This field of brittle fracture has engaged researchers from various fields of engineering from the early days until today. There are nowadays different approaches for the fracture and fatigue design. A high potential has been found in the strain energy density (SED) approach recently applied under different fracture and fatigue loading conditions. This approach has strong numerical advantages especially if applied to advanced materials and complex structures. Different problems and applications are presented in this paper, considering some recent outcomes at different scale levels, showing the possibility of considering a coarse mesh without any definition of a control volume. The potential of the method fits well with the application to connections of any type and in particular with welded joints. The main aim of this work is to compare the SED when applied to traditional welding processes as friction stir welding, and advanced technologies as hybrid bonding.