Dan Mezick introduces Gaming Happiness at Work, then discusses related goals, rules and scoring, the relationship between games and happiness, and how to bring it all together in work meetings. By Dan Mezick

G. Blake Meike discusses concurrency in Android, focusing on AsyncTask - what can be done with it, what problems using it and how to circumvent them. By G. Blake Meike

Matthew Flatt explains the Racket - a Lisp dialect - way through examples: everything is a program, concepts are language constructs, the language is extensible, and everything composes. By Matthew Flatt

Google’s platform-as-a-service, Google App Engine has received an overhaul this week, with the addition of complementary Java 7 language features GAE’s 1.7.3 release has been boosted by the arrival of Java 7 features to the SDK, with promises of complete Java 7 support to be rolled out imminently. It’s perhaps indicative that only now is Java 7 considered ready for adoption, although some other PaaS vendors, such as Jelastic and Cloud Foundry, have already supported Java 7 for some time. According to the release blogpost, it’s now possible to run and test applications using a local Java 7 installation, which they recommend before formal runtime support appears. The team also disclose just some of the new language enhancements on their blogpost, including: The ability to use the String class in Switch statements Expression of binary literals using simple prefixes 0b or 0B Single catch blocks that can handle multiple exceptions Improved type inference for generic instance creation Auto closing of resources when enclosed within a try-with-resources statement Simplified varargs method invocation Plenty to whet the whistle with, but developers wanting more can register for full Java 7 support in an early preview. A full list of features can be found in the release notes.

It’s no secret that the latest challenge for the ‘big data’ movement is moving from batch processing to real-time analysis. Metamarkets, who provide “Data Science-as-a-Service” business analytics, last year revealed details of in-house distributed database Druid - and have this week released it as an open source project. Druid was designed to solve the problem of a database which allows multi-dimensional queries on data as and when it arrives. The company originally experimented with both relational and NoSQL databases, but concluded they were not fast enough for their needs and so rolled out their own. The company claims that Druid’s scan speed is “33M rows per second per core”, able to ingest “up to 10K incoming records per second per node”. An earlier blog post outlines how the company managed to achieve scan speeds of 26B records per second using horizontal scaling. It does this via a distributed architecture, column orientation and bitmap indices. GigaOM reports that CEO Mike Driscoll said he chose to open source the technology, which powers their web-based data analysis software, in an attempt to make it an industry standard. Like open-sourcing of certain technologies by Twitter, it offers no competitive downside - since the data analysis service, rather than Druid itself, is their key product. The release comes in the same week that Cloudera unveiled Impala, a real-time SQL-based query engine for Hadoop - yet another tool for instant data analysis. As with seemingly all modern open source projects, you can find the source code on GitHub at github.com/metamx/druid.

Debasish Ghosh talks about the advantages of functional programming and how its abstractions help to reason about code, Monads, DSLs, NoSQL and MongoDB, and much more. By Debasish Ghosh

Yet another week has flown by and the JAX editorial team are preparing for the upcoming holidays. Yes, Halloween counts and there’s certainly some chilling coding stories to be told (get in touch with those at chrism@jaxentercom or elliotb@sandsmedia.com). You know the score know - five irreverent things that caught our eye this week from the world of Java and beyond. Let’s get to it!  1. Banking on Clojure Probably our favourite blogpost of the week - Jon Pither recounts his team’s experiences of taking the plunge at the investment bank he works at, moving to Clojure from Java. Definitely worth reading if you’re in the financial industry and considering a similar JVM move.  2. Github dating spinoff service? Well this brings a new meaning to pull request. Noriko Higashi, a female Tokyo software engineer has used Github essentially as a ‘lonely hearts’ advertising service to find her Mr Right. It’s a pretty comprehensive list of what she’s looking for and unsurprisingly this has received much attention on Reddit. Currently, she has received 17 pull requests and 44 issues noted. You have to admire her for targeting the demographic she wants. 3. A journey through sound It’s scratchy and fairly indecipherable but an important piece of musical history. Dating back to 1878, this first ever recorded musical performance, made on a Thomas Edison phonograph, has been digitally remastered and shown to the world. The recording begins with an unidentified 23-second cornet solo before a man recites two nursery rhymes, in which he gets Old Mother Hubbard wrong. Surely the oldest blooper in history. Personally, I preferred his earlier work... 4. Microsoft find new use for Surface at launch - as a skateboard It’s been difficult to escape talk of Microsoft’s foray into the tablet market with Surface, but we’ll leave the reviews to the experts. It won’t take you long to find a lauding hands-on followed by a scathing piece from an Apple advocate. Windows Chief Steven Sinofsky however managed to show on Twitter that there was another use for the durable Surface, as a skateboard. Just don’t expect to be Tony Hawk with it, pulling ollies left, right and centre. 5. R.I.P Ceefax Ceefax 1974-2012   This one is for Brits and American readers may well be lost here, but bear with us. Back in 1974 in the UK, a TV-based text information service was launched called Ceefax, a forerunner to the interactive services we see today. Sure, looking at it now, its garish colour scheme make it an eyesore and its loading times were sluggish at best, but there’s still a charm about it. Live sports events would be conveyed over a pixelated videprinter, leaving fans waiting by the minute for news of how their team were doing. After 38 years of long service at the BBC, Ceefax ceased on Tuesday 23rd October 2012 (in line with a UK digital TV switchover) and a national mourning period began. Even former Prime Minister John Major said it would be “much missed”. As the country struggles to come to terms with the departure of a faithful friend, Twitter users can ease the pain by ‘Tweefaxing’ their feed. A nice touch. Have a good weekend. Mine will be Bond-based, I suggest you follow my lead.

Overview of the largest gathering of the PHP and Web Community in Europe, which took place last week in Mainz, Germany. By Fabian Lange

Thoughtworks Principal Jez Humble offers up a bitesize view into Continuous Delivery and how businesses can use it to get valuable new software to uses as quickly as possible, whilst keeping their production environment stable. Jez discusses important CD practices and principles including value stream mapping, the deployment pipeline, acceptance test drive development, zero-downtime releases and incremental development. This video was filmed by Marakana Tech TV (marakana.com) at JAXconf in July 2012

The JavaOne 2012 conference materials listed this presentation as "Project EASEL: Developing and Managing HTML5 in a Java World," but the title slide posted as we wait for the session to begin is titled "NetBeans - Project Easel." The authors and presenters listed on that title slide are John "JB" Brock, Preview Text: ...