• Dynamic Charts with HTML5, Canvas, and Flotr for Prototype – HumbleFinance is an HTML5 data visualization tool written as a demonstration of interactive graphing in HTML5. It is similar to the Flash tool on http://finance.google.com/. The tool itself is written entirely in JavaScript, using the Prototype and Flotr libraries.
• SpringSource tc Server 2.0 Adds VMware Virtualization to Commercial Tomcat — Developer.com – The new Spring edition of tc Server 2.0 also provides expanded integration with virtualization technologies from VMware (NYSE: VMW), enabling developers to deploy apps to both real and virtual environments
• Building a GAE+GWT application using the best practices, Part 1 « Reminiscential: of or pertaining to remembrance – In the next few blog posts, I’m going to present my experience building a simple (but non-trivial) web application using GWT and Google App Engine, while applying the best practices introduced by Ray Ryan in his excellent presentation at Google IO last year.
• Beanlib – Java Bean Library – Beanlib is a utility library for use with JavaBean. Beanlib for Hibernate in particular makes it easy for developers to reuse the same pojo classes for both persistence and data transfer objects
• gwt-html-editor – GWT WYSIWYG HTML (Rich Text) Editor – This is a simple but sufficient for most cases WYSIWYG HTML (Rich Text) Editor Widget fully (99% + JSNI) implemented with GW
• Ext.ux.Printer – A generic printing class that assists with the printing of any Ext.Component – Ext.ux.Printer is a small library that provides a generic way of printing Ext Components (Grids, Trees, etc).<br />
  It consists of the main Printer class, and a number of Renderers, which each provide support for a given type of <br />
  component.
• Announcing Ext JS 3.2 beta – Multisort, Transitions and Composite Fields — Ext JS Blog — JavaScript Framework and RIA Platform – We are pleased to announce that a beta version of Ext JS 3.2 is now publicly available. 3.2 introduces a number of exciting new components and adds great new capabilities to your existing applications.
• Happiness is a Warm Cloud – Jay Pipes – Rackspace is also heavily invested in Cassandra, and sees integration of Drizzle and Cassandra as being a key way to add value to its platforms and therefore for its customers
• Spring – Dependency checking with @Required Annotation | Spring – The @Required Annotation is more flexible than dependency checking in XML file, because it can apply to a particular property only
• Ehcache 2.0 Gets More ‘Enterprisey’ Features | Javalobby – Ehcache 2.0 now supports fully-coherent distributed caching as a Hibernate Second-Level Cache, as well as directly through the Ehcache API, using one common JVM vendor-agnostic .jar file

Daily del.icio.us for March 9th through March 13th

• Compare JavaScript frameworks – In this article, you will discover how JavaScript frameworks make it easier and faster to create highly interactive and responsive Web sites and Web applications
• Technobabble » Spring MVC 3.0 and JSR 303 (aka javax.validation.*) – The new annotated validation spec (jsr 303) is pretty slick, especially when used along side Spring MVC 3.0, and when backed by ejb3 entities. I’m pretty impressed with how easily it integrates with Spring MVC’s framework, and with how seamlessly error messages are passed to the form taglibs so they show up in your web forms.
• Google Code Blog: Announcing Google Chart Tools – Whether you need a simple line chart, an interactive Geo Map or a complex Motion Chart , Google can help you add live charts to your web page using our Chart and Visualization APIs. Both of these APIs are free and simple to use, however they each have distinct advantages
• Ajax Simplifications in Spring 3.0 | SpringSource Team Blog – Spring 3 provides first-class Ajax support with JSON as part of the Spring MVC module. This includes support for generating JSON responses and binding JSON requests using the Spring MVC @Controller programming model in conjunction with the Jackson JSON processor.
• Tomcat in the Cloud – Cloudcat | MuleSoft – MuleSoft has announced Cloudcat, a pre-configured Apache Tomcat image with MySQL on Linux, available from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and GoGrid.
• Startup links VMware with Amazon to create secure cloud storage | Cloud Computing – InfoWorld – A storage startup called Nasuni is unveiling a virtual NAS file server that runs on VMware and connects customers to cloud platforms such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service, adding encryption to enhance security and several features to improve performance
• Amazon Web Services Blog: New Feature: Amazon S3 now supports Object Versioning – We've added beta support for Versioning across all Amazon S3 Regions. Versioning provides an additional layer of protection for your S3 objects. You can easily recover from unintended user errors or application failures. You can also use Versioning for data retention and archiving
• InfoQ: Getting Started with Grails, Second Edition – "Getting Started with Grails" brings you up to speed on this modern web framework. Companies as varied as LinkedIn, Wired, Tropicana, and Taco Bell are all using Grails. Are you ready to get started as well?
• edspencer’s Ext.ux.Exporter at master – GitHub – Exporter is a generic export class which takes any Ext.data.Store-based component (e.g. grids and similar) and exports the data in any format.

  Exporter works completely client-side. It uses a Formatter class to generate a document (.xls, .csv etc) and then redirects the user’s browser to a data url so that they can view or download it.

• ExtJS: How to Export DataGrid to Excel | Loiane Groner – This tutorial will walk through how to export data from ExtJS DataGrid directly to Excel.

Daily del.icio.us for February 8th through February 14th

• jQuery Visualize Plugin: Accessible Charts & Graphs from Table Elements using HTML 5 Canvas | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA – A while back, we wrote an article describing a technique we came up with to use JavaScript to scrape data from an HTML table and generate charts using the HTML 5 Canvas element. The technique is particularly useful because the data for the visualization already exists in the page in structured tabular format, making it accessible to people who browse the web with a screen reader or other assistive technology.
• InfoQ: Merapi Project Utilizes Java to Expand the Desktop Capabilities of Adobe Air – Merapi is a technology that can be used as a messaging bridge between applications that run in the Adobe Flash player or Adobe AIR and applications written in Java
• InfoQ: Introduction to Data Services – Data services are software services that encapsulate operations on key data entities of relevance to the enterprise
• InfoQ: Born To Cycle – Agile development is not about doing a set of practices, it's about a way of "being," it's about learning. How is this learning accomplished? By taking brief pauses after small experiments, even large problems can be solved. In a recent Harvard Business Review interview of Toyota's president, he observed, "…when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution."
• InfoQ: Measuring Agility, Craftsmanship, and Success – David Starr has looked at how and why an organization might want to measure things like: agility, craftsmanship, and organizational success. He found craftsmanship relatively easy to measure, while agility was the most difficult to measure in a useful way.
• InfoQ: Introduction to Virtual Service Oriented Grids – Virtual service-oriented grids have the capacity to fundamentally change the way business is conducted in much the same way that the Internet did by reinserting a middleman in the form of software, rather than human. The key to this paradigm shift lies in services, the abstraction of interoperability and reuse.
• SOA and TOGAF: A Good Fit? – Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a style of architecture and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is an architecture framework. The combination sounds promising, but do they play well together
• Cay Horstmann’s Blog: Upgrading to Eclipse Galileo – I just installed Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo)—it seemed a more attractive thing to do than actually getting my work done. Fortunately, I only need three Eclipse plugins right now. Here is how they fared with Galileo
• Clojure: Challenge your Java assumptions – JavaWorld – Clojure is a dynamic functional language for the JVM, recently released in version 1.0. Clojure offers a new set of programming techniques for robust code and rapid development. In particular, it has new solutions for multicore computing. Whether you make the shift to Clojure or stick to Java, learning about this new language will challenge your assumptions about the best way to design software.
• Why Microsoft is Losing Browser Share | Zoho Blogs – Why is Microsoft losing share? I would submit that it ultimately had to do with their fateful decision to tightly weld together the browser and the operating system. That must be the most bone-headed business decision in Microsoft's history

Daily del.icio.us for July 6th

• Sun’s Six Biggest Mistakes – Forbes.com – In the interest of exploring Sun's value to history students, if not its shareholders, we asked analysts and industry watchers where Sun went wrong.
• Protovis – A graphical toolkit for visualization – Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots.
• SitePen Blog » Stocker: Advanced Dojo Made Easy – SitePen is excited to announce Stocker, which demonstrates some of the more advanced capabilities of Dojo, including the newly released DataChart, the DataGrid, Data Store, Comet, Persevere, and BorderContainer.
• Why baseball benched Microsoft Silverlight | Digital Media – CNET News – The thwacking sounds of bats striking balls will once again fill stadiums, as Monday is opening day for Major League Baseball. This year, Microsoft will watch from the sidelines.

  MLB.com no longer uses Microsoft's Silverlight to stream games to its 500,000 subscribers. This season fans will watch live and on-demand video via Adobe's Flash player.

• Internal cloud’s big test: Amazon vs. Cloudera | The Wisdom of Clouds – CNET News – The announcement on Thursday of Amazon's new Hadoop-based Elastic MapReduce service, combined with the introduction of a commercial Hadoop distribution from start-up Cloudera, means that we finally have a reasonable means of watching which directions enterprise IT prefers.
• I.B.M. Withdraws $7 Billion Offer for Sun Microsystems – NYTimes.com – After weeks of negotiations, I.B.M. withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun’s board balked at a reduced offer, according to three people close to the talks.
• Digital Domain – Web-Based Competition for Microsoft Word – NYTimes.com – The best online word processor, however, may be the one from a tiny company, Zoho, a nimble innovator. Zoho Writer is running close enough to Word to imagine that it and other online word processors will be able to do most everything that Word can do, and more.
• Outside the Box() » Ext Core vs. JQuery – Both Ext Core and JQuery are solid, complete base JavaScript libraries. JQuery leans towards simplicity while Ext Core offers enhanced configuration. The choice of which to use will come down to where you are now.
• Ext JS – Ext Core 3.0 Beta Released – the Ext Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Ext Core 3.0 beta for download. Ext Core provides a cross-browser consistent API for performing the most common tasks in JavaScript development for web pages. Ext Core is released under a permissive MIT license – there is no cost to use Ext Core – it's free for everyone.
• SaveIE6: Help us save the best browser around – These days we are inundated with bloated web browsers that overcomplicate our lives. However, there is one eminent exception: IE6. It has been around since 2001 and is still one of the most powerful and versatile browsers available.

Daily del.icio.us for April 3rd through April 7th

• Writing good unit tests, Part 1: Follow your GUTs – JavaWorld – Just like production code, test code needs to be rigorously examined to ensure it's clean and bug free. In this first half of a two-part article, Klaus Berg makes the case for why good unit tests are as important as high-quality production code, then provides a comprehensive listing of agile tools and best practices used to improve the internal quality of test code
• Flux: Java Job Scheduler. File Transfer. Workflow. – Flux – Flux is an embeddable, pure Java solution that increases productivity by meeting the challenges of Job Scheduling, File Transfer, and Workflow
• Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing? | High Scalability – We are on the edge of two potent technological changes: Clouds and Memory Based Architectures. This evolution will rip open a chasm where new players can enter and prosper. Google is the master of disk. You can't beat them at a game they perfected.
• Hadoop, Analytical Software, Finds Uses Beyond Search – NYTimes.com – MapReduce represented a couple of breakthroughs. The technology has allowed Google’s search software to run faster on cheaper, less-reliable computers, which means lower capital costs. In addition, it makes manipulating the data Google collects so much easier that more engineers can hunt for secrets about how people use the company’s technology instead of worrying about keeping computers up and running.
• Update: Cisco enters server market with Unified Computing System | InfoWorld | News | 2009-03-16 | By Marc Ferranti, Elizabeth Montalbano and Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service – Cisco's new data-center architecture comprises compute, network, storage access and virtualization resources in a single rackable system designed to cut IT infrastructure costs and complexity, stretch existing IT investments and allow enterprise customers to build an agile data center that they can easily extend for future growth, according to the company.
• America cheers as satirist, Jon Stewart, delivers knockout blow to TV finance gurus | World news | The Observer – For the past 10 days the US has been gripped. Even President Obama tuned in as the country's foremost TV comic, Jon Stewart, unleashed an extraordinary broadside against TV's top financial commentators for their part in the unfolding economic crisis.
• Useful scripts to plot charts in web pages – In this post I want to suggest you a list of some interesting scripts you can use to plot easily charts (line, area, pie, bar…) in your web pages using jQuery, MooTools, Prototype and other JS frameworks
• Better batteries are on their way | Batteries now included | The Economist – The result is a material that, when tested in experimental batteries, was able to charge and discharge in a few seconds. In the future, therefore, that weekend in the south of France need not be interrupted by running out of juice
• The Positive Legacy of C++ and Java – In a recent discussion, there were assertions that C++ was a poorly-designed language. I was on the C++ Standards Committee for 8 years, and saw the decisions take place. I think it's helpful to understand the language choices for both C++ and Java in order to see the bigger perspective.
• AWS "sucks the air out of the room." Cuts EC2 costs by 50% [Article] « elc technologies – Amazon's goal is to enter a market and "suck the air out of the room." Yes–that room is now your server room; the market is your internal IT infrastructure cost center. EC2 had an effective price cut today of 50% of its server usage fees

Daily del.icio.us for March 14th through March 19th

• script.aculo.us Tutorial | Ajaxonomy – The folks over at Tutorials Point have posted a good tutorial for learning script.aculo.us on their site. The tutorial does well to cover the framework, includes lots of codes examples, and even has a W3C Schools style "try-it-yourself" editor to let you
• Prototype JavaScript framework: Deprecation.js: easing the 1.5 → 1.6 transition – f you’ve put off the task of upgrading your old code to Prototype 1.6, now you’re out of excuses. Core team member Tobie Langel has developed a script that will warn you of any deprecations or API changes
• Jack Slocum’s Blog – » Ext 2.0 API Docs on AIR – Using the soon to be available Ext AIR adapter that allows Ext JS to run in the AIR application sandbox, Jack took the Ext JS 2.0 API documentation application and get it running on AIR
• Tutorial:Getting Started with Forms – Learn About the Ext JavaScript Library – This tutorial does show you how to create a form – The next tutorial shows populating the form with data from the server and submitting that data back to the server: Loading Data Into and Submitting a Form
• Ext JS Blog – » Community Talk – February 2008 – There’s nothing I like to hear about more than a developer having success with Ext. It’s even better when that developer is willing to share their experiences and insight with others. His blog has quite a few Ext posts and they are all well written.
• Savvy Duck: Ext Event Handling – The event handling and dispatching system in Ext is easy for a developer to hook into. It doesn't take anytime to integrate with and its a breeze to extend. Happy coding!
• Savvy Duck: Javascript: Introduction to the Ext Grid Object – A GridPanel has a ColumnModel field which is a collection of column configurations. The ColumnModel.renderer member lets you change the default rendering behavior of a column. The ColumnModel.editor member is an Ext.form.Field object
• Savvy Duck: Javascript: Mixing Ext’s Grid with JQuery’s Flot – I needed to integrate a Javascript chart library into an Ext based grid application. I’ve taken a previous example of the EditorGridPanel and extended it with charts and a few other minor embellishments. I went along with JQuery’s Flot
• Red Hat’s JBoss dons BlackTie to target BEA Tuxedo – Yahoo! News – At its JBoss World conference , Red Hat unveiled JBoss BlackTie, a project for integrating Java and legacy-based distributed transaction-processing environments. The new product will complement and extend the current JBoss transaction-monitor project
• Groovy-power automated builds with Gant – Java World – If you've ever wished for the command of a programming language to drive your build process, then you need to know about Gant. In this article Klaus P. Berg introduces this combination of Groovy and Ant and shows you why some Java developers are choosing
• Red Hat launches JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, 3 new open source projects | Open Source | ZDNet.com – Red Hat announced a fully integrated SOA platform combining JBoss middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and launched three new open source projects. Due by the end of February, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a subscription-based offering that inco

Daily del.icio.us for February 14th through February 16th