• 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: 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• The End of Borders and the Future of Books – Businessweek – An inside look at the real reasons for the once-beloved chain's demise
• New features and improvements in Hibernate 4.0 – New features and improvements in Hibernate 4.0
• Hibernate Core Migration Guide : 4.0 – Get ready for Hibernate 4.0 with this Hibernate core migration guide.
• Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT and Dart – Meanwhile, rest assured that GWT will continue to be a productive and reliable way to build the most ambitious web apps — and even games like Angry Birds. Key projects within Google rely on GWT every day, and we plan to continue improving (and open-sourcing) GWT based on their real-world needs
• Migrating from Ext GWT 2.x to 3.0 – Migrating from Ext GWT 2.x to 3.0 presentation from @darrellmeyer of Sencha.
• Foreigners Don’t Take IT Jobs, They Create Them – Global-cio – Executive insights/interviews – Informationweek – Research shows that immigrant-founded companies generate billions in revenue and employ hundreds of thousands of Americans, so why do so many people want to seal our borders?
• Kundera – A JPA 2.0 compliant Object-Datastore Mapping Library for NoSQL Datastores – The idea behind Kundera is to make working with NoSQL Databases drop-dead simple and fun.

Links for November 9th through November 13th

• What the end of Flash means for Adobe – SplatF – Adobes specific phrase in its release was: "Focusing Flash resources on delivering the most advanced PC web experiences, including gaming and premium video, as well as mobile apps." But the reality is that the mobile browser is the future of the web. So anyone who is using Flash today for anything should start working on a plan to eventually stop using it.
• JPMorgan Chase makes a case for the big data platform (and career track) of the future. – Five of JP Morgan Chase's seven lines of business now use a Hadoop shared service. They use it for extract, transform, and load (ETL) processing; high-scale Basel III regulatory liquidity analyses and reporting; data mining; transaction analysis; fraud investigation; and social media sentiment analysis. It's also a low-cost storage option for all types of data, including structured financial records, semi-structured clickstreams and Web logs, and unstructured text and social comment feeds.
• iBackupBot – iTunes Backup Manager for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad – iBackupBot for iTunes is a tool that helps you browse, view, export and even EDIT files backed up to iTunes.
• Will there be a Silverlight 6 (and does it matter)? – Several of my customer and partner contacts have told me they have heard from their own Microsoft sources over the past couple of weeks that Silverlight 5 is the last version of Silverlight that Microsoft will release
• Google Launches OAuth 2.0 Playground @ API Evangelist – Google announced the OAuth 2.0 Playground which allows developers to experiment with APIs using the OAuth 2.0 protocol, and understand how the protocol functions and will make your life easier.
• Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5 (Adobe Flash Platform Blog) – We will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.
• Why Flash didn’t work out on mobile devices – Apple leaving mobile Flash off their mobile devices for the last four years, has shown that the web has adapted, with more sites embracing HTML5 for websites, games and apps.
• 10 Challenges That Will Shape Wall Street in 2012 – Wall Street & Technology – Battered and bruised by a difficult 2011, Wall Street faces another challenging year. We examine 10 critical issues that will set the agenda at capital markets firms in 2012.
• Redis: Zero to Master in 30 minutes – Part 1 – More than once, I've said that learning Redis is the most efficient way a programmer can spend 30 minutes. This is a testament to both how useful Redis is and how easy it is to learn. But, is it true, can you really learn, and even master, Redis in 30 minutes?
• Google Web Toolkit and Web Services: The XML Way | Wazi – In this two-part series, we’ll build a project to show how to get and process XML and JSON data, and deal with sundry matters such as security restrictions and server-side proxies. What you’ll learn here should help you deal with all kinds of services and enhance your GWT applications.
• From the Mule’s Mouth » AMQP and the future of web messaging – The real potential for AMQP is queuing on the web, there hasn’t been a strong play for this yet but I believe queuing will become a fundamental part of orchestrating services on the web as applications start to leverage APIs more.
• Why The MongoDB Hate? – 10gen has built a novel datastore that offers high availability, sharding, and schema-free design at a very specific cost. Bugs will be pushed, mistakes will be made, and systems will go down. There is no silver bullet.10gen has built a novel datastore that offers high availability, sharding, and schema-free design at a very specific cost. Bugs will be pushed, mistakes will be made, and systems will go down. There is no silver bullet.
• Ektorp – Java API for CouchDB – Ektorp is a persistence API that uses CouchDB as storage engine. The goal of Ektorp is to combine JPA like functionality with the simplicity and flexibility that CouchDB provides.

Links for November 6th through November 9th

• 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

• VMware and Verizon team up for mobile virtualization — Tech News and Analysis – Employees who want to combine their work phone and their personal phone will soon be able to do so with the aid of the VMware Horizon software on their phones
• Good to Know – Google – Advice for staying more secure on the web and an overview of some of the security tools that Google offers.
• OTN TechCast – Oracle SOA Governance demystified for Architects (SOA Governance@work) – Cathy and Bob discuss why SOA Governance is important to different aspects of IT including on-premise applications and the cloud.
• Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages – Have you ever wanted to process the spam score of incoming or outgoing email messages, but didn’t want the hassle of managing SpamAssassin? Now you can use our lightweight JSON API and instantly integrate spam score processing in your app
• Logging the cloud with SimpleDB – Peecho – The solution? Store logs in SimpleDB. Amazon SimpleDB is a highly available, flexible and scalable non-relational data store. It is perfect for this situation. It is eventually consistent, read optimized, highly available and extremely durable.
• A Byteman Tutorial | inject side-effects into a simple Java program – You use Byteman to change how a Java program operates without having to edit the source code and recompile it. Actually, you can even use Byteman to modify a running application without needing to stop and restart it. Byteman will happily redefine the behaviour of both application classes and JVM runtime classes like String,Thread etc.
• Coding Horror: Serving at the Pleasure of the King – If you choose to deliver software in the Apple ecosystem, this is simply the tradeoff you've chosen to make. Apple developers serve at the pleasure of the king.
• InfoQ: Can the Kanban Method Avoid Becoming another Management Fad? – Benjamin Mitchell believes that Kanban risks to become a fad if it does not cover gaps related to experiencing embarrassment and threat, proposing a solution based on the double-loop learning model.
• Spring Framework 3.1 RC1 released | SpringSource Team Blog – It is my pleasure to announce that the first Spring Framework 3.1 release candidate has – finally – been released this week! We have been working on this release for several months, completing our milestone work and recently adding support for Java SE 7 and for Hibernate 4.0 to the feature list
• InfoQ: New in Google Cloud: SDK 1.5.5, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Prediction API and Premier Accounts – Google Cloud Services has announced a new version of the App Engine SDK (1.5.5) -the frontend request deadline has been raised from 30 sec. to 60 sec., Python 2.7-, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and Prediction API are out of Code Labs, and Premier Accounts.
• Web 2.0 Expo: LinkedIn’s Big Data Lessons Learned – The BrainYard – InformationWeek – Former LinkedIn chief scientist DJ Patil shares advice on turning large-scale data into useful products.
• Scott Adams on Taxes, the Wealthy and a Return to the Ocean – WSJ.com – Driving the Rich Into the Sea. Megaship ahoy! To escape higher taxes, the wealthy could relocate…to open waters

Links for October 12th through October 19th

• JavaOne: Comparing Java Web Frameworks – Finally, he finished with an interesting thought – that one of the main scalability issues with any web framework is people i.e. the competencies and preferences of the developers on the team.
• Comparing Mongo DB and Couch DB – MongoDB – We are getting a lot of questions "how are mongo db and couch different?" It's a good question: both are document-oriented databases with schemaless JSON-style object data storage. Both products have their place — we are big believers that databases are specializing and "one size fits all" no longer applies.
• Why Dart is not the language of the future – Dart fails to provides the advantages of static languages, without compensating by the flexibility of dynamic languages. Nothing has been learned from the dynamic language renaissance of the last ten years; nothing from the functional world; nothing even from the slick concurrency model of Go and its goroutines, also from Google.
  So I think it's a step backwards in language design. With Node.js and Coffeescript around, and the programming paradigms they allow, Dart looks already obsolete and inadapted.
• minuteproject – WS-JEE is minuteproject track to quickly have a webservice based on JAX-WS on top of a backend with JPA2 layer – WS-JEE is minuteproject track to quickly have a webservice based on JAX-WS on top of a backend with JPA2 layer
• The new iPhone portfolio and implications on ASP | asymco – The iPhone is now available as five different variants with 10 different price points. Prices and options may vary by country, but I took the US portfolio as the baseline and illustrated it:
• Apple’s Next Big Thing Already Here: Siri More Than Speech Recognition, Analyst Asserts – Forbes – Siri is unique because it meshes voice recognition capabilities with both sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities and tight integration with the phone’s other software — such as its calendar and address book — and its GPS system
• Review: 4 Java clouds face off | Application Development – InfoWorld – CloudBees, Google App Engine, Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware Cloud Foundry reveal the pleasures and perils of coding on a public cloud platform
• Chrome Remote Desktop BETA – Chrome Web Store – Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is the first installment on a capability allowing users to remotely access another computer through the Chrome browser or a Chromebook.

Links for October 8th through October 11th

• whoosh – Fast pure-Python indexing and search library. – Whoosh is a fast, featureful full-text indexing and searching library implemented in pure Python. Programmers can use it to easily add search functionality to their applications and websites. Every part of how Whoosh works can be extended or replaced to meet your needs exactly.
• Homepage | Celery: Distributed Task Queue – Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.
• The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache TomEE Certified as Java EE 6 Web Profile Compatible : The Apache Software Foundation Blog – Making its certification debut at JavaOne, Apache TomEE (pronounced "Tommy") is the Java Enterprise Edition of Apache Tomcat (Tomcat + Java EE = TomEE) that unites several quality Java enterprise projects including Apache OpenEJB, Apache OpenWebBeans, Apache OpenJPA, Apache MyFaces and more.
• Scala Language Tour presentation, and introduction to Scala primarily for Java Developers – Scala Language Tour presentation, and introduction to Scala primarily for Java Developers & other Object Oriented languages
• 10 programming languages worth checking out – H3RALD – This article deals with ten possible candidates, and it’s far from being an exhaustive list. The programming languages described henceforth are very different from each other, but they all have one thing in common: they all stimulate my curiosity in their own, very different ways.
• Larry Ellison unveils Oracle Public Cloud, claims no one will be locked in – Oracle boasts the Public Cloud will provide “all the productivity of Java, without the IT,” and “the Oracle database you love, now in the cloud.”
• Daring Fireball: Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot – I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.
• Oracle announces public cloud to host long-awaited Fusion applications – 10/6/2011 – Computer Weekly – "Use the Salesforce cloud if you want them to run your applications forever. It's kind of sticky, the ultimate vendor lock-in. You can check in but can't check out," he said. "It's the roach hotel of clouds."
• Announcing Box For Microsoft Office | The Box Blog – Box for Office, a new add-on for Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010, lets you easily open, edit, save, and share using Box from within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
• Oracle’s boxes more about integration than innovation — Cloud Computing News – Exalytics is essentially a bundle of the TimesTen in-memory database acquired by Oracle, Hyperion’s EssBase, acquired by Oracle, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition suite or OBIEE.
• SourceTree – Free Mercurial, SVN and Git GUI for Mac OS X – A powerful Mac client for Git and Mercurial distributed version control systems. SourceTree strips away the complexity of DVCS and makes it usable for mere mortals.
• Nitobi enters into Acquisition Agreement with Adobe – Open Source HTML5 Mobile App Platform Accelerates Adobe's HTML5 and Web Standards Strategy
• PhoneGap to become an Apache project as Adobe acquires Nitobi – Adobe has entered an agreement to acquire Nitobi, the startup behind PhoneGap. Alongside news of the acquisition, Adobe and Nitobi have jointly announced plans to donate the PhoneGap project to the Apache Software Foundation.
• Effective Mockito Part 2 – As promised in the first part of the "Effective Mockito" blog series, I will concentrate on Mockito specifics in the followup posts. So, the main topic for Part 2 is Mockito's @Mock Annotation.
• Incredibly Useful CSS Snippets | webexpedition18 – Below is a list of CSS snippets that will help you minimize headaches, frustration and save your time while writing css, and I hope you will find it useful. Whether you are a experienced web developer, or just getting started with css, they are all worth checking out.

Links for October 2nd through October 8th

• Clean Coders – Code-casts for software professionals – Clean Coders is all about educational videos for software professionals, by software professionals. They're unlike anything you've seen before. Add our code-casts to your library and watch Instantly! Watch as many times as you like.
• Strides – Focus, work, win. A new way to play the game of work. – Strides is a fresh approach to getting things done. With Strides, you and your team can work together more effectively as you tackle new challenges, hurdle information barriers, and soar to new heights!
• stackparts | Writing a web application is not just LAMP any more. Choose parts of your stack. – Writing a web application is not just LAMP any more. There's more to it
• Windows 8 – A quick summary of my thoughts of Windows 8 coming from a Silverlight product manager’s perspective. mossyblog on… – A quick summary of my thoughts of Windows 8 coming from a Silverlight product manager's perspective.
• Microsoft to developers: Metro is your future | ZDNet – Silverlight and .Net are not dead (yet). But Metro is really the future for Windows 8, Microsoft is telling developers on the opening day of Build.
• Windows 8: Microsoft’s browser-based OS | ExtremeTech – Get this: The entire Metro interface — the complete Windows 8 front-end — is powered by Internet Explorer 10. Not the browser with a back button and an address bar, but the IE10 rendering engine Trident.
• 500 days with the iPad – SplatF – It has now been 500 days since my iPad 3G arrived at the end of April, 2010. So I'm going to write a bit about how it fits into my life today and what that means

Links for September 13th through September 14th

• 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

• GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex – Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don't have a clue what it's actually about.
• Nick Farina – Git Is Simpler Than You Think – For me, understanding the structure of the object database was my Eureka moment for Git. After that, I could start to understand not just how Git worked, but why
• Thinking about the Social Enterprise – confused of calcutta – As customers begin to reorganise businesses around themselves, there will be many problems to solve, problems of federation and interoperability and portability. Problems that have been obfuscated in the past by incumbents with vested interests. Problems that will be solved by the Social Enterprise.
• Akamai thrives in the spirit of its lost founder – The Boston Globe – Akamai is bringing its customers into cloud computing, mobile computing, data security, and the delivery of HD video. And with 95,000 servers in 72 countries, and 2,200 employees, the company delivers 15 to 30 percent of all Web traffic worldwide.
• Why Summer Vacations (and the Internet) Make You More Productive – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic – People who complain about presidential vacations should get out more. Indeed, they might be better workers for it. The science of productivity tells us breaks matter more than overtime.
• Why developers should be force-fed state machines – Shopify – Hopefully, reading this text has made you more aware of state machines and you will be applying them more often when developing a web application.
• Design by Contract in Java with Google – Design by Contract is a powerful approach for building simple and robust software. Contracts for Java isn't the first attempt to bring this approach to Java, but it's a simple and powerful implementation that might become a standard tool for ensuring Java software validity.
• BoltJS – UI Framework from Facebook for creating Javascript mobile apps. – BoltJS is a UI framework designed by Facebook to be compact, fast and powerful. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the browser, needing no server backend.
• H-P’s One-Year Plan – WSJ.com – Dumping it is a beautiful absurdity that one analyst, Jayson Noland of Robert W. Baird & Co., described as "like McDonald's getting out of the hamburger business."
• madrobby/keymaster – keymaster.js is a simple micro-library for defining and dispatching keyboard shortcuts. It has no dependencies – keymaster.js is a simple micro-library for defining and dispatching keyboard shortcuts. It has no dependencies

Links for August 28th through September 8th

• Running MongoDB on the Cloud – In this video Jared Rosoff covers topics like scaling and performance characteristics of running MongoDB in the cloud and he also shares some best practices when using Amazon EC2.
• Why it is important to choose a #1 language for an enterprise project : Adam Bien’s Weblog – Why it is important to choose a #1 language for an enterprise project?
• Kendo UI – The Art of Web Development – Kendo UI is a framework for modern HTML UI. Engineered with the latest HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript standards, it delivers everything needed for client-side, jQuery-powered development in one integrated, compact package.
• Java NIO: NIO vs. IO – In this text I will try to shed some light on the differences between Java NIO and IO, their use cases, and how they affect the design of your code.
• totallylazy – Another functional library for Java – A functional library for Java that provides map, reduce, join operations.
• Heroku | Heroku for Java – Heroku is driven by a simple first principle: do what's best for developers. Supporting Java is what's best for the large world of Java developers; it's what's best for developers who want to use other JVM languages; and it's even good for users of other languages, who will benefit indirectly from the learning their community may gain from contact with Java. We're pleased to welcome Java developers to Heroku.
• Google Doubles Down On Android And Andy Rubin – Seeking Alpha – Page has opened the full faith-and-credit of Google to Rubin, meaning its best legal and lobbying minds are now at his disposal, and the network Google built for itself may now be slowly opening up to handle direct customer traffic
• Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA – Forbes – The managers in both companies did exactly what business school professors and the best management consultants would tell them to do—improve profitability by focuson on those activities that are profitable and by getting out of activities that are less profitable.
• Advantages Of Being A Polyglot Programmer – People who only work with one language/platform often have an emotional attachment to it. If you're emotionally attached, it's not always easy to remain rational during discussions or when the future of your language/platform is being threatened

Links for August 24th through August 27th

• How You Should Go About Learning NoSQL – NoSQL is a big world, and solutions vary in complexity and differentness. That's why I think MongoDB, which isn't very different, and Redis, which is different but very simple, are a great place to start.
• Warrick – Recover Your Lost Website – Warrick is a free utility for reconstructing (or recovering) a website when a back-up is not available. Warrick will search the following web repositories for missing resources: Internet Archive, Google, Bing (formerly Live Search), and Yahoo.
• Addressing Misconceptions about Google Web Toolkit – It appears that many people, including decision makers, are not fully aware of important GWT abilities and limitations. Many features in recent releases of GWT and related projects can be real game changers for the developers and for the end users. Here I am going to address common misconceptions and provide solutions to common issues.
• How Linux mastered Wall Street | ITworld – Linux has become a dominant player in finance due to the OS kernel's ability to pass messages very quickly
• Suck on it, AppleSoft — Google pulls a rope-a-dope | Real Dan Lyons Web Site – Does anyone really believe this $12.5 billion acquisition just got thrown together in the last few weeks as a response to the AppleSoft patent grabs? Doesn’t it seem likely that Google and Motorola started talking long before the Nortel auction?
• mike.mainguy: Heroku is a bus, Engineyard is a car – Overall, I'd say Heroku is like taking the bus: if enough people want to go the same place at the same time, it's more economical. Engineyard is like buying a car: it's going to be a bit more expensive and you're going to need to know how to drive, but it is a much more flexible solution.
• Stop Coddling the Super-Rich – NYTimes.com – While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks
• Steven Poole: Goodbye, cruel Word – I weep at all the innocent electrons I wastefully killed over the years, sending those massive, lumbering Word documents through the internet. I apologise for my particle profligacy. I have learned my lesson. Goodbye, cruel Word.
• Create unique websites without writing code | Muse (code name) – Create websites as easily as you create layouts for print. You can design and publish original HTML pages to the latest web standards without writing code. Now in beta, Muse makes it a snap to produce unique, professional websites.

Links for August 15th through August 16th