Best of this Week Summary 19 November - 25 November 2007

• For software companies to test the security skills of their IT employees, the Secure Programming Council created this "Essential Skills for Secure Programmers Using Java/Java JEE". The draft is now open for public review for 60 days. Other languages like C++ and PHP will follow. Amongst the people in the Java steering committee are Ed Tracy and assisting them are for example people from the OWASP. Definitely a good initiative.
  


• In October W3C wrote a proposal to allow cross domain capabilities (same-origin-policy) for the XMLHttpRequest (XHR) object. This article summarizes it and also compares it with the JSONRequest proposal.
  


• Great presentations that contain comparisons of several Java web frameworks: JSF, Spring MVC, GWT, Seam, Stripes, Struts2, Tapestry and Wicket. Also included are Flex and Grails. Definitely a good starting point if you're starting with a web framework selection. Note that the general trend is that Tapestry is being used less and less, while Wicket is on the rise. GWT I would not use quickly for deployment on Internet sites since it creates quite large Javascript code. For intranet this constraint is a lot less serious. Note that soon you should be able to minimize the required Javascript libraries, thus improving download time. This is a presentation of Matt Raible where he compares a bunch of web frameworks in this 1 hour funny presentation, from a developer's point of view. He also asks who uses what (Hibernate, Websphere, Struts, JSF, Wicket etc). The above mentioned presentations are updated version of the one used in this presentation. His conclusion is that there is no real winner yet.
  


• A nice how-to on how you can write RESTful web services in Java that conform to the JAX-RS: Java API for RESTful Web Services (JSR-311) specification. This JSR should be in Java EE 6.