Most interesting links of March

I've decided to publish links to the most interesting blogs, articles and pages that I've stubled upon in a particular month. Enjoy the first dose! (In no particular order.)

I recommend the post 43 Essential Controls for Web Applications,which presents - with screenshots and short descriptions - the most used and useful javascript/ajax widgets for web pages, from the basic ones like auto-complete/suggestions and sliders through a calendar for less known yet very cool ones like sparklines. Read it to learn what's hot and you shouldn't miss in your application! (Warning: The number of widgets on a page is inversely proportional to its quality.)

Code Bubbles - a new IDE UI paradigm: An extremely interesting proposal of a completely different UI for IDEs based on related pieces of code instead of files.

Twitter on Scala - why some parts of Twitter are being ported to Scala - shortcomings of JRuby (more excatly its virtual machine), advantages of Scala (high level, static, JVM), lessons learned.

Reasons why to switch from Log4j to Logback, a (not so) new logging framework by a Log4j father. Really compelling.

 10 Lessons Learned from Usability Testing - why doing usability testing can be cheap and afordable for anybody and whay you need. My experience is that users are too often frogotten and UT should certainly be done much more often - and this post argues that it's indeed possible.

A discussion of various Source Code Management systems (scroll down) and which one to choose for Eclipse, including CVS, SVN, Git, Mercurial and Jazz SCM, with their advantages and disadvantages, really enlightening. For the busy yet curious ones, the winner was Git (though that doesn't mean that for a different project you wouldn't pick another one).

What's new in Maven 3 - an interview with J. van Zyl. Among others: even better IDE integration, better dependency handling, mixins (since 3.1) for reusable pieces of configuration, a set of core plugins of guaranteed quality. Looking forward!