TheServerSide's top articles from 2019
TheServerSide covered a variety of different topics that captured the imagination of both the readership and the writers over the past 12 months. Here are ten of the most popular articles published in 2019.
It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that the future of important server-side technologies such as WebSphere and IBM’s portal server are a hot topic. The most read story on TSS this year was Sal Pece’s about the future of WebSphere Portal after HCL acquired various IBM technologies.
Java and the JDK
While Pece is a freelancer on TheServerSide, the most read article of the year penned by our in-house staff was Darryl Taft’s about the transfer of power between Oracle and Red Hat on the stewardship of the OpenJDK.
The fact is, any article about Java and the JDK always plays well on this site. An article inspired by a ‘Birds of a Feather’ talk at Oracle Code One addressed the age old question of whether Java is slow. This article gets a special mention because the comments are actually more interesting than the article itself.
Spring is always a winner when it comes to server-side, Java based technologies. But you wouldn’t think an article about configuring application properties would set any viewership records, yet it did. So thank you to Dreamix’s Nikolay Stanev for teaching us how to dynamically create an inner class using Spring’s @ConfigurationProperties, something I never knew you could do.
Sometimes it’s surprising to see which articles catch fire. I thought I’d write down some best practices on how to write a Git commit message as an afterthought while traveling. It was probably the article I put the least amount of effort this year, yet it has become one of the most commonly read ones of 2019.
Another consistently popular topic on the site over the past two years is distributed version control system management. Tim Culverhouse managed to pull together a nice conglomeration of the most pertinent pieces to those who are interested in how to master Git and DVCS concepts in general.
The prolific freelancers
Why is programming so hard to master? It’s a question many readers clearly wanted an answer to, and fortunately, contributor Bob Reselman provided it. Another prolific contributor to TheServerSide and the entire TechTarget family of sites is George Lawton. It’s hard to pick my favorite article over the past twelve months from Lawton, but his work on API security definitely tops the list.
Chris Tozzi only typically contributes a few articles a year, but his articles always seem to address under-serviced topics which our readers want to learn more about. His article on how to write clean code was no exception.
All things server-side
As I said earlier, any Java tool or technology that’s commonly used by server-side software developers connects with our readers. We did a number of articles contrasting Tomcat against Jetty or even the Apache Web Server. We enjoy producing this content, and we hope you enjoy reading it.
Thanks for reading and thank you to all the contributors who write for the site. We look forward to your continued views and contributions throughout the next decade.