Links for December 30th through January 4th

  • Why Your Next Cloud App Will Probably Suck Without….Unit Testing – Put simply, developers use unit tests as an internal control on the functionality and compatibility of their applications when changes to features, code or the environment happen.
  • Hacking Knowledge: How to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better in the 21st Century | OEDb – We've collected some amazing tips and tricks (an update of our earlier article, almost seven years old now) you can use to help you get the most out of the time you spend learning. From study suggestions to brain hacks, these tips are sure to help you learn faster, deeper, and better, no matter the subject.
  • America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead – Cleaning up the rest of the lead that remains in our environment could turn out to be the cheapest, most effective crime prevention tool we have. And we could start doing it tomorrow.
  • Advanced NFL Stats: Play-by-Play Data – I've recently completed a project to compile publicly-available NFL play-by-play data. It took a while, but now it's ready.
  • Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j | Architects Zone – Here's a 1-hour practical guide to getting started with Spring Data on Neo4j. This will cover Spring Data Neo4j's features/benefits, use cases, and a step by step demo.
  • The future according to Google’s Larry Page – Fortune Tech – Google CEO Larry Page envisions a future in which computers plan your vacations, drive your cars, and anticipate your whims. Audacious? Maybe. But Page's dreams have a way of coming true.
  • Seven Deadly Sins of Modern Objective-C – We're all guilty of some Objective-C sins, I'm sure, but the important thing is to improve. We're at the dawn of a new year. Why not take this opportunity to reflect on why you've been so sinful and find ways to code more virtuously in the new year?
  • Introducing Spring Scala – The goal of the Spring Scala project is simply to make it easier to use the Spring framework in Scala. We believe that there are many Spring users out there who want to try Scala out, but do not want to leave their experience with Spring behind. This project is meant for those people.
  • Sublime Package Control – a Sublime Text 2 Package Manager by wbond – A full-featured package manager that helps discovering, installing, updating and removing packages for Sublime Text 2. It features an automatic upgrader and supports GitHub, BitBucket and a full channel/repository system.
  • Eve is a multipurpose, web based agent platform that uses existing protocols for communication (HTTP, XMPP, JSON-RPC) – Eve is a multipurpose, web based agent platform. The project aims to develop an open protocol for communication between software agents. Eve is designed as a decentral, scalable system for autonomously acting agents. Eve uses the existing world wide web as platform, and uses existing protocols for communication (HTTP, XMPP, JSON-RPC).
  • twig-persist – Object Datastore for Google App Engine – Twig is an object persistence interface built on Google App Engine's low-level datastore which overcomes many of JDO-GAEs limitations including improved support for inheritance, polymorphism and generic types. You can easily configure, modify or extend Twigs behaviour by implementing your own strategies or overriding extension points in pure Java code.
  • OWNER – Java properties files made super simple! – The goal of OWNER API is to minimize the code required to handle application configuration through Java properties files. The inspiring idea for this API comes from GWT i18n
  • Java.next() -> Scala or Groovy? – Generally the understanding is that scala has the ability to disrupt the status quo rather than incrementally improving it like Groovy. Scala has done and doing good job of reducing the cost of abstraction transliterate Java into Scala and end up with bytecode that is almost exactly the same. Scala has some original good ideas and well thought out type system.
  • Windows 8 proving less popular than Vista | KitGuru – Data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 is less popular than Windows Vista, the operating system that proved unpopular with the enthusiast audience.
  • Antivirus Makers Work on Software to Catch Malware More Effectively – NYTimes.com – Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. That is prompting start-ups and other companies to get creative about new approaches to computer security.
  • HtmlUnit vs JSoup: html parsing in Java – In this blog I will compare JSoup with other similar framework, HtmlUnit. Apparently both of them are good Html parsing frameworks and both can be used for web application unit testing and web scraping. In this blog, I will explain how HtmlUnit is better suited for web application unit testing automation and JSoup is better suited for Web Scraping.
  • Progress of Happiness – The first is that sucking at something is the first step of getting better at it. And that trying really hard isn’t supposed to be easy. In fact, getting better at anything isn’t supposed to be easy. You are bound to get fail, get hurt, fail again before you succeed.
  • Microsoft WebMatrix – Open Source Web Applications Made Easier – Open source web apps make it easy to get started developing websites, but they can sometimes be time-consuming to get configured on your computer. WebMatrix makes it simple and straightforward.
  • Safeguard Your Phone from Malware – WSJ.com – According to a report by research group Juniper Networks, JNPR -2.07% hackers are increasingly targeting smartphones and other mobile devices with malicious software (also known as malware) to gain access to personal information. The threat is still small in comparison to computers, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions to protect your smartphone.
Advertisement

Links for August 14th through August 17th

  • Hibernate 4.1.4: Envers tests run & pass on multiple DBs – Envers is an entity auditing framework, making it possible to store and query for historical data.
  • Integration At Scale: Lessons Learned From The New Enterprise Web – David Laing, Neels Burger, Neil Pellinacci, Parand Tony Darugar, and Scott Morrison (moderator) discuss the impact of integration of various interconnected devices, web technologies, and cultures.
  • OAuth – Everything You Want to Know (Hopefully) – Pratap Chilukuri explains what OAuth is and how it works, exemplifying using the protocol with an example.
  • Choose the "Right" Database and NewSQL: NoSQL Under Attack – Talk #1: Stefan Edlich suggests choosing a NoSQL DB after answering about 70 questions in 6 categories, and building a prototype. Talk #2: Edlich presents NewSQL solutions counteracting NoSQL.
  • Eli Collins on Hadoop – Eli Collins discusses Cloudera's CDH4 release, which tasks are well suited for Hadoop, Hadoop and MapReduce vs SQL, the state of Hadoop, and much more.
  • Sears Competes On Big Data and Loyalty Programs – Forbes – Sears has a very intensive big data program to drive customer loyalty; the sophistication surprised me and should interest investors.
  • Where Does Big Data Meet Big Database? – Ben Stopford takes a look at the Big Data movement, its development and implications, reflecting on a future where NoSQL solutions and traditional ones coexist.
  • Panel: How Banks Are Managing Their Data – Frank Tarsillo , John Davies, Jon Vernon and Ari Zilka (moderator) discuss the technologies and architectures used these days to manage large amounts of sensitive data in top financial institutions.
  • Video: Spring Roo—Not Just another RAD Tool! | SpringSource.org – In this presentation, SpringSource's Josh Long and Spring Roo in Action authors Ken Rimple and Srini Penchikala introduce Spring Roo 1.2, and then go further, exposing Roo's powerful addon-based underbelly. They introduce Roo's OSGi bundle support, and introduce how add-ons can be used to generate code, install templates, respond to addition / removal of annotations, and expose both open-source and internal-company libraries for use by your developers
  • Spring Data – One API To Rule Them All? – Spring Data is a high level SpringSource project whose purpose is to unify and ease the access to different kinds of persistence stores, both relational database systems and NoSQL data stores.
  • The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (Clojure & JRuby) – Allen Rohner discusses the benefits and the problems of mixing Clojure and JRuby running them in the same process, making some recommendations at the end.
  • Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT Support for Mobile App Development – If you’re interested in using GWT to build mobile apps and mobile web apps from a single codebase, then you’ll want to take a good look at mgwt. The following is a guest blog post from Daniel Kurka, the creator of the mgwt library.
  • anic – Faster than C, Safer than Java, Simpler than *sh – anic is the reference implementation compiler for the experimental, high-performance, implicitly parallel, deadlock-free general-purpose dataflow programming language ANI
  • Sencha Architect 2.1 Now Available | Blog | Sencha – Sencha Architect is now even better! Release 2.1 is finally here and the team is excited to share what we've been working on for the past three months. The goal for the first minor release was to improve performance and stability while continuing to add functionality that helps developers do even more.

Links for January 27th through January 31st

  • 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 December 27th through December 28th

Links for December 23rd through December 26th

Links for December 20th through December 21st

Links for December 4th through December 9th

Links for November 21st through November 25th

Links for June 20th through June 23rd

Daily del.icio.us for February 19th through February 22nd