Google released today a series of open-source libraries that make it easier to work with highly optimized JavaScript. Closure Tools includes a JavaScript compiler, a set of utility libraries, and a client-side JavaScript template engine.

At its X Innovate 2009 Developer Conference, PayPal announced today a new platform and APIs that allow developers to integrate a variety of payment types into applications. In an interview with Artima, Damon Hougland, senior director of the PayPal Platform, talks about integrating payments into end-user applications.

Traffic Server is an open-source HTTP proxy that has been in production at Yahoo and other large Web sites for several years, and is capable of handling over 35,000 requests per second.

YouTrack is a new bug and issue tracker that provides a simple, keyboard focused UI, with an intelligent, context-sensitive search box, to speed up locating and modifying issue and bug status.

> Speaking for myself, most of my time is spent connecting> together multiple non-deterministic and lightly documented> systems. (For example, creating a web app that connects> humans to a legacy document management system.) Most of> the bugs that crop up result from when the systems combine> in unique and unexpected ways. > > You could try to...

> > I'm curious: How do others doing TDD deal with this?> > This is what I was implying with my statement that > > Truly valuable testing, however, often requires a fair> amount of integration testing.> > I see that Nemanja Trifunovic has also said as much, but I> just wanted to reiterate that one of JUnit's biggest pain> points is what is...

My biggest JUnit pain point is that once I've invested into writing lots of unit tests, I can't do major refactorings of the codebase without throwing away all that investment. This is probably not a JUnit only pain point. As I discover a problem domain more, I obviously want to improve my design, and that means throwing away some code, moving...

Amazon released today a relational database service as part of Amazon Web Services. The service provides a cloud-based equivalent of a MySQL 5.1 database engine, and is priced based on usage.

In a recent blog post, Naresh Jain summarizes a conference discussion about code smell, highlighting some of the worst code smells, and some that, if eliminated, can bring order to a putrefying codebase.

> Is there a reason why SQL can't be statically checked? I> think it could be nice to validate my queries at compile> time. I just don't understand why we need new languages> to do this.That's a very good point. The more I learn about SQL, the more I ask that question.

VisualVM is an open-source application that monitors and presents visually rich metrics about Java applications running in a JVM. Based on the NetBeans platform, the latest VisualVM release features a sampling CPU and memory profiler plugin, among other features.

In a recent paper, Miguel Garcia, Anastasia Izmaylova, and Sibylle Schupp describe an effort to add type-safe, language-integrated database querying capabilities to Scala.

> "I can't think of a single example where a struggling> commercial software suddenly started regaining market> share when they went open source. Can you?"> > What about Eclipse?And what about OpenOffice? It used to be called StarOffice. I remember paying for it for use on my SparcStation 20 back in the days.

In this interview with Artima, JetBrains' Dmitry Jemerov discusses how he hopes developers will benefit from the decision to open-source Intellij IDEA.

In a pair of recent blog posts, Uncle Bob and Martin Fowler discuss the types of technical debt almost every project incurs, and debate whether messy code can be considered a kind of technical debt.