• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Hibernate Should be to Programmers what Cake Mixes are to Bakers – Cake mixes consist of a mix of things you already have in your cupboard plus a load of unnecessary, potentially harmful preservatives. They cost more than making cake from scratch, the resulting cake tastes worse, they take away people’s confidence in their ability to make their own cakes, and they don’t even save you any time. Hibernate has the same misperceived benefits and the same draw-backs. Gordon Ramsay wouldn’t be caught dead using any cake mix. As professional programmers, we should be more skeptical of generic frameworks like Hibernate.
• InfoQ: Should Enterprise Architecture Teams Be More Focused on Innovation? – Enterprise Architects may be disproportionally concerned with portfolio consolidation, standardization and simplification instead of offering leadership in business technology innovation. This is the proposition offered by Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins in a recent blog post.
• dzone.com – Using MongoDB with Morphia – Morphia is a Java library which acts sort of like an ORM for MongoDB – it allows us to seamlessly map Java objects to the MongoDB datastore. It uses annotations to indicate which collection a class is stored in, and even supports polymorphic collections
• GitHub Enterprise – Install GitHub on Your Servers – GitHub on Your Servers – A secure, intuitive system for enterprise software development and collaboration.
• 10 Key Skills Architects Must Have to Deliver Value | Cutter Consortium – This Executive Report by Michael Rosen discusses the role of the architect and describes 10 activities that architects should perform to add value to projects.
• 25 Secrets of the Browser Developer Tools – AndiSmith.com – Over the last few years there has been one tool that has helped out every web developer more than any other – the browser developer tools. Working in harmony with the web browser, the developer tools allows us to manipulate DOM elements, CSS styles, JavaScript and other useful information from the same window often in real time.

Links for November 4th

• Cisco Gen-Y study: Mobile devices valued more than higher salaries | ZDNet – New research reveals that Generation Y employees prefer device freedom over higher pay, and they would rather lose their wallets than their smartphones.
• Yahoo! Announces Cocktails – Shaken, Not Stirred · YDN Blog – “Cocktails” is a mix of HTML5, Node.JS, CSS3, JavaScript and a lot of ingenuous, creative mind-bending tricks from Yahoo!’s engineers. Today, we are announcing two Cocktails: Yahoo!’s Mojito, an environment-agnostic JavaScript web application framework, and Yahoo! Manhattan, a hosted platform for Mojito-based applications.
• Are you ready for the era of ‘big data’? – McKinsey Quarterly – Strategy – Innovation – Through investments and forward-looking policies, company leaders and their counterparts in government can capitalize on big data instead of being blindsided by it.
• Amazon, the Company That Ate the World – BusinessWeek – Jeff Bezos' new tablet, the Kindle Fire, is cheap, pretty, and puts Amazon in perfect position to take a bite out of Apple—and every online transaction you make
• InfoQ: Interview and Book Review: Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond, 2nd Edition – InfoQ spoke with Paulo Merson, co-author of the book on software architecture documentation concept and how it can be used to model the architecture to help with the design and development of software applications.
• zeroclipboard – Provides "Copy to Clipboard" functionality for your web site using JavaScript and Flash – The Zero Clipboard library provides an easy way to copy text to the clipboard using an invisible Adobe Flash movie, and a JavaScript interface. The "Zero" signifies that the library is invisible and the user interface is left entirely up to you.

Links for November 2nd

• Yahoo spinoff shakes up Hadoop market with new distro — Cloud Computing News – Hortonworks, the Hadoop company that spun out from Yahoo in June , is getting into the software space after all with Tuesday’s release of the open-source Hortonworks Data Platform
• Wit.io: Ruby and Python: pivot points – Python and Ruby seem similar. They’re dynamic, flexible and expressive. But everyone knows we don’t use them the same way. After 6 years with Ruby and 2 months with Python, I’ve tried to find ‘pivot points’ that define how different they are
• Introducing the 5-watt server that runs on cell phone chips — Cloud Computing News – Can ARM wrestle its way into the server market? Calxeda and Hewlett-Packard think so. On Tuesday Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM server-on-a-chip (SoC), which it says consumes as little as 1.5 watts (and idles at half a watt). And HP, the world’s largest server maker, committed to building EnergyCore-based servers that will consume as little as 5 watts when running all out.
• Have your HTML5 and native app too | Mobile Technology – InfoWorld – A small company called AppMobi says you now can have your cake and eat it, too — that is, you can develop HTML5 apps that tap into native hardware and OS capabilities, such as gravity sensing, accelerometer, GPS, camera, sound and vibration, and the file system. Its MobiUs browser for iOS implements HTML5's DirectCanvas API for gaming, as well as the HTML5 local storage API for saving executables and data in the browser cache so that apps can run offline.
• Is caching an ‘Architectural Smell’? – We can take the concept to the next layer of abstraction and identify a number of "Architectural Smells". A recent blog article touched upon one of mine – the (over) use of Caches.
• Bufr Overflow: You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends. – Bottom line: If the main topic of conversation you have with your friends is not how you can better yourself, you need to get new friends.
• Modern Web Apps with HTML5 and DART – Building Modern Web Apps with HTML5 and DART – GWT
• xdissent/ievms – Automated installation of the Microsoft IE App Compat virtual machines – Microsoft provides virtual machine disk images to facilitate website testing in multiple versions of IE. The ievms scripts aim to facilitate that process using VirtualBox on Linux or OS X. With a single command, you can have IE7, IE8 and IE9 running in separate virtual machines.
• Useful Coding Tools and JavaScript Libraries For Web Developers – Smashing Magazine – There are so many excellent tools out there which deserve attention of the community, yet unfortunately remain obscure way too often. Here are some of the most useful coding and workflow tools released recently.
• Migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to MongoDB – Lessons Learned – this year we migrated all our data from Microsoft SQL Server, a traditional relational database, to MongoDB which is a “NoSQL” document-based database. In this article I will share the challenges we faced and the lessons we have learned from this

Links for October 29th through November 1st

• Google & the Future of JavaScript | Infrequently Noted – Simply stated, Google is absolutely committed to making JavaScript better, and we’re pushing hard to make it happen.
• InfoQ: Agile and Architecture Conflict – There is a constant tussle between following Agile techniques and still managing to do enterprise architecture. While Agile development focuses on adjusting the design and plan as more insight is gained into the domain, architecture establishes the technology stack. It addresses the quality attributes and communicates to the interested stakeholders. Combination of the two is successful when agile techniques are leveraged to drive towards the desired architecture.
• The MongoDB NoSQL Database Blog – MongoDB 2.0 Released – The MongoDB development team is pleased to announce the release of version 2.0.0. Version 2.0 is the latest stable release, following the March 2011 release of version 1.8. This release includes many new features, improvements to existing features, and performance enhancements.
• dzone.com – Spring Social 1.0: What a Year Makes – It’s been an exciting year leading up to Spring Social 1.0, and there is a lot to be excited about with this big release. Now that we have a strong, stable foundation, I’m looking forward to seeing where Spring Social goes from here.
• Refactoring in IntelliJ IDEA, Live by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – A live refactoring demo performed by the legendary software expert himself. He’s, of course, using IntelliJ IDEA!
• Google Dart to “ultimately … replace JavaScript” – The goal of the Dash effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform.
• Pow: Zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X – Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Have it serving your apps locally in under a minute
• A Powerful Obama Speech By Mohamed El-Erian CEO and Co-CIO, Pimco – Judging from President Obama's impactful speech this evening, the Administration has at long last recognized the severity of America's unemployment crisis and the need for a comprehensive policy response.

Links for September 10th through September 12th

• Apple’s P/E compression illustrated | asymco – he following chart is a simple representation of P/E (line chart with left scale) with Net Income growth super-imposed (bar chart with right scale.) We chose a time period of 22 quarters. 11 quarters after the crisis (i.e. quarters after the one ending in Sept. 2008) and 11 quarters before the crisis (quarter ending 12/20/05 through the one ending 6/30/08).
• Building Your Own Secure Storage Space That Mirrors Dropbox’s Functionality – Building Your Own Secure Storage Space That Mirrors Dropbox's Functionality
• Thinking Functionally on Vimeo – In this presentation we'll look at what functional programming is, why we should care about it, and how to make use of it in our daily programming activities.
• New in 11: Changes digest for easier pre-commit review | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – Great new features in IntelliJ IDEA v11 – Changes digest for easier pre-commit review
• Here are all JavaZone’s 2011 videos on Vimeo – Here are all JavaZone's 2011 videos on Vimeo
• InfoQ: Spring AMQP 1.0 GA – The Spring AMQP project applies core Spring concepts to the development of AMQP-based messaging solutions, and is available in both Java and .NET versions.
• InfoQ: SOA Gateway: A Lightweight, Low-Cost Alternative to the ESB – Jaime Ryan, Partner Solutions Architect at Layer 7, in an article titled "Rethinking the ESB: Building a simple, secure, scalable Service Bus with an SOA Gateway" has discussed the emergence of the SOA gateway as a viable alternative for the ESB
• Rethinking the ESB: Building a simple, secure, scalable Service Bus with an SOA Gateway – Computerworld – Modern SOA Gateways include all the hallmarks of a traditional ESB: standards-based endpoint abstraction, broad data and transport mediation capabilities and dynamic, intelligent message routing
• Dropbox simplifies your life. Safebox secures it. Safebox and Dropbox work side-by-side. – Dropbox simplifies your life. Safebox secures it. Safebox and Dropbox work side-by-side.

Links for September 9th through September 10th

• Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful? The country’s achievements in education have other nations doing their homework – Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around.
• Deck JS » Modern HTML Presentations – A JavaScript library for building modern HTML presentations. deck.js is flexible enough to let advanced CSS and JavaScript authors craft highly customized decks, but also provides templates and themes for the HTML novice to build a standard slideshow.
• Amazon ElastiCache – Memcached in the cloud – Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud
• Crockford on JavaScript: A Public Lecture Series at Yahoo! – Douglas Crockford is Yahoo!'s JavaScript architect and a member of the committee designing future versions of the world's most popular programming language. Over first three months of 2010, Douglas delivered his acclaimed series of lectures on the history of JavaScript, its features, and its use. Links to video, transcripts, and photos from each of the events follows:
• Daring Fireball: A Simple Explanation for Why HP Abandoned Palm and Is Getting Out of the PC Business – You don’t bring in an enterprise consulting guy to turn around a PC and device maker. You bring in an enterprise consulting guy to turn a PC and device maker into an enterprise consulting company.
• What Does an Architect Do in an Agile Shop? An Agile Architect Explains All… — Application Development Trends – The agile architect is a jack-of-all-trades, doing what is necessary to ensure architectural integrity of the product. Listening, guiding, mentoring and cajoling are all part of the job.
• Getting started with MongoDB and Spring Data | Jeroen Reijn – Getting started with MongoDB and Spring Data
• Daring Fireball Linked List: Mike Arrington’s Taxes Are Too High – It’s easy to understand why the rich tech elite support Democrats on economic issues. They’re smart enough to wish we could return to an economy like we had under Bill Clinton.
• Java development 2.0: Ultra-lightweight Java web services with Gretty – Gretty is one of a new school of ultra-lightweight frameworks made for building web services. Built on top of the blazingly fast Java™ NIO APIs, Gretty leverages Groovy as a domain-specific language for web endpoints and Grape's Maven-style dependency management. In this article, get started with using Gretty to build and deploy Java web service applications.

Links for August 20th through August 23rd

• web development – The Definitive Guide To Forms based Website Authentication – Stack Overflow – The Definitive Guide To Forms based Website Authentication
• What’s the Fastest Web Browser in the “Real World?” Chrome. | TechCrunch – Compuware’s benchmarks division, Gomez, has just released new data from a website measurement project whose goal was to determine what the fastest web browser is in the “real world” of desktop users.
• Moving an Elephant: Large Scale Hadoop Data Migration at Facebook (2) – In 2010, Facebook had the largest Hadoop cluster in the world, with over 20 PB of storage. By March 2011, the cluster had grown to 30 PB — that’s 3,000 times the size of the Library of Congress!
• Web Architecture versus Enterprise IT – This video show how the typical enterprise IT landscape can benefit from the Web’s architecture, what Java developers need to learn to be part of this, and why the whole idea of “applications” is going to disappear.
• Calculated Risk: Dow Down 600+, S&P 500 down 6.66% – Here is a table of the largest one day declines (in percentage terms) for the S&P 500 since January 1950. There were quite a few large down days in 2008 and early 2009 … and now two in the last week (both in red).
• The joy of algorithms and NoSQL: a MongoDB example – Datablend – In this article, I try to illustrate my point, by employing NoSQL, and more specifically MongoDB, to solve a specific Chemoinformatics problem in a truly elegant and efficient way. The complete source code can be found on the Datablend public GitHub repository.
• Sencha Touch Quick Start | Learn | Sencha – Want to build something amazing with Sencha Touch? Use these simple recipes for Mac OSX, and Microsoft Windows to ensure you can get started with the framework's SDK as quickly as possible. Ideal for a rolling start at hackathons!
• An interview with Lenovo’s CIO: The IT factor – McKinsey Quarterly – Business Technology – Strategy – In a global operating model, IT must deliver the efficiencies of standardization but respect local business needs. Xiaoyan Wang describes her strategy.
• DryDrop updates App Engine site after pushing to GitHub – DryDrop is a tool that lets you host your static site on Google App Engine and update it by pushing to GitHub. Thanks to GitHub post-receive hooks your App Engine site can be updated automatically when you push new content
• Scott Adams on the Benefits of Boredom – WSJ.com – Still, it's worth keeping an eye on the link between our vanishing boredom and our lack of innovation. It's the sort of trend that could literally destroy the world without anyone realizing what the root problem is.
• Ehcache 2.5 goes beta – cool new features explained – The new release of Ehcache has gone beta less than 2 weeks ago, and there are many cool things packed in there, I wanted to talk a bit about it. If you’re using Ehcache as a memory cache or as a cache for Hibernate, you’ll find some useful information here.

Links for August 6th through August 8th

• HTML5 Charts for Mobile Devices | Touch Charts | Sencha Touch | Products | Sencha – Introducing Sencha Touch Charts — the world’s first HTML5-based, mobile charting and drawing product. Sencha Touch Charts enables you to build complex radar, bar, line, stacked, and pie charts with stunning interactivity and incredible ease of use. Visualizing rich data on the mobile web has never been easier.
• Agility.js Javascript MVC library – Agility.js is an MVC library for Javascript that lets you write maintainable and reusable browser code without the verbose or infrastructural overhead found in other MVC libraries
• Chosen – a javascript plug-in for jQuery and Prototype – makes select boxes better – Chosen is a javsacript plug-in that makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly. It is currently available in both jQuery and Prototype flavors.
• InfoQ: Pragmatic Software Architecture and the Role of the Architect – Joe Wirtley introduces software architecture and the role of the architect in software development along with techniques, tips and resources to help one get started thinking as an architect.
• O’Reilly’s OSCON Chairman: "Java deserves another look" – Java dominated the Tiobe Index again in 2010 and outsold all other languages in terms of books sold in 2010. That's not bad for a dead language. It's also a reminder that the opinions touted on the blogosphere are rarely reflective of the general spectrum and breakdown of opinions of the software development community.
• Java 7 Webcast – Watch this Webcast to find out more about the features of Java 7, hear from technologists at companies that use Java technology, and learn through a series of technical presentations and a panel discussion.
• Is VMware screwing the non-View VDI community with the vSphere 5 licensing changes? – Brian Madden – BrianMadden.com – While many people are speculating that this is going to be a showstopper for a lot of customers, it's exacerbated in VDI environments where servers typically have very high memory-to-processor ratios.
• Writing a Sencha Touch Application, Part 4 – This is the last of a four-part series on how to write a Sencha Touch application. If you’re new to the series, here are the links to the previous installments:
• inconsequence » Adventures in Mobile Development – I should state at this point that this does not qualify as a review so much as a disjoint set of observations based on generally shallow experience of a number of mobile development options. It is, in effect, a quick brain dump of my current impressions rather than any kind of careful analysis
• MongoDB is the New MySQL – tecosystems – It would be foolish to predict the same success that MySQL enjoyed for MongoDB, because the underlying market context has changed. But it is clear that – whether it is intentional on 10gen’s part or no – MongoDB is, according to a variety of metrics, the new MySQL.

Links for July 6th through July 23rd

• The Post-PC era will be a multi-platform era | asymco – The thesis that one dominant platform wins the mobile “war” is naive. The post-PC era will be a multi-platform era. Developers already understand this. Platform vendors know this. It’s time to unlearn the lessons of the PC era.
• CDI 1.0 vs. Spring 3.1 feature comparsion: bean definition & dependency injection | Javalobby – This blog article provides a comparison matrix between Spring IoC 3.1 and CDI implementation JBoss Weld 1.1
• Imixs Workflow Project – Java BPM …the open source workflow technology for business applications – Imixs Workflow is an open source project based on a robust and scalable technology, to design business applications in a fast and easy way.
• InfoQ: Twitter Shifting More Code to JVM, Citing Performance and Encapsulation As Primary Drivers – While it almost certainly remains the largest Ruby on Rails based site in the world, Twitter has gradually been moving more and more of its stack to the JVM. The change is partially motivated by oft-cited advantages of the JVM, such as performance and scalability, but is also driven by a desire for better encapsulation of individual services, and other architectural concerns.
• Top Ten Articles for Q2 2011 from the McKinsey Quarterly – Top Ten Articles for Q2 2011 from the McKinsey Quarterly
• Building Java Object Graph with Tour de France results – using screen scraping, java.util.Parser and assorted facilities « AMIS Technology blog – Building Java Object Graph with Tour de France results – using screen scraping, java.util.Parser and assorted facilities
• InfoQ: Innovation at Google – Patrick Copeland on pretotyping: innovators beat ideas, pretotypes beat productypes, data beats opinions, doing beats talking, simple beats complex, now beats later, commitment beats committees.
• Convince your Boss to let you use Scala – Convince your Boss to let you use Scala
• Ruby Kickstart: free course with videos, quizzes, & challenges – Ruby Kickstart: free course with videos, quizzes, & challenges
• Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social | Epicenter | Wired.com – Google believes that with Circles it has solved the tough sharing problem that Facebook has inexplicably failed to crack. “With Facebook I have 500 friends — my mom’s my friend, my boss is my friend,” says Shimrit Ben-Yair, the product manager in charge of the social graph. “So when I share on Facebook, I overshare. On Twitter, I undershare, because it’s public. If Google hits that spot in the middle, we can revolutionize social interaction
• CoffeeScript. An Outsider Opinion – nuclearsandwich’s Blog – Thoughts on CoffeeScript from a server-side developer just getting started with frontend and JavaScript development.
• The Confluence of Technology & Finance – Andrew Lo of MIT on the confluence of technology & finance, and what is has wrought, for good and … much less good. And, yes, John Thain is in this too
• The Google Plus 50 – I wrote down 50 things to think about with regards to Google+, in no particular order. The purpose of this list is to get you thinking about a bunch of different possibilities.

Links for July 3rd through July 6th

• Kind of Screwed – Waxy.org – At the heart of this settlement is a debate that's been going on for decades, playing out between artists and copyright holders in and out of the courts.
• rest-client – Java application to test RESTful webservices – RESTClient is a Java application to test RESTful webservices. It can be used to test variety of HTTP communications. From version 2.3, it has two executable Jars:
• Extremely Decoupled Architecture for Web Applications (EDAWA); Part 1: Vertical Decoupling | Javalobby – Vertical decoupling brings the opportunity to exchange the whole technology stack including programming language, runtime environment, operating system or whatever.
• What’s Up, JavaDoc? (Jonathan Gibbons) – The Java documentation tool, javadoc, has been somewhat neglected in recent releases, but in JDK 7, it's been getting some amount of long-overdue TLC, albeit mostly under the covers.
• Announcing GitHub for Mac – GitHub – Pull requests, merge button, fork queue, issues, pages, wiki –– all awesome features that make sharing easier. But those things are only great after you've pushed your code to GitHub. Today we're happy to announce GitHub for Mac.
• InfoQ: Where Did My Architecture Go? – Eoin Woods advices on writing code that preserves the initial architectural design using conventions, dependency analysis, module systems, augmenting the code & checking rules, and language extensions.
• CWE – Common Weakness Enumeration: A Community-developed dictionary of software weakness types – International in scope and free for public use, CWE™ provides a unified, measurable set of software weaknesses that is enabling more effective discussion, description, selection, and use of software security tools and services that can find these weaknesses in source code and operational systems as well as better understanding and management of software weaknesses related to architecture and design.
• Lessons in Software Reliability – Java Code Geeks – Ensure that you build support across the organization, build a culture that puts reliability first. Like any change, it will require patience, commitment, and unrelenting followup.
• Amazon Web Services Blog: Now Available: Amazon EC2 Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux – I'm pleased to be able to tell you that you can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2 with support from Amazon and Red Hat
• Raible Designs | Java Web Application Security – Part V: Penetrating with Zed Attack Proxy – In this article, I've shown you how to pentest a web application using Firefox and OWASP's Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP). I found ZAP to be a nice tool for figuring out vulnerabilities, but it'd be nice if it had a "retest" feature to see if you fixed an issue for a particular URL.
• My “NoSQL for Java Devs” slides are now online « Glen Smith – In the talk we looked at four different types of NoSQL options for Java guys: Simple Key/Value in-memory stores (Memcached), sophisticated distributed key/value stores (Voldemort), Document Databases (CouchDB), and Graph Databases (Neo4j).
• An introduction to MongoDB – In this short demo, long-time developerWorks contributor Andrew Glover introduces MongoDB, provides a quick tour of its use, and helps you understand where it's most applicable
• An introduction to Amazon SimpleDB – an introduction to SimpleDB, a massively scalable, highly available key/value datastore. Part of the Amazon Web Services suite, SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query the data, and return the results. Get started with SimpleDB in this short introduction.
• InfoQ: 5 Classic Patterns in Everyday Code – Michael Wood explains the importance of using patterns in software design, exemplifying with Adapter, Decorator, Command, and several Factory patterns.
• The Big Idea: Before You Make That Big Decision… – Harvard Business Review – In this article, we will describe a straightforward way to detect bias and minimize its effects in the most common kind of decision that executives make: reviewing a recommendation from someone else and determining whether to accept it, reject it, or pass it on to the next level.
• Not doing Code Reviews? What’s your excuse? – Java Code Geeks – Reviews don’t need to be a big deal, you don’t need formal review meetings. And there are tools to help make reviews cheaper, easier and more effective. So, what about the rest of you? Why aren’t you doing code reviews? What’s your excuse?
• InfoQ: New Books on Software Architecture – Software Architecture is one of the important topics for software engineers, because many failures of software development projects are caused by inadequate design. Thus, it is essential to learn more about architectural issues in theory and practice. Interesting new books that have been published recently or in the near future could be very helpful:
• Cassandra vs MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis vs Riak vs HBase comparison :: KKovacs – In this light, here is a comparison of Cassandra, Mongodb, CouchDB, Redis, Riak, Membase, Neo4j and HBase:
• » GWT Dependency Injection recipes using GIN (III) » Canoo RIA Blog – In my opinion, dependency injection allows a much cleaner structure, enables configuring the application in an elegant and easy way and, when used together with an event bus, produces low-coupled high-modular applications.
• Sencha touch – show loading mask anywhere | Schogini – If, you need to show a load mask anywhere (not necessarily linked to a store) then you can do something like this:

Links for June 20th through June 23rd

• Ahead Of IPO, Brightcove Launches A Whole New Business Making Apps – Brightcove's new "App Cloud" business is basically an app-building platform for companies that want mobile, tablet, and mobile web apps, but don't necessarily want to hire and manage an expensive developer team
• AirPlay for Windows Media Center – Beta 1 « Thomas Pleasance – AirPlay for Windows Media Center – Beta 1
• InfoQ: Gartner: Out of Necessity, Enterprise Architecture Begins to Align Closer with Business – Multiple factors have contributed to the acceleration towards a more business-integrated EA team. Gartner cites the business’s increased capability to make independent technology decisions, management pressure on EA teams to deliver tangible business value, and the growing CIO opinion that IT strategies should align with business priorities.
• The Age of Software was fun. Welcome to the Age of Data. – tecosystems – Software support and services alone hasn’t produced a Top 20 revenue earner in over two decades, and doesn’t appear poised to anytime soon.

  The Age of Software was fun. Welcome to the Age of Data.

• The Architecture of Open Source Applications: The NoSQL Ecosystem – The NoSQL ecosystem is still in its infancy, and many of the systems we've discussed will change architectures, designs, and interfaces. The important takeaways in this chapter are not what each NoSQL system currently does, but rather the design decisions that led to a combination of features that make up these systems
• Sencha Touch Customer Spotlight: Vimeo | Blog | Sencha – Sencha Touch gave us the benefits of native app-like performance and user interface but without the limitations of slower development time..
• The Infinite Version – Somehow, we have to be able to automatically update software while it is running without interrupting the user at all.

Links for May 23rd through May 24th

• The MessagePack Project – Extremely efficient object serialization library for cross-language communication. It’s like JSON, but very fast and small. – MessagePack is a binary-based efficient object serialization library. It enables to exchange structured objects between many languages like JSON. But unlike JSON, it is very fast and small.
• Guest Blog: You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential – "One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts." —Albert Einstein
• Internet security: Keys to the cloud castle | The Economist – What Dropbox provides is more than adequate for most users. Those with a more stringent need for privacy—most often because they are breaking either a just or unjust law—need to take responsibility for their own privacy, not count on a remote, third party service to provide it
• InfoQ: Putting the "re" into Architecture – Kevlin Henney promotes live architecture through refactoring, recovery, re-envisioning, retrospection, re-engineering, repair, rewriting, reduction, reuse, reaction, re-evaluation and remembering.
• Spark – A Sinatra inspired micro web framework for quickly creating web applications in Java with minimal effort – A Sinatra inspired micro web framework for quickly creating web applications in Java with minimal effort
• Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math – BusinessWeek – Can an ex-hedge fund guy and his nonprofit Khan Academy make American schoolkids competitive again?

Links for May 20th through May 21st

• Social networking behind the corporate firewall increases 500%, creates big vulnerabilities | IT Systems News – Betanews – In total, social networking within the corporate firewall has increased 500% in one year's time. The reason this is important is because Palo Alto highlights this as a huge vulnerability, since most SSL-encoded traffic is invisible to corporate IT, and it is a potential vector for serious security breaches.
• forplay – A cross-platform game abstraction library – Google Project Hosting – ForPlay is a cross-platform game abstraction library for writing games that compile to HTML5 (WebGL and Canvas), Java, Android and Flash
• Google Think Insights – research and insights to help marketers make smarter decisions – At Google we believe data beats opinion. So we work hard to study the worlds of consumer behavior, digital and media, and we’re pleased to share what we’ve learned with you.
• InfoQ: Evolution of Code Design at Facebook – Nick Schrock presents how Facebook’s code evolved over time, explaining some new constructs – fbobjects, Preparables, Ents – introduced to address the complexities of a large social graph.
• InfoQ: Agile Architecture Interactions – By simplifying agile methods to a perspective such as the one presented here and being influential at the critical interaction points, a skilled architect can adapt to agile development while staying focused on the core architectural work
• Google announces Android @ Home | BGR – Google announced on Tuesday a new feature of the Android operating system called Android @ Home. The framework and associated functions transform an Android device into a home automation controller that connects and directs all of the devices and appliances in the user’s home
• Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby – GitHub – Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server.
• Github as a CMS to end CMSes – Github can be used as a site serving tool. It is actually a pretty usable CMS even for non-technical folks. With some more tweaks it could be a killer platform for content with all the wonderful potential from forking and pull requests
• Why Every Child in America Needs an iPad | Cult of Mac – My advice to parents: Unplug that TV and run, don’t walk, to Toys R Us and buy each of your kids an iPad 2 — before TV turns them into "average Americans."

Links for May 9th through May 11th

• What’s New in Ext JS 4 | Ext JS 4 | Products | Sencha – Ext JS 4 brings a whole new way to build client applications, but introducing the popular model-view-controller pattern to Ext JS
• How CEOs Can Manage Information Technology – WSJ.com – Too many CEOs and other top executives often don't even know where to begin when it comes to managing IT. To that end, we offer the four IT questions that every CEO needs to think about—and answer.
• senchalearn/teagrams – Teagrams is an experimental app for the iPad 2 using Sencha Touch and the Instagram API. – Teagrams is an experimental app for the iPad 2 using Sencha Touch and the Instagram API. It makes a request to the Instagram API for all photos posted with the tag "tea" and the populates the images along with the user's name whom took it.
• Data Guru Abhi Mehta on Hadoop as a Major Disruptive Force | siliconANGLE TV – Data guru Abhi Mehta talks about Hadoop as the most significant open source movement since Linux. Mehta puts forth a vision of how analytics and big data, powered by Hadoop is fundamentally and permanently changing businesses
• Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D (AMZN) – Service-oriented architecture — or SOA — is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies
• Getting Started with Redis, Spring Data & Cloud Foundry | SpringSource Team Blog – I am going to quickly showcase what it takes to work with a key value store (Redis) using Spring (Spring Redis) through one of Spring Data samples (RetwisJ) and deploy the app into the cloud (through Cloud Foundry) to share it with the world.

Links for April 27th through April 29th