the world serves 12-14 million web pages per day with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. They’re passionate about performance, and they’ll share the scalability lessons they learned along the way.
• Raible Designs | Play 2.0, A web framework for a new era – This was a great talk on what's new in Play 2.0. I especially like the native support for LESS and CoffeeScript and the emphasis on trying to keep developers using two tools: their editor and the browser. The sample apps look great, but the documentation look sparse. I doubt I'll get a chance to migrate my Play 1.2.3 app to 2.0 this month, but I hope to try migrating sometime before the end of the year.
• Google Music Store Chases Apple’s ITunes 8 Years Too Late: Tech – Businessweek – Google Inc. is entering the online music market almost a decade too late to pose a threat to Apple Inc., the largest seller of songs on the Web.
• Reading Needs a Platform: Introducing the New Readability – For free!! – Wherever you read — your browser, iPhone, iPad, your Amazon Kindle — Readability is going to be there. For free.
• Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT and Dart – We view Dart as an ambitious evolution of GWT’s mission to make web apps better for end users … we anticipate working closely with the GWT developer community to explore Dart.

Links for November 15th through November 18th

• Why Americans use social media | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project – Two-thirds of online adults (66%) use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn. These internet users say that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools
• Set Up an Amazon EC2 Instance with Tomcat and MySQL – 5 Minutes Tutorial – Set Up an Amazon EC2 Instance with Tomcat and MySQL – 5 Minutes Tutorial
• Gartner Says Sales of Mobile Devices Grew 5.6 Percent in Third Quarter of 2011; Smartphone Sales Increased 42 Percent – Worldwide sales of mobile devices totaled 440.5 million units in the third quarter of 2011, up 5.6 percent from the same period last year, according to Gartner, Inc. Non-smartphone devices performed well, driven by demand in emerging markets for low-cost devices from white-box manufacturers, and for dual-subscriber identity module (SIM) devices.
• More information of Google+’s technology stack from an engineer on their infrastructure team – Many of you wanted to hear more about Google+'s technology stack. A few of us engineers decided to write a few posts about this topic and share them with you.
• Got big data? Crunch it with Google’s BigQuery | VentureBeat – Google wants to help you crunch big data like cornflakes. To that end, it is opening up BigQuery, the service is designed for large-scale internal data analytics, to companies of all sizes, and it’s adding a web interface so you can do it all in the cloud.
• Kindle Touch review – Amazon reinvents the Kindle with the all-new Kindle Touch. But how far have we really come? – Amazon reinvents the Kindle with the all-new Kindle Touch. But how far have we really come?

Links for November 14th through November 15th