Short summary - part 2.

Microformats. I've been putting an eye on Microformats since December 05 or so. The mere fact that somebody like Tantek is involved as a project leader makes it highly intersting of course.

In short Microformats allow to markup semantically rich content in XHTML. That's important. Using XHTML the content is readable to both humans and machines. Another interesting aspect is how Microformats are being "standarized" - the project follows a bottom-up approach by looking at realword examples of how problems already are being solved "in the wild". And they are striving for an 80-20 rate of only including what seems to be useful for most of the usecases - and leaving out everything else.

Identity 2.0 - Dick Hardt's talk at OSCON 05 totally bought me. I read a lot about distributed, open, user-centric ... approaches to Identity on the web - an interesting topic anyway. And I'm following the OpenID/Yadis mailinglist since December or so.

There already are several fullfledged OpenID and Yadis libraries available for different languages. Very interesting stuff. Unfortunately I haven't found the free time to check them out yet.

Agile Team and Scrum. I've been gathering experiences with agile team development methodologies like Scrum for the last months- quite interesting and instructive.

Talking about methodologies ...

DomainDrivenDesign. This book greatly changed my thinking about my work. Like with most of these methodologies it's not so much about really *new* ideas. It's rather about given and accepted knowledge being re-structured, re-phrased and concentrating on different points - learning from newer experiences with the older approaches. I.e. "knowledge crunching" in the domain of programming.

Well, yes. The book (and as well the community) mostly talks about Java, sometimes .NET. But there's nothing Java-specific with this IMO. I'm totally curious about how I'll be able to apply these principles and recommendations to an application written on top of Ruby on Rails.

And there's another exciting thing, this one actually coming from the Ruby camp.

Behaviour Driven Design. Here's a Google TechTalks by Dave Astel about BDD and the RSpec implementation.

Wow. Now that's definitely hot. Can't wait to actually try this out. This is exactly what I've been wishing for when doing TDD. It's interesting to see how the more "philosophical" thoughts on programming come from people working in Ruby.

REST. Another thing I've been trying to wrap my head around is how a more RESTful approach can be applied to highly dynamic web applications like those I've been usually building for the last years.

I've registered at the rest-discuss Yahoo mailinglist and lurked since February or so. I think this topic also demands its own blog post.