Eric Miraglia posts on the YUI Blog today about the recent exploits of Douglas Crockford. A synopsis of Mr. Crockford’s keynote from the AjaxWorld East 2008 Conference is available along with the slides from his talk. Most of his complaints about the current state of the web revolve around the insecurities inherent in web browsers and JavaScript.

The post also mentions an interview with Douglas Crockford, Alex Russell, and Joseph Smarr on Microsoft’s Channel 9.

Apache Commons Lang version 2.4 has been released. Lots of new methods were introduced, including 17 new methods for the StringUtils class, and some new formatting classes. Check out the release notes for more information.

Max Pool at CodeSqueeze has an interesting article on the decision between comfort and confidence. The article talks about how most teams will develop software not using the best tools for the job, but rather the tools they are comfortable with. It ends with some sage advice, telling you to get outside of your comfort zone occasionally and learn something new (say, maybe, a new programming language?).

RegDeveloper has the first in a five-part series from Scott Bain’s new book “Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development” up on their site today. In it, Scott goes over some basic qualities found in well-written maintainable code. I’ll be looking forward to reading the rest of the excerpts and eventually the book.