While our work has evolved, contracts have essentially stayed the same—for a number of good reasons. In fact, several principles are just as important in today’s contracts as they were in Roman times.

Tengine is a web server originated by Taobao, the largest e-commerce website in Asia. It is based on the popular Nginx HTTP server and has many advanced features. Tengine has been proven very stable and efficient on the top 100 websites, including taobao.com and tmall.com.

Apache Rave is a new web and social mashup engine. It will provide an out-of-the-box as well as an extendible lightweight Java platform to host, serve and aggregate (Open)Social Gadgets and services through a highly customizable and Web 2.0 friendly front-end. Rave is targeted as engine for internet and intranet portals and as building block to provide context-aware personalization and collaboration features for multi-site/multi-channel (mobile) oriented and content driven websites and (social) network oriented services and platforms. For the OpenSocial container and services the (Java) Apache Shindig will be integrated. At a later stage further generalization is envisioned to also transparently support W3C Widgets using Apache Wookie.

With the emergence of HTML5, WebGL, and other browser-based 3D technologies, the way we think about browsers is quickly shifting. To me, making badass graphics in a browser is a rad prospect, but a hard one. Unless you have a pretty deep understanding of shaders, vertex buffers, matrix transformations and the like, it can be overwhelming just to approach it.

REST is the architectural style of the Web, and closely related to REST is the concept of a HTTP API. A HTTP API is a programmer-oriented interface to a specific service, and is known by other names such as a RESTful service contract, resource-oriented architecture, or a URI Space.

I say closely related because most HTTP APIs do not comply with the uniform interface constraint in it's strictest sense, which would demand that the interface be "standard" - or in practice: Consistent enough between different services that clients and services can obtain significant network effects. I won't dwell on this!

One thing we know is that these APIs will change, so what can we do at a technical level to deal with these changes as they occur?

Challenging the notion that REST is suitable only for simple CRUD-based data services, in this TechTalk Ian Robinson will show how to implement a complex business process as part of a RESTful application.

FlyJSONP is a small JavaScript library, 2.38KB (1.13KB gzipped), that allows you to do cross-domain GET and POST requests with remote services that support JSONP, and get a JSON response.

Gearman (an anagram for “Manager”) is a system for farming out work units to several different servers (or several processes on one server), allowing the calling code to do something completely different while the task is performed. Gearman is not intended for inter-process communication, but is a way to tell other processes that there are work available, and letting these processes (called workers) grab a piece of work for themselves.

You may be thinking “What are these Google Protocol Buffers that you speak of?”
In essence it is the name given to the binary serialization format used by Google for much of their data communications a.k.a. simply protobuffs.

It’s easy to understand the benefit of partial response and partial update. Imagine that you are writing a new Android calendar widget, and you want to display the time and title of the recently changed events on your Google Calendar. With the old Calendar Data API, you would request your calendar’s events feed and receive a large amount of information in response -- including lots of extra data like the attendee list and the event description.