The Best of the Week (July 4): Enterprise Integration Zone

Make sure you didn't miss anything with this list of the Best of the Week in the Enterprise Integration Zone (July 4 to July 10). Here they are, in order of popularity:

1. Gradle 2.0 Release - Brings Backwards Compatibility, Memory Efficiency, and Higher Performance

Gradle 2.0 came out last week, and it's a pretty big move from Gradle--the first major version update they've done. With the major release comes a baseline of backwards compatibility, and a significantly simplified codebase.

2. Aligning Work with REST

To gain significant business benefits, teams must understand their IT business goals, define an appropriate SOA & API mindset, describe how to implement shared services and popular APIs, and tune governance practices.

3. Easier Spring Version Management

Earlier on, Spring migrated from a monolithic approach – the whole framework, to a modular one – bean, context, test, etc. so that one could decide to use only the required modules.

4. You Probably Don’t Need a Message Queue

I’m a minimalist, and I don’t like to complicate software too early and unnecessarily. And adding components to a software system is one of the things that adds a significant amount of complexity. So let’s talk about message queues.

5. JSON: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Over the past several years JSON has become the darling of service message standards. These days you are shunned if you offer a SOAP service. The more I use JSON service though the more I question if they are really the answer.