zameer4u

APPLE ipod

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:40:00 +0000

APPLE iPOD

APPLE ipod

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:40:00 +0000

XML security

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:55:00 +0000

XML security

The subject of XML security is quite over-hyped. The whole idea of XML security can be simply described as applying common-sense security technology to a specific format, known as XML. XML security is classically described as a combination of XML Encryption and XML Digital Signature. We shall review these concepts in this article.
XML Encryption
The most interesting part about XML encryption is that we can encrypt an entire document, or its selected portions. This is very difficult to achieve in the non-XML world. We can encrypt one or all of the following portions of an XML document:

* The entire XML document
* An element and all its sub-elements
* The content portion of an XML document
* A reference to a resource outside of an XML document

The steps involved in XML encryption are quite simple, and are as follows:

1. Select the XML to be encrypted (one of the items listed earlier, i.e. all or part of an XML document).
2. Convert the data to be encrypted in a canonical form (optional).
3. Encrypt the result using public key encryption.
4. Send the encrypted XML document to the intended recipient.

The following a sample XML document, containing the details of a credit card of a user

John Smith

1617 1718 0181 9910
Master
05/05

We shall not describe the various details of this XML document, and would simply remark that it contains the credit card details, such as the user’s name, credit limit, currency, card number, issuer name and expiry details. Let us assume that we want to encrypt this. When we perform XML encryption, a standard tag called as EncryptedData comes into picture. As we have mentioned before, we can choose to encrypt selected portions of the XML document, or we can encrypt it as a whole. For illustration purposes, we shall see what happens when we encrypt only the actual credit card details (such as its number, issuer and expiry details). The result is shown in the figure below. We can see that the encrypted text is embedded inside the tag CipherData. This is another standard tag in XML encryption.

John Smith

http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#Content’ xmlns=’http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#’>

D7T60UB67

As we can see, the credit card details are now encrypted, and therefore, cannot be read/changed. The fact that we have encrypted the contents of the XML document is signified by using the xmlenc#Content value. If we had encrypted the full CreditCard element, this would have been changed to xmlenc#Element.

XML Digital Signature
As we can see, a digital signature is calculated over the complete message. It cannot be calculated only for specific portions of a message. The simple reason for this is that the first step in a digital signature creation is the calculation of the message digest over the whole message. Many practical situations demand that users be able to sign only specific portions of a message. For instance, in a purchase request, the purchase manager may want to authorize only the quantity portion, whereas the accounting manager may want to sign only the rate portion. In such cases, XML digital signatures can be used. This technology treats a message or a document as consisting of many elements, and provide for the signing of one or more such elements. This makes the signature process flexible and more practical in nature.

Eclipse vs NetBeans

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:29:00 +0000

Eclipse vs NetBeans

Eclipse vs NetBeans ...On which side are you on? Let us know which IDE you think is better and why.

Think of Java IDEs and two names that will come up are Eclipse and NetBeans. I have been using NetBeans for many years now and Eclipse has been a more recent addition to my Java armory. I have enjoyed working with both tools and as such don't have a clear favorite. I prefer NetBeans a little more than Eclipse as I have been using it longer and am more comfortable with it.

The thing I am most surprised about is how rapidly Eclipse has grown and how it has well and truly eclipsed NetBeans over the past year or so.

In the article: Migrating to Eclipse: A developer's guide to evaluating Eclipse vs. Netbeans, the author shows the differences between the two IDEs.

Just Eclipse or Eclipse in its WSAD avatar or MyEclipseIDE avatar is definitely good but hey..is it so good that nobody wants to be talk of NetBeans these days??? I haven't as yet tried out the new NetBeans 4 Beta 2 but I do hope it is very good. So that the competition between Eclipse and NetBeans stays fierce and there is no clear winner.

The end user gets two very good IDEs.

Apache Axis2 Offers Next Generation Web Services

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:26:00 +0000

Apache Axis2 Offers Next Generation Web Services

Axis2 is the next generation of the Apache Web service stack, that's built on a new flexible and configurable architecture. Axis2 has introduced a J2EE-like easily configurable deployment model, where the developer can bundle files into an archive file, and just drop it into a specified location in the file system. Axis2 uses AXIs Object Model (AXIOM), an XML object model meant to achieve a boost in performance. All this makes Axis2 our java developer software pick for the week

The Axis2 site says "One of the key motivations for Axis2 is to provide a clean and simple environment for implementations of associated WS standards such as Apache Sandesha and Apache WSS4J. Implementations of associated standards should be able to easily interface with the base SOAP Message handling system. In summary, Axis2 has a more modular and flexible message handling pipeline. It focuses on the details of message handling and provides clear hooks for implementations of associated Web Services standards and protocols. This evolution will allow Axis to be a foundational technology for next generation Web Services.

Apache Axis2 Version 0.94 was released recently and can be downloaded from here . The complete feature list for Axis2, as of version 0.94 is as follows:

1. AXIOM (AXis Object Model), an XML object model working on StAX (Streaming API for XML) parsing optimized for SOAP 1.1/1.2 Messages. This has complete XML infoset support.
2. Support for One-Way Messaging (In-Only) and Request Response Messaging (In-Out)
3. Module Architecture, mechanism to extend the SOAP Processing Model
4. Module version support , can have multiple versions of the same module and use them depending on the requirement.
5. Content hierarchy
6. Archive based deployment Model and Directory based deployment model
7. JWS like deployment (making Java class into Web service)
8. WSDL Code Generation Tool for Stub and skeletons
9. WS-Addressing, both the submission (2004/08) and final (2005/08) versions
10. WSS4J module for security
11. Improved and user friendly Client API
12. WSDL2Java
13. REST (REpresentational State Transfer) Support
14. Transports supports: HTTP, SMTP, TCP, JMS
15. Raw XML providers
16. Support for MTOM/ MIME/ SwA
17. SAAJ implementation
18. DOOM - New Feature
19. Pack/Unpack capability for the generated code- New Feature
20. Axis Data Binding - ADB (Framework and Schema Compiler)
21. Numerous bug fixes since last release

Spket IDE

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:22:00 +0000

Spket IDE

Spket IDE is powerful toolkit for JavaScript and XML development.

The powerful editor for JavaScript, XUL/XBL and Yahoo! Widget development. The JavaScript editor provides features like code completion, syntax highlighting and content outline that helps developers productively create efficient JavaScript code.

What's new

Spket IDE 1.6.5 released - 1 Jan 2008

* Toggle Mark Occurrences for JavaScript, screenshot
* Add/Remove comment for JavaScript.
* Minor bugfixes and feature enhancements.

What users searched for in 2007?

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 10:26:00 +0000

What users searched for in 2007?

A review of Yahoo searches reveals global warming, celebrity meltdowns, social networking and a literary boy wizard's final adventure captured mankind's attention in 2007.

The US Internet giant sifted billions of searches made this year by its hundreds of millions of users worldwide to identify trends regarding what piqued people's interest.

Here we bring to you the 10 most searched tech words on Yahoo in 2007. These are the words for which the users clamoured for information on in this past-one year.

And are also the words which as Raj Gossain, Yahoo's senior director of marketing search, says reflect broad consumer trends that dominated the year 2007.

YouTube

Gadgets and games weren't the only thing to push the tech limits. In 2007, the popular video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips -- YouTube -- ruled the Yahoo search results.

YouTube made headlines for its US Presidential debate, its YouTube Video Awards, and of course its soft porn videos.

According to a new report from research firm comScore, Google's YouTube continues to rank as the top US online video property, drawing the most unique video viewers and most videos.

Wikipedia

The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet was the second most searched word on Yahoo in 2007. The foundation that runs Wikipedia recently agreed to pay contributors to the online encyclopedia a modest fee for their work.

However, it won't pay the thousands of people who participate in creating the wiki pages -- just artists who create “key illustrations” for the site.

The year 2007 was also full of controversies for one of the biggest online brands with reports of companies including Microsoft trying to edit wiki entries. The site was also banned in some US schools.

Facebook

Corporate stakes accelerated the growth of social networking and the biggest example of it is Facebook.

The social networking site which has been giving tough competition to the Internet giant google recently got support from its biggest rival Microsoft. Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 per cent stake in the company this October.

Facebook has also raised $60 million from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, adding to its list of financial heavyweights backing the online hangout's rapid growth.

The second largest social network on the Web behind News Corp's MySpace.com launched a marketing initiative called Beacon last month. The marketing tool agitated thousands of Facebook users because it circulated potentially sensitive information about their online purchases and other activity

iTunes

The digital media player application introduced by Apple in January 2001 once again showed its popularity: the music app is fourth on the Yahoo tech search trends for 2007.

Now users can turn songs from the iTunes Store into custom ringtones for their iPhone and download music from the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store on their iPod touch or iPhone.

Also, following a dispute over pricing issues in August, NBC has now officially ended its deal with Apple and their content has been removed from the iTunes Store, despite the company being the largest supplier of video downloads.

Some shows that are broadcasted on NBC are still available at the iTunes Store, however, as they are produced by other studios, rather than NBC Universal.

iPod

The portable media player leader iPod comes was the fifth most tech searched word on Yahoo. iPod which was launched by Apple in 2001 again revamped its line-up this year.

Apple unleashed a slew of new iPods, including its all new iPod, the iPod Touch. Also dubbed as 'the God machine', the new iPod seems to have borrowed interface technology from iPhone -- except that it is no phone.

Apple also reduced the price of its best-selling 8 GB iPhone model from $599 to $399, barely two months after it started selling them. The smaller 4 GB phone, which had sold for $399, was discontinued. Apple executives said that the revamped and expanded iPod line -- which recasts the iPhone as the top model -- is the company’s most robust lineup ever for the holiday season.

iPhone

Apple seems to be in a habit of ruling the charts, iPhone is third offering from the company in the Yahoo's most searched tech words list.

The phone which made its international debut in June gave a new lease of life to smartphones and compelled phone manufacturers to rethink their strategies after their products look shadowed in iPhone halo.

In fact, the iPhone success seems to have claimed its first victim with many analysts believing that iPhone success contributed to Motorola's CEO Ed Zander exit. Many feel that RAZR 2 was released too late and has been overshadowed by iPhone.

However, iPhone too has its share of controversies, after initial network glitches on AT&T, the iPhone is now facing a lawsuit from Klausner Technologies over its voicemail. New York-based Klausner has filed a $360 million suit against Apple and AT&T Inc over voicemail patents that Klausner claims the Apple iPhone infringes.

Nintendo Wii

Nintendo Wii debuted in late 2006, amidst predictions of a stiff competition from the Sony PlayStation 3 and the new Xbox, however, Wii sales gained on both the 360 and the PS3. Little doubt then that it was among the Yahoo's 10 hottest search words for 2007.

The company's 2007 releases include "Super Mario Galaxy" and "Metroid Prime 3: Corruption" (for the Wii) and “The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass” and “Brain Age 2” (for the DS).

The company also announced that it will let individuals and outside game studios create and sell downloadable Wii games with a tool called WiiWare. Gamers will be able to purchase the games through the console's Wii Shop channel starting in early 2008.

Xbox

Giving competition to Nintendo's Wii is Microsoft's Xbox 360. While Wii racked up 350,000 unit sales during Thanksgiving week in the US, Xbox 360 wasn't very far behind with 310,000 units sold during the same period.

Based on these figures, analysts believe that it will be a fairly tight battle between the Wii and 360 during December, with the Wii having a slight edge.

In this, Nintendo seems to be taking a page from Microsoft Corp's play book. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker's XNA Game Studio tools let developers design video games for its Xbox 360 console.

Recently, Microsoft is said to have issued a warning about a one of the features of the new dashboard update for the Xbox 360. The update allows users to change the email account (Live ID) associated with their Xbox Live Gamertag and one that has been requested since the consoles launched.

Sony PlayStation 3

Ninth on the Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) games console sold 183,217 units in November in Japan, outselling Nintendo's Wii's 159,193 units for the first time, according to media reports.

This may be a turning point for Sony's struggling games division. The PS3 has lagged the Wii in sales since the devices were launched late last year due to the Sony machine's high price and scarcity of strong game titles.

Sony Computer Entertainment America reported similar success in the United States, where PlayStation 3 hardware sales have increased by nearly 300 per cent.

Sony launched a 40 GB model for Y40,000 ($361) in Japan in November and cut prices on 20 GB models, which ignited sales and could provide the next-generation console with the momentum it needs through the holiday shopping season.

Analysts said this year's Christmas season is crucial for Sony's PS3 in terms of winning the “perception wars.”

Guitar Hero

Tenth on the Yahoo list is the popular game Guitar Hero, one of the hottest and most surprising hit.

Musical games have long had their niche in the video-game industry. Fans of “Dance Dance Revolution” or “Pump It Up” like to show off their footwork; “SingStar” and “Karaoke Revolution” attract “American Idol” wannabes. Such games can be fun at parties and they've always had a devoted audience, but they never really attracted the masses.

That changed with the 2005 release of RedOctane's “Guitar Hero.” Suddenly, every gamer had a fake Gibson connected to his PlayStation, and plenty of music lovers who don't usually play games got hooked as well.

The creators of “Guitar Hero” are now developing “Rock Band” -- which adds drums and vocals to the formula -- for Electronic Arts and MTV Games. Activision is preparing “Guitar Hero III” for the holidays.

And plenty of other studios have music games in the works. Fans of the genre are no longer a cult today it seems every gamer wants to be a pop star.

Activision Blizzard recently announced plans to "exploit" its successful franchises like Guitar Hero by bringing out titles on an annual basis.

How-tos of an online interview

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:20:00 +0000

How-tos of an online interview

Rajeev Dogra spent a sleepless night before reaching the local office of a large banking company. Quite nervous at the thought of taking a video conference interview for a position in operations, there was nobody he could turn to for tips.

His friends had bunch of advice for face-to-face interviews, but they had little help to offer on virtual format. And the very thought of the situation intimidated Rajeev. With more and more companies opting for virtual interviews, by phone, conference call or videoconference, rather than the traditional face-to-face ones, there may be many like Rajeev biting their thumbs.

Here are a few steps to keep in mind to help clinch the deal.

Time it right

Arrive at the videoconference site with enough time in hand to get comfortable with the equipment and ensure that everything is working properly. You should be primed and ready to go when your interviewer joins the conference.

Don’t bother too much about what can go wrong, be positive. That should help you perform better.

Appearance counts

Remember, appearance matters here just as much as in any regular interview. Just because you are not meeting your potential employer face-to-face does not mean you can afford to dress sloppy.

Instead, dress professionally -- even soberly. Avoid over-bright colours and glittery jewellery that catches the light and distracts the interviewer.

Sit smart and relaxed through the interview. That says a lot about your personality and comfort with technology.

Practise the technique

Speak slowly and clearly in well modulated voice. Avoid excessive movements and look straight into the monitor to make direct eye contact with your interviewer.

Also, keep in mind that in an interview like this, there will be a slight delay in receiving the audio and the video. So, practice pausing a bit before speaking to ensure that the other person has finished speaking and again, when you’ve finished, so that the people at the other end know that you’re done.

Mind your language

End your interview with a smile and ensure that your videoconference equipment is completely switched off before making any comments about the interview.

Don’t let an indiscreet comment or gesture spoil the entire process for you.

Send a thanks note

Like in any other interview, send a thank you note, thanking your potential employers for their time and outlining your interest in the company. Politeness always helps!

Java EE 6

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:41:00 +0000

Leading-Edge Java
Java EE 6

A Conversation with Bill Shannon and Roberto Chinnici
by Frank Sommers

November 6, 2007

Summary

In this interview with Artima, Bill Shannon and Roberto Chinnici, spec leads for JSR 316, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6, discuss the key design considerations for the upcoming version of the enterprise Java specification.

Frank Sommers:
The JSR for Java EE 6, JSR 316, was submitted to the JCP in July. What are the main themes for EE 6?

Bill Shannon:
We've been doing Java EE for quite a while now, and the EE community has become a vibrant place, with lots of things going on. There are now alternatives being created to various facilities in the EE platform, and lots of pseudo-competitors emerged.
We are looking at all the great stuff going on in and around Java EE, and have really been inspired by that. For EE 6, we are trying to find a way to manage those things, and embrace this very rich world of Java EE in a manner that makes sense for developers. That desire is among the main drivers for the direction we're going with Java EE 6.
One of the main themes for EE 6 centers around extensibility. Already, it is clearly possible to build a lot of facilities on top of Java EE, but we think there is a lot more we can do in that area to make it easier for people to build technologies that work well with Java EE, that integrate more easily with EE, and that make it easier to develop applications that use some other technologies that aren't part of the platform, but work well with the platform.
So we're going to focus a bit on extensibility in Java EE 6, have more pluggability points, and make it easier to compose applications out of many of the different technologies that are available in the enterprise Java world and beyond.
Another thing that we're going to focus on is the introduction of profiles to the EE platform. The JCP defines a very specific notion of profiles, and we're going to take advantage of that notion here.
Java EE continued to grow over the years and mature, but it's also gotten bigger. There are a lot more facilities than there were when we started, and we're finding that some developers who might be interested in Java EE are intimidated by the amount of stuff that's there.
To attract more of those developers, and to make it clear that they can actually use EE for simpler things, too, we are considering introducing a new profile, the Web Profile, focused at Web application developers.
The Web Profile would effectively be a subset of Java EE, providing just the important capabilities that Web application developers need. You're clearly not going to write all of your complete, high-end enterprise applications using a Web profile product, but there's a wide variety of simple applications that you could write with this profile. Combining that with the extensibility support, it would provide a very good base for building on and adding additional Web frameworks and capabilities that you might need.
We are also going to define additional profiles of different sorts in the future. What those might be, we haven't gotten that far yet. We think there are other opportunities to define profiles to attack particular markets or application development needs, and we'll be looking at that, after EE 6.
The third major focus in EE 6 is something we call pruning. As I said, the platform has grown over the years, and part of that growth has been the accumulation of technologies that are not quite as important or interesting now as they were at the time we added them. Some of them were replaced by newer technologies that we think are a better match for what developers need these days.
In pruning out the parts of Java EE that are not as widely used and not as much needed as they once were, we'll basically be following a process that was defined by the Java SE folks for SE 6. It's a multi-step process that effectively means that something goes from being a required component of the platform to being an optional component, over multiple releases. First, we declare that some technology is a candidate for this type of pruning, and in the next release we might actually move it from the required state to the optional state.
There are a couple things we discussed pruning out. One of the bigger ones is JAX-RPC [JSR 101, Java APIs for XML-Based RPC]. It was an older technology that's effectively been replaced by JAX-WS [JSR 224, Java API for XML-Based Web Services], which is a better match for the Web services support we need.
The other thing is the whole EJB CMP [container-managed persistence] support, the entity bean support that's been there for a very long time. It had some issues, and wasn't getting quite as much traction as we might have liked, and effectively it's been now replaced by the Java Persistence API [JSR 220, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0]. We think that's a much better approach to solving that same problem. So we don't think there is a great need for the EJB CMP support any more. Those are the two big things listed in the Java EE 6 JSR for pruning.
There are additional things we've been discussing in the expert group that may also end up in that category. One of them is the JAXR API [JSR 93, Java API for XML Registries 1.0], an API for accessing [Web service] registries. It's one of those things, again, that hasn't seen quite the use that we anticipated when we added it to the platform.
Our initial plan is to deliver the final Java EE 6 spec in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Frank Sommers:
You said that the communities formed around non-Java EE enterprise technologies are one of your main inspirations for Java EE 6. Why do you think those communities formed outside of Java EE in the first place, and how do you plan to address their initial concerns about Java EE in version 6?
Bill Shannon:
There are a lot of reasons those communities sprang up. One is that we have been so incredibly successful with Java EE, and that success both enabled the Java EE community and inspired people to consider competitors to that technology. So in part it's our success that enabled those communities.
In some cases people have looked at what we've done and they thought of better ways to do it. There is no one perfect, final answer to all programming problems. There are alternatives being considered. The incredible growth of the internet and the Web has inspired more and more people to develop applications for this environment, so there are lots of alternative ways of doing things. Even Java technology is not the only technology being used here. With the incredible range of applications being delivered, it's natural that there would be alternatives.
Frank Sommers:
How do you view the role of the Java EE specification in a world where there are increasingly alternative technologies to accomplish the goals defined for Java EE?
Bill Shannon:
Part of what we're trying to do in EE 6 is to embrace some of the alternatives by making it easier for people to choose which alternatives they want to use with, or on top of, the Java EE platform. The extensibility support that we'd like to add would help with that.
It's not always possible to support all the alternatives. Sometimes, you do have to make a choice. Where possible, we'd like to leave the choices in hands of the application developers. Different applications and different developers with different needs and backgrounds will prefer different alternatives.
Frank Sommers:
Some emerging alternatives for enterprise development are not based on Java. To what extent will Java EE 6 embrace non-Java enterprise technologies?
Bill Shannon:

There are a few ways we're looking at non-Java technologies. One way is interoperation with those non-Java technologies through Web services. That's a very core capability, and is very important to the platform. And it allows to connect Java and non-Java things together.
In addition, we're also looking at ways to add other, non-Java, language support to the Java platform. There are now a lot of things that will help you write your applications in different languages but still deliver them on the Java platform.
The JRuby work is now being done at Sun to deliver support for the Ruby language on the Java platform. There's the Groovy language, which is a JCP standard [JSR 241, The Groovy Programming Language]. Roberto Chinnici has been doing some experimental work to support JavaScript for Web applications. We'd like to enable more of those things to happen with Java EE.
Which of those we'll eventually bring into the platform and endorse as part of a standard, required part of the EE platform, that's not clear yet. We definitely want to enable that level of experimentation and some of those alternatives to be used in the context of Java EE applications.

Frank Sommers:
To what extent do you see a room for "opinionated software" in the EE spec? By that, I mean the conscious decision to narrow down the choices developers can make in the interest of simplicity, or at least to guide developers toward a common development style. Are such decisions anathema to Java EE's desire to embrace all kinds of enterprise technologies and APIs?

Bill Shannon:
What we're seeing now is developers increasingly embracing the notion of freedom of choice. Our original approach to J2EE and Java EE was that we'd make decisions that would define the one standard way of doing things, and we would then incorporate those decisions into the platform. Sometimes we got it right, and sometimes we didn't.
We're now moving to the world where there are so many choices available, and developers would generally prefer to have the choices in their hands rather than us making the choice for them.
You're right that things like Ruby on Rails, they made a lot of those choices for you, and forced you into a particular style and framework that, if you buy into that, gives you many benefits. But that does restrict some of your choices. We'd like to have some of the ease of development attributes of something like Ruby on Rails, but in an environment that doesn't restrict you to just that style of development.
Our goal with the Web profile, for example, is to define a class of products that are simpler than the full Java EE stack. The Web profile doesn't have all the capabilities of Java EE, but it has enough capabilities that you can build on for a wide range of simpler applications.
In the future, we could define additional profiles targeted at different needs. If your goal is to write applications for some telecommunications environment, for instance, we could define a profile that has the right collection of technologies for that type of application.

Frank Sommers:
How do you see the role of vendors evolving in an enterprise Java world where developers have more and more choices, and where many of those choices come from open-source efforts?

Bill Shannon:
Vendors will still have a very important role, because they are still the primary means for developers to get access to the platform's capabilities.
If you look at what the major vendors in this space are doing, most, if not all, of them, are approaching things similarly to what I described here: They are embracing some of the open-source and alternative platforms in their product lines. Some of them are supporting things like Spring in their Java EE products, for example. They're well-aligned with what we're doing in EE 6.

Frank Sommers:
How will Java EE 6 make it easier for developers to compose an enterprise application from their choice of frameworks and components?

Roberto Chinnici:
That's still in the early stages. From a developer's point of view, we'd like to see a pain-free way to use multiple frameworks, especially for Web applications. Thus far, developers have a hard time having to juggle the requirements of several frameworks in an application—Spring and Hibernate, WebWork, and things like that, especially when trying to mix them. The goal is to define a hassle-free way to use these together in an application.

Bill Shannon:
Combining Web frameworks into a Web application usually requires that you pick up all the different pieces, and put them together, and then you have to edit this one descriptor that talks about everything and how all that fits together.
To figure out what to edit in that one descriptor to make all the pieces work together properly, is kind of a pain. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just pick up the pieces and drop them into your application, and they would combine in ways that you didn't have to describe, but would still make sense and would allow your application to work? That's the sort of simplicity we're aiming at.

Frank Sommers:
What is the most important design lesson you've learned in your years as a key architect of Java EE? What do you consider to be the biggest design mistakes?

Bill Shannon:
Everything is a compromise. That's what you learn. We're always trading off content and date and resources. Nothing we do is ever perfect, because if it was perfect, it would be late, and being late would make it not perfect.
If we had more time to do some of these things, we could have done a better job the first time around, but would also have been much more delayed, and that would have completely changed the market, and would have opened the door for other competitors to come in because we were moving too slowly. You just have to make the best decisions in the time you have. The timeline of the work you do is an important factor to consider.
This always leads to interesting discussions in the expert groups, where some people come in and say, Well, we want to be the absolutely best we can ever be, and we'll take as long as we can to do that. I think we need to balance that desire with the need to actually deliver something in a finite amount of time.
As for individual choices that we made, if you look at some of the things that are on the list for pruning, you might conclude that those were mistakes. That's not a fair characterization of them, however.
We included JAX-RPC in the platform, because Web services were becoming incredibly important, and we already felt that we were late in delivering Web services support in the Java platform. If we hadn't included that and took more time to come up with a more perfect version of that, the first version might have been wonderful. But it would have been so incredibly late that people would have concluded that Web services and Java EE were never going to come together. It was a tough trade-off.
EJB CMP is on our pruning list, too. That was pretty revolutionary stuff at the time we introduced it. I think we did the best job that we knew how to do at that time. There weren't a lot of better choices. Based on years of experience using that and trying alternatives, we discovered a better way to do things. Was it a mistake the first time around? No, I don't think it was a mistake, but over the years we learned things that allowed us to do that better.

Frank Sommers:
Sun open-sourced its Java implementations over a year ago. How has open-source Java changed the evolution of Java EE?

Bill Shannon:
We have Glassfish, which is the reference implementation for Java EE. It's been open-source for something like a year and half now, and I think we're just starting to see some of the changes as a result of that.
We're seeing more participation from the community, and from some of the other vendors as well in terms of contributing to the reference implementation. The extent that it opens the ability for other parties to contribute to the reference implementation is great, and it's no longer the case that Sun has to do the initial implementation work itself. We get other parties involved. We're definitely seeing that.
While it's still the case that most of the reference implementation is done by Sun employees, in the Glassfish project, we're seeing now some other companies delivering major components. Oracle is delivering the Java persistence component, and we're hoping that RedHat/JBoss will deliver the Web Beans technology, JSR 299, and we intend to include that in Java EE 6.
Also, if we do a good job of following the open-source model, we're delivering things to the community constantly, and getting feedback from them. That can't help but improve what we're doing.
Open-sourcing Java has changed Sun's role in different ways, too. We're definitely seeing improvement in our product, and in the perception of our product, related to Java EE 5 and the open-source work that we'd done. Glassfish is getting quite a bit of traction, and that's a core of our product—that is our product. Having an open-source application server opens a lot of new markets to us. The fact that it's the first one implementing the new Java EE standards helps us a lot, too. The open-source process definitely allowed us to build a much better product than what we had before.

Roberto Chinnici:
I should add that many developers contribute by picking up the latest build from the open-source sites, and then kicking the tires. There are people who are passionate about an API, for example, and they would use that implementation and API, and identify issues and bugs. Even if they do not contribute code, that feedback truly makes the outcome better

Jess 7.0p 1

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:17:00 +0000

Jess 7.0p1 (Stable)

About:
Jess is a fast, light rule engine and scripting environment written entirely in Java. You can build Java software that has the capacity to "reason" using knowledge you supply in the form of declarative rules. It is supplied as a programmer's library, making it ideal for embedding in larger applications. Jess includes development tools built on the Eclipse platform. It is free for academic use and can be licensed for commercial use.

Release focus: Minor bugfixes

Changes:
Several minor bugs from the 7.0 release are fixed. Formatting and syntax coloring in the JessDE are no longer confused by multiline strings and comments. The JessDE contains a few new selection and formatting commands.

NetBeans - The Only IDE You Need

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 10:33:00 +0000

Publish Post6" />

NetBeans - The Only IDE You Need

The NetBeans IDE is a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. You get all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web and mobile applications, in Java, C/C++ and even Ruby. The IDE runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris; it is easy to install and use straight out of the box.

The 6.0 release includes significant enhancements and new features, including a completely rewritten editor infrastructure, support for additional languages, new productivity features, and a simplified installation process that allows you to easily install and configure the IDE to meet your exact needs.

Highlights

Easy-To-Use Java GUI Builder

Create professional-looking Java GUIs by placing and aligning components on a canvas.

Visual Web and Java EE Development

Build standards-based web applications visually using Ajax, CSS, and JSF. Full set of tools for EJB development.

Visual Mobile Development

Create, test and debug GUI applications that run on mobile phones, set-top boxes, and PDAs.

Visual UML Modeling

Separate software design from implementation with UML Modeling.

Ruby and Rails Support

Powerful Ruby editor (with code completion), debugger, and full support for Rails. Includes the JRuby runtime.

C and C++ Development

Full-featured C/C++ editor, debugger, project templates, and support for multiple project configurations

Edit, enhance pics with ease

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 10:24:00 +0000

Edit, enhance pics with ease

Digital camera screen shots look great. But their printouts are often moderate or poor. This distortion can be removed by photo editing software. These tools help turn ordinary pictures into great ones and also make you look more professional. Although, all digital cameras come with photo editing tools, a large number of these do not match professional software. One of the best professional tools available is the Adobe Photoshop - CS3. The version for photographers comes for $649 (about Rs 27,000). That's lot of money considering that a decent five mega-pixel camera itself costs much less. That is no reason for disappointment though. There are several photo editing tools available on the Internet for free. You just need to know how to use these freewares.

The one that closely resembles Adobe Photoshop but is less known is GIMP, and it’s absolutely free. GIMP, an image manipulation program, packs several features that your built-in digital camera software may not have provided.

Google’s Picasa, tools like Paint.Net, FxFoto and Saint Paint Studio are other freebies that can work miracles on pictures taken on digital cameras.

“GIMP’s features allow it to be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image producer or an image format converter,” says a GIMP user. It offers a full suite of painting tools, including brush, pencil, air-brush, clone all these allow photographers to make those little changes, here and there, to touch up the pictures.

GIMP also supports layers and channels — meaning, you can superimpose one picture on the other. The channel mixing allow you to change the look and the feel of the images. Multiple undo/redo options allow you to do away the changes as often as you would like to.

It also has a powerful gradient editor and blend tool to improve colour tones. Great transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip. The software supports almost all file formats that you might ever use.

Selection tools include rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent — all those are available in Adobe Photoshop as well. Plug-ins are small patches that allow easy addition of new file formats and new effect-filters. It comes built-in with over 100 plug-ins. Plus GIMP supports custom brushes and patterns. There is, however, another small piece of programme called ‘Gimp Tool Kit’ (GTK) that needs to be installed before GIMP is installed.

As far as other tools are concerned, Google’s Picasa scores on ease of use. It also offers an array of retouching features that allow you to enhance pictures a great deal. According to download.com, Paint.Net is another popular tool. “It’s an open source freeware editor with essential features, including those for cropping, rotating, re-sizing, adjusting colours, and creating collages. It has inbuilt capabilities for red eye removal in addition to allowing for finish like emboss, mosaic, and oil painting,” notes download.com on its website. Download.com is a website that checks all software and allows free downloads, too.

FxFoto and Saint Paint Studio are pretty much the same but with a few minor differences. Next time you invest in a digital camera, keep photo editing software in mind as what you shoot and print depends a lot on such nifty tools.

Meet America's gamer no.1

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 10:13:00 +0000

Meet America's gamer no.1

SEATTLE: Geoff Robinson does not fit the stereotype of a hardcore geek gamer. The 22-year-old student is sociable, an avid weightlifter, studies English and history -- not computer science -- and wants to be a teacher.

But Robinson is also the best American at a computer strategy game called StarCraft: Brood War and he is one of about 700 gamers from 74 countries competing at the World Cyber Games (WCG) 2007 Grand Final in Seattle, USA.

Organisers of the WCG said these players are athletes with tremendous hand-eye co-ordination, who simply happen to be competing in ‘e-sports’ or electronic sports.

“We would love to see the stereotype of the geek gamer smashed,” said Michael Arzt, senior vice-president, WCG. “It’s not that lonely kid in the basement that people think it is.”

In playing StarCraft, Robinson estimates that a good player will do about 300 different actions per minute on either a keyboard or mouse, and the best players can push that to 500 actions per minute.

“It’s about hand speed,” said Robinson, who has been playing the game since 1998. Robinson said he practices three hours a day and kicks that up to five to six hours a day in the weeks leading up to a tournament.

But his work doesn’t come at the expense of school, time at the gym or his social life. “I probably lost a few hours of sleep,” said Robinson. “I don’t think it ever crossed my mind to make my living playing video games, but I would like to see where this takes me.”

Well-rounded, media-friendly players like Robinson are key to move professional video gaming to the mainstream and gaining wider acceptance.

Professional video gaming has not reached the mainstream in most countries, but it’s already closely followed in South Korea, where tournaments are regularly televised and the best players can make over $1,00,000 (Rs 40 lakh approximately) a year.

The WCG Grand Final’s format is similar to the Olympics: Competing players represent their country and try to win medals for their national team. Of course, the $4,48,000 (Rs 1.76 crore approx) in prize money is an added incentive. “(Our) goal is to be recognized one day at par with the Olympics or the World Cup,” said Arzt

When 'ee' means 'move right'

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:28:00 +0000

When 'ee' means 'move right'

SEATTLE: A mouse that can move accurately in response to sounds could mean the difference between dependence and independence for someone with motor impairments.

A University of Washington researcher with a specialty in speech recognition is putting his skills to use teaching computers to do just that.

Jeff Bilmes, the associate professor of engineering leading a team creating the Vocal Joystick with a grant from the National Science Foundation, said most existing controllers are far from ideal.

Some are controlled by the breath or the tongue, but then users can't talk while operating their PC and if the device falls out, someone else has to put it back in.

“The one last bit of independence that such individuals have has been lost,” Bilmes said.

Other solutions, like sensors implanted under the skin or eye-movement trackers, can be invasive or expensive, he noted. Vocal Joystick is neither.

Bilmes said he was inspired by “beatboxers,” people who make a wide array of percussive noises with their mouth.

“The human voice can do much more than what's typically done for a standard language,” said Bilmes, who presented Vocal Joystick at a National Academy of Engineering meeting this week.

His team assigned vowel sounds to correspond to mouse movements: Up is “a” as in cat, right is “aw” as in “Aw, shucks.” There are sounds for more complex movements -- “down and to the right” is “oh” as in bold -- and sliding sounds together sends the mouse on smooth curves around the screen.

Vocal Joystick also gives computer users control over the mouse pointer's speed. A very quiet “ee” as in beet will move the cursor slowly to the right; a loud “oo” as in boot sends it plunging downward.

Once users are accustomed to the commands, they can do sophisticated on-screen work, such as illustration or digital photo restoration.

When he first started thinking about it, Bilmes wondered if people would feel too silly making all the ooooeeeeeuuuuuaahh's for Vocal Joystick to be useful.

“As soon as we built the first prototype and I tried it, I immediately forgot that I was making sounds,” he said. “As soon as you start doing it and see it respond to your voice, something amazing happens.”

Apple's new OS

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:28:00 +0000

Apple's new OS

Apple's upgraded Leopard operating system debuted this week as trend-setting iPods and iPhones cause the ranks of Macintosh computer lovers to swell.

Eagerly-awaited by Apple's notoriously cultish followers, Leopard's release was delayed so the company's engineers could devote their time to getting iPhones to market in the United States in June.

Rival Microsoft, whose software powers 90 per cent of the world's computers, released its own new operating system, Vista, in January.

Time Machine

Leopard features include playful “iChat” video-conferencing and a “Time Machine” that resurrects lost data. The 3D Time Machine was inspired by a survey that indicated only 26 per cent of Macintosh users regularly backed up information on their machines to avoid losing it forever in system crashes.

The feature automatically copies music, pictures, applications, files and “absolutely everything” a person puts on their Macintosh, according to Apple vice president of platform experience Scott Forstall.

The operating system enables people to remotely search for files on all computers connected to their network. In the event a file is lost, users can search back through time to find deleted files, applications, photos and other digital media and then instantly restore the file. If required, Leopard can also restore an entire system from the Time Machine data on an external drive.

Widgets

Leopard also has simple tools for people to create “widget” applications that stream feeds such as news or syndicated cartoons from websites onto small windows on computer screens.

It includes improved text-reading, Braille support and closed-captioning for people with disabilities. There's also a dictionary with Wikipedia built in, allowing users to access up-to-date information on any subject.

iChat Theatre

Modifications to iChat allow people linked via Web cameras to share slide show presentations, playfully distort their pictures or insert fake backdrops.

iChat Theater makes it easy to show photos, presentations, videos or files in a video conference; screen sharing which lets users remotely view and operate another Mac; and Photo Booth effects for fun distortions and video backdrops that can instantly make users appear to be anywhere they choose.

Stack-up

Another useful addition to Leopard is Stacks. It is a virtual “stack” of documents that lives in the dock area, giving users one-click access to files.

They can create their own Stack, when a user clicks on it, the Stack will display all the documents in a cascading pile. Downloads too are automatically added to the download Stack to help the user find them easily.

Mail goes new

The new OS also packs some new features in its email programme. There's Data detection software that will spot key words in messages, such as appointments, dates and times.

On running the cursor over these details and it will ask the user if he wants to add them to his calendar application as an event. Not only this, if it senses an address, it will even generate a Google Map. There are also additions like sticky notes and to-do lists.

Parental Controls

Microsoft's Vista boasted it, so how could Apple be behind. Under Leopard's Parental Controls panel, if a user sets up multiple user accounts, including individual ones for children, he can manage and control the amount of time they can spend online (including different allowances for weekends and school nights) and the kind of websites they are allowed to access.

It also has content filters to weed out inappropriate content and activity logging to monitor their web use.

Embraces Microsoft

Crucially, Leopard is the first Apple operating system that will also allow you to install a Windows operating system alongside it. The BootCamp programme has been available for download on some other Apple machines, but it required a level of technical expertise to install and run that some novice users may have found daunting.

In Leopard, it's all built in: you just need to buy a copy of Windows and let the BootCamp assistant guide you through the installation process.

Google Desktop

Google Desktop for Mac has been updated adding support for the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

In addition to Leopard support, Google Desktop allows indexing of drives where Spotlight has been disabled Desktop no longer tries to index PGP disks; Time Machine won't back up Desktop indexes, nor will Desktop search Time Machine backups; and Desktop preferences pane now supports keyword searching in System Preferences for various settings.

Richest Indian tech honchos

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 05:52:00 +0000

Richest Indian tech honchos

Indian technology honchos never had it so good. More so now when the stock markets are on fire and their market cap is going up by leaps and bounds. Little wonder then that when the Forbes magazine came out with its list of richest Indians, there are a number of Indian technology entrepreneurs in the list.

We bring you top eight of the list of top 50 richest Indians selected by Forbes.

Azim Premji

The richest Indian techie Azim Premji, Chairman, Wipro Group, ranks fifth on the Forbes list with a net worth of $14.8 billion. A graduate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, US, Premji took on the mantle of leadership at Wipro at the age of 21, after the sudden demise of his father in 1966.

Under his leadership, the fledgling $ 2-million hydrogenated cooking fat company has grown to a $1.76 billion IT Services organisation serving customers across the globe. This year Wipro acquired outsourcing firm Infocrossing; bought Southeast Asian personal care products outfit Unza; opened software development center in Mexico. Son Rishad, Harvard Business School graduate, joined Wipro in July this year, setting buzz about a succession plan.

Over the years, Azim Premji has received many honors and accolades. He was adjudged the Business Man of the Year 2000 by Business India and as the Business Leader of the Year 2004 by the Economic Times. Financial Times included him in the list of top 25 billionaires who have done most to bring about significant and lasting social, political or cultural changes (November 2004). Time listed him (April 2004) as one amongst 100 most influential people in the world. He was named by Fortune (August 2003) as one of the 25 most powerful business leaders outside the US, Forbes (March 2003) listed him as one of ten people globally, who have the most "power to effect change".

The Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee and the Manipal Academy of Higher Education have both conferred honorary doctorates on him. He is also a member of the Prime Minister’s Committee for Trade and Industry in India. In January 2005, the Government of India conferred upon him the Padmabhushan, one of the highest civilian awards in the country.

Sunil Bharti Mittal

With a net worth of $12.5 billion Founder, Chairman and Group CEO of Bharti Enterprises Sunil Bharti Mittal is the second richest Indian techie and sixth richest Indian on the Forbes list. Bharti AirTel, one of the India's leading private integrated telecom company, has been at the forefront of the telecom revolution.

Sunil started his career at a young age of 18 after graduating from Punjab University and founded Bharti, with a modest capital, in the year 1976. Today, he heads a successful enterprise, among the top five in India, with a market capitalisation of over $ 35 billion employing over 30,000 people.

Bharti has grown successfully in partnership with various leading companies of the world - Singapore Telecom, Vodafone, Warburg Pincus, British Telecom to name a few.

The other businesses in the group are communication & media devices (Beetel), life insurance with AXA of France (Bharti AXA), and a joint venture with the Rothschild group to develop Indian horticulture and export fruits and vegetables to the world (FieldFresh).

Bharti has recently entered into a JV with Wal-Mart for setting up supply chain, logistics and cash and carry to support the burgeoning retail market in India.

Sunil is an alumnus of Harvard Business School, MA, USA. He has been conferred one of the highest civilian award - Padma Bhushan. Sunil has been conferred the degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) by the GB Pant University of Agriculture & Technology.

Shiv Nadar

HCL founder Shiv Nadar is the third richest techie with a net worth of $4.3 billion and ranks 18 on Forbes list. At a time when India had a total of 250 computers, Shiv Nadar led a young team which passionately believed and betted on the growth of IT industry. That vision in 1976, born out of a Delhi garage three decades later in creating a $4.4-billion global enterprise. HCL today employs 51,000 professionals, has a global presence in 18 countries spanning locations in the US, Europe and Japan.

Nadar started US operations in the in 1988. In 1987 ELCINA the body representing the electronic industry in India nominated Nadar as the Man of the Year. In December 1995, Nadar was nominated the Dataquest IT Man of the Year. The scorching pace did not go unnoticed nationally or internationally. Nadar is a member of the Executive Board of Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad.

From modest beginning three decades ago, Shiv Nadar made it to the Forbes List of billionaires for the first time in the year 2000.

NR Narayana Murthy

NR Narayana Murthy, Chairman of the Board and Chief Mentor of Infosys Technologies, is 37th on the Forbes list with a net worth of $1.69 billion. He founded Infosys in 1981 along with six other software professionals and served as the CEO for 21 years before handing over the reins of the company to co-founder Nandan M Nilekani in March 2002. Under his leadership, Infosys was listed on NASDAQ in 1999. He served as the Executive Chairman of the Board and Chief Mentor from 2002 to 2006.

Murthy is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. The Economist ranked him 8th on its list of 15 most admired global leaders in 2005. He was ranked 28th among the world's most respected business leaders by The Financial Times in 2005.

Murthy holds a BE (Electrical) from the University of Mysore (1967) and MTech (Electrical) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (1969). He has been conferred honorary doctorate degrees by leading universities across the world.

Anurag Dikshit

Anurag Dikshit is the 40th richest Indian on the Forbes list. Developmental engineer turned online gambling mogul owns 28 per cent of Internet casino company PartyGaming. Company founder, American Ruth Parasol, launched Starluck Casino on the Internet in 1997. Dikshit joined the company in 1998; wrote company's betting software, which enables gamblers around the world to play one another in poker.

Dikshit sold large part of the shares; left the company's board in 2006. The company’s stock has been down 80 per cent since 2005 peak due to new US laws banning financial groups from facilitating online bets.

Dikshit earned degree in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Dikshit worked as a software developer in the United States at CMC, as a systems analyst for Websci and later as a consultant for AT&T.

Jignesh Shah

Jignesh Shah is ranked 43 in Forbes richest Indian list with a personal worth of $1.37 billion. Shah is CEO of Financial Technologies Group and has set up India's largest commodities exchange Multi Commodity Exchange.

He founded Financial Technologies in 1995 as a software company with a valuation of $10,000. A decade later, the Mumbai-based company has grown over $2 billion in market capitalisation and is globally recognised as among the top 10 leaders in financial technology infrastructure and commodity exchanges.

The FTIL Group has launched fast growing companies operating in the commodities and exchange sectors. Shah has been recognised as among the youngest first generation Indian billionaires by Forbes Magazine, and was recently honoured with the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2006 for Business Transformation.

Nandan M Nilekani

Nandan M Nilekani is ranked at 45 with a personal wealth of $1.26 billion. Nilekani is the Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of Infosys Technologies Limited. From March 2002 to June 22, 2007, he served as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director and has previously held the posts of President and Chief Operating Officer. He is one of the founders of Infosys and has served as a director on the company’s board since its inception in 1981.

In January 2006, Nilekani became one of the youngest entrepreneurs to join 20 global leaders on the prestigious World Economic Forum (WEF) Foundation Board. He is listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, 2006.

Nilekani is the recipient of several awards. He was the Forbes “Businessman of the Year” in 2007. He, along with Infosys founder (and currently non-executive chairman) NR Narayana Murthy, received Fortune magazine's `Asia’s Businessmen of the Year 2003' award. He was named among the `World's most respected business leaders' in 2002 and 2003, according to a global survey by Financial Times and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In 2006, Nilekani was conferred the Padma Bhushan, one of the highest civilian honors awarded by the Government of India. Nandan received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India in 1978.
Nandan M Nilekani is ranked at 45 with a personal wealth of $1.26 billion. Nilekani is the Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of Infosys Technologies Limited. From March 2002 to June 22, 2007, he served as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director and has previously held the posts of President and Chief Operating Officer. He is one of the founders of Infosys and has served as a director on the company’s board since its inception in 1981.

In January 2006, Nilekani became one of the youngest entrepreneurs to join 20 global leaders on the prestigious World Economic Forum (WEF) Foundation Board. He is listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, 2006.

Nilekani is the recipient of several awards. He was the Forbes “Businessman of the Year” in 2007. He, along with Infosys founder (and currently non-executive chairman) NR Narayana Murthy, received Fortune magazine's `Asia’s Businessmen of the Year 2003' award. He was named among the `World's most respected business leaders' in 2002 and 2003, according to a global survey by Financial Times and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In 2006, Nilekani was conferred the Padma Bhushan, one of the highest civilian honors awarded by the Government of India. Nandan received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India in 1978.

S Gopalakrishnan

Infosys Technologies Chief Executive Officer S Gopalakrishnan (Kris to his colleagues) is ranked at 49th on the Forbes list with a net worth of $1.18 billion.

One of the founders of Infosys Technologies Limited, Kris took over from Nandan M Nilekani as the CEO and Managing Director of Infosys Technologies Limited on On June 22, 2007. Kris previously served as Chief Operating Officer (since April 2002), and as the President and Joint Managing Director (since August 2006). His responsibilities included Customer Services, Technology, Investments and Acquisitions.

Kris' initial responsibilities at Infosys included management of design, development, implementation and support of information systems for clients in the consumer products industry in the US. Between 1987 and 1994 he headed the technical operations of KSA/Infosys (a joint venture between Infosys and KSA at Atlanta, USA) as Vice President (Technical). In 1994, Kris returned to India and was appointed Deputy Managing Director of the company.

Kris holds MSc (Physics) and MTech (Computer Science) degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai. He began his career with Patni Computer Systems (PCS), Mumbai, as a software engineer in 1979 and quickly rose to become an assistant project manager by 1981. His seminal contribution during his stint at PCS was the development of a distributed process control system for controlling LD converters at Rourkela Steel Plant.

SXDE 9/07 AVAILABLE NOW

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:26:00 +0000

The Solaris Operating System (OS) is already the most stable, feature-rich, robust enterprise operating system on the market. Now Sun Microsystems has made it one of the easiest to install and use.

In the latest update to Solaris Express Developer Edition, SXDE 9/07, Sun has rewritten the GUI front end for the Solaris installer. The changes dramaticallysimplify and streamline the installation process. It's the first major change to the installer since the release of Solaris 8 in 2000, and should drive further adoption of the operating system, particularly among users with no previous Solaris OS experience.

With SXDE 9/07, Sun has thoroughly modernized its installer, presenting a straightforward experience that developers might find in Linux. Indeed, since SXDE is built from source code at OpenSolaris.org, and shares many of the same open-source-based components, Linux developers will make an easy transition to Solaris.

Sun's usability team worked with engineers to develop new simplified installation screens to create a positive experience for users, says McMeekin. "The team focused on removing all the geekiness that used to be a hallmark of the Solaris install process. They zeroed in on minimizing the installation effort and clarity of instructions. The result is fresh, clean, and modern."

With SXDE, the latest developer tools are installed during OS installation. For the 9/07 release that means Sun Studio 12, NetBeans 5.5, and D-Light. Installing the tools during system installation saves developers the time and hassle of installing them separately.

A highlight for developers of the 9/07 release is the inclusion of D-Light, a GUI-based tool that simplifies the use of Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology. Using D-Light developers can write their own monitors, correlate multiple events, plot data any way they need, and there is always a connection from what they monitor back to specific lines of source code. Most importantly, a developer doesn't have to be an expert in DTrace probes to use D-Light. The GUI makes it easy for Solaris and Java developers to monitor application performance.

Supporting Developers

Sun also recognizes that laptops are the system of choice for many developers these days. That's why wireless support is so important to the SXDE program and why new drivers are added to each release, including SXDE 9/07. This new release now includes support for Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST), an important power management feature. EIST support is the latest addition to a growing list of ways in which Sun is broadening its commitment to the x86 architecture, and particularly to laptop computing.

To further ease the installation process for developers, Sun has bundled SXDE installation and configuration support into service subscription offerings for Solaris 10, at no additional cost. Sun also offers Developer Expert Assistance, a developer support program available on a per incident or annual subscription basis.

Early Peek at Solaris

SXDE is freely available and updated quarterly, providing developers with all the tools to build applications for the Solaris OS, Java Application Platform, and Web 2.0. It also is a great way to learn about Solaris futures. This means IT managers can begin testing, training, and integrating key features of Solaris months or even years ahead of the next formal OS release.

The upside is faster time to productivity for critical Solaris OS, Java, and Web 2.0 applications.

With the latest release of SXDE, Sun has turned an IT axiom on its head. That is, if an operating system is easy to use, it must not be robust enough for the most demanding tasks. Solaris is already proven to be among the most battle-tested enterprise operating systems. Now Sun has removed any barriers of entry by making it a snap to install and use.

JavaFX.....The Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:10:00 +0000

JavaFX
The JavaFX family of products comprises a set of runtime environments, widgets, development tools, and scripting environments based on Java technology. There are currently two products in the JavaFX family:

» JavaFX Script Speed development of rich Internet applications with this productive scripting language.

» JavaFX Mobile Streamline mobile ecosystems with a complete middleware and application stack, built around Java and Linux open-source technologies.

Tomcat: The Definitive Guide

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:15:00 +0000

Defining Version 5.0

Tomcat 5.0 is, of course, the next major refactoring of Tomcat since version 4.1. The major version number of Tomcat is incremented each time the Java Servlet and JSP specifications have a new final release, hence Tomcat 5 corresponds with the final release of the Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 specifications.
All new development will now occur on the Tomcat 5.0 source code branch, or on one of its future sub-branches. The Tomcat committers could decide to apply new code with new features to Tomcat 4.1's source, but that's only likely to be a backport of features that are already implemented in Tomcat 5. If critical security flaws are fixed in Tomcat 5 that also apply to Tomcat 4.1's code, for example, those will probably all be backported.
Tomcat 5.0 goals

Tomcat 5.0 looks great so far. It includes support for the Java Servlet 2.4 and the JSP 2.0 specifications, fixes many performance issues, and adds many new features and other improvements. Below we'll look at the two overall goals of Tomcat 5.0, which were implemented as of version 5.0.16.

Unifying the Two Tomcat Communities

An important goal for Tomcat 5 was to reunify the Tomcat communities under one codebase. A split had occurred in the Tomcat community between the Tomcat 3 branch proponents and the Tomcat Catalina developers. They each worked on their own branches and didn't collaborate much. Eventually, the Jakarta Project Management Committee made the decision that Tomcat Catalina was ready to replace Tomcat 3, and it was dubbed Tomcat 4. But because Tomcat 4 was a different implementation by a mostly different team of developers, migration from Tomcat 3 to Tomcat 4 was difficult.
Despite the committee's sanctioning of Tomcat 4, the community remained split, among developers and users alike. Each branch of Tomcat separately developed various features and performance enhancements. Several of these developments solved some deep problems in elegant ways, but depending on which Tomcat version a user used, only a portion of these solutions were available.
About the time that developers began working on Tomcat 4.1, both Tomcat development teams agreed to work together on the Tomcat connectors, which included the Java side of the JK2 connector, the HTTP connector (a pure-Java web server), as well as other connectors. A connector is a Tomcat core component that channels servlet container requests into Tomcat.
The consolidation of the Tomcat 3 and Tomcat 4 connector code signaled a larger step toward reunification as it led to collaboration on other core performance issues, as well as development of independent servlet-container-version solutions, one of the last hurdles to unification. Tomcat 3 had been implemented as a small servlet container core that could be configured to load and use plug-ins called modules. Proponents of this design believe that keeping the core modular makes it both easier to maintain and more flexible. Tomcat 4's Catalina core was implemented modularly, but didn't offer the feature of generic servlet container modules.
Tomcat 5 includes Tomcat 4.1's core, and it adds the feature of version 3's generic servlet container modules. The developers still have some work to do in this area before it's clear what can and should be built as a module, and how it's generally done, but this work had led to the developer community working together again on all aspects of Tomcat.

Supporting the Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 Specifications
The release of Tomcat 5 corresponds with the final release of the Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 specifications, so now let's take a brief look at what's new in each spec, and what impact, if any, there will be on Tomcat 5 development.
The Java Servlet 2.4 Specification
The Servlet 2.4 Specification is only a slight evolution of the Servlet 2.3 Specification, so the API and semantics are almost completely backwards-compatible. With very few exceptions, Servlet 2.3 web applications should work fine in a Servlet 2.4 container.
This is great news for those currently using Tomcat 4 who wish to upgrade to Tomcat 5 -- you probably don't need to modify your web applications. Keep in mind, though, that your server.xml config file isn't part of your web application; it's a Tomcat-specific file, and as such may need some modifications to upgrade it for use with Tomcat 5. Since the syntax of Tomcat 4's server.xml file is almost the same as that of Tomcat 5's server.xml file, this shouldn't be difficult. I recommend that you start fresh with a Tomcat 5 server.xml file and migrate only the XML elements that you added to Tomcat 4's server.xml file. One way to see what you modified is to diff your modified Tomcat 4 server.xml file against the untouched distribution version. When you add those XML elements, look at the Tomcat 5 Configuration Reference pages and verify that each element's attribute exists for Tomcat 5. This is especially important for the and elements, since they have each been modified in Tomcat 5.
The deepest impact that the Servlet 2.4 specification has on Tomcat 5 is the integration of XML Schema. In previous versions of the servlet specification, the deployment descriptors for servlet web applications were defined and validated using an XML DTD. This worked fine, but as it turned out, DTDs aren't quite modular or flexible enough for other technologies to be able to leverage servlet web apps as a framework. To achieve this level of flexibility and modularity, those involved in revising the Servlet 2.4 Specification and other J2EE 1.4 specifications decided to base the deployment descriptor definition and validation on the newer XML Schema, while maintaining backwards-compatibility with the older servlet 2.3 (and lower) DTDs.
The remaining changes to the Servlet API have been small, amounting to clarifications, bug fixes, and omission fixes. This is good news because it shows that the Servlet API is mature. Tomcat 5 fully implements all these new API changes and additions.
The JavaServer Pages 2.0 Specification
This new version of JSP is quite a bit larger due to its many new features, but aims to be backward-compatible with JSP 1.2. The most important addition to JSP 2.0 is the inclusion of the JavaServer Pages Expression Language (EL). Since EL is now part of the JSP container, EL became more useful because it can be used even in the middle of template text as opposed to just within certain custom tags. For Tomcat developers, the main thing to keep in mind with this new addition is that EL is now also part of Tomcat 5, which makes version 5 more featureful and easier to use than Tomcat 4 for developing detailed web applications.
Another new feature that JSP 2.0 includes is "tag files", which are JSP tags that are implemented as JSP fragment files and contain JSP content. Tag files make it easy to develop such things as modular page components, including XML content, which can be included in JSP pages. It's a feature, therefore, that's available only in Tomcat 5, offering web app developers something that Tomcat 4 does not offer.
Also included in JSP 2.0 are improvements to the handling of XML content, which allow developers to write their dynamic XML content as JSP content. The specification has numerous clarifications since version 1.2, and the file extensions .jspx and .tagx have been added. This feature isn't exclusive to Tomcat 5--other servlet container implementations are free to implement JSP 2.0--but this is a feature that Tomcat 4 does not have because it only implements JSP 1.2.

Tomcat 5.0 Features

Now it's time to get to Tomcat 5's major new features.
Performance Refactoring to Reduce Garbage Creation
The first enhancement to look at is Tomcat 5.0's memory-profiling tools. Tomcat 5 has been carefully optimized so that it produces less object garbage for the Java VM's garbage collector to have to clean up.
A typical problem with busy Java servers is that the server software constantly instantiates new objects, and when they're not needed anymore (typically, when a request ends), the objects are not reused but instead thrown out as garbage. The garbage collector must then find and reap all such objects to reclaim the memory they occupy. This takes time and CPU cycles to do, and in the meantime the whole JVM may be paused so that the garbage collector can finish its work. This means the requests currently in process must simply wait until the garbage collector is done, which makes the whole server slow down a little. Usually, this isn't a big problem because the garbage collector is pretty efficient at collecting garbage objects. But in some cases there is so much garbage being produced that it can't keep up, and eventually the amount of free memory gets low because there is a backlog of garbage objects using lots of memory. Or sometimes a web app creates very large objects that take the garbage collector longer to finalize and destroy, so the amount of free memory is lost in large chunks but isn't being replenished quite as fast.
Tomcat 5.0 has had many garbage creation (read performance enhancement) changes since Tomcat 4.1. Tomcat 5.0's single most important garbage-creation refactoring was the new request URI mapper. After some optimization profiling, Tomcat 4.1's request pipeline was found to create excess garbage while mapping a Connector's requests to the proper Container. For Tomcat 5, a whole new mapper was implemented that generates little or no garbage (lots of object recycling is going on in there), and thus Tomcat 5.0's request pipeline performs noticeably better than that of Tomcat 4.1. This also lowers the overall memory usage compared to Tomcat 4.1, which helps to prevent OutOfMemoryExceptions in the web apps it runs, and helps Tomcat 5 to scale higher vertically (i.e. higher scalability on a single machine)
Tomcat 4's configuration system offered some modularity in the form of deployment context fragments. These were XML configuration files that contained a single element and everything nested within it. If the deployer found one in the CATALINA_HOME/web apps directory, it would deploy that context (web app) the same as if it had been configured in Tomcat's server.xml file. This was helpful because any changes to the server.xml cannot be reread until Tomcat is restarted, while context XML fragment files can be reloaded at any time. But, the administrator didn't have any fine-grained way to control which they were deployed into, or which (for those who have multiple s configured -- probably not many).
To add better scoping control of the context fragments, and to consolidate Tomcat's configuration files in the CATALINA_HOME/conf directory, Tomcat 5 now supports placing the context fragments in a CATALINA_HOME/conf/[Enginename]/[Hostname]/ directory. For example, if your Engine is named Catalina, and you have a Host named www.example.com, then you can place context XML fragments into the CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/www.example.com/ directory. If you have multiple s, each of them has its own directory, separating its config files from other s. Reloading the context fragments in Tomcat 5 works the same as in Tomcat 4, they're just in a different file system location.
Many of the deployment attributes have been renamed, or have had their behavior changed in Tomcat 5. Mainly this was to rename ambiguously named attributes, but it was also to make the deployment and redeployment behavior a bit more desirable. For example, the Tomcat 4 attribute named liveDeploy has been renamed autoDeploy in Tomcat 5, and the Tomcat 4 attribute named autoDeploy has been renamed deployOnStartup in Tomcat 5. In short, Tomcat 4's configuration elements in server.xml are not compatible with those of Tomcat 5. Compare the Tomcat 4.1 Host configuration reference page with the Tomcat 5.0 Host configuration reference page in order to migrate your configs.

Standalone Deployer

As of Tomcat 5, a new standalone web app deployer is included. By standalone I mean that it isn't bundled as part of Tomcat but as a separate package released alongside of Tomcat. This deployer is actually just an Apache Ant build file that uses some custom Ant tasks to do things to web applications, like:
• Compile the JSPs
• Validate the deployment descriptor using XML schema validation
• Deploy it into Tomcat
• Redeploy a new version
• Undeploy a web app
• Reload a web app without redeploying it
• Start a web application
• Stop a web application
• List the context paths of all currently installed web applications of a specified virtual host
• List the available global JNDI resources in Tomcat
• List the available roles and their descriptions
But not all of these tasks are used in the deployer's build file. Here's output from the build file showing the public targets that it offers:
$ ant -projecthelp
Buildfile: build.xml
Main targets:

clean Removes build directory
compile Compile web application
deploy Deploy web application
reload Reload web application
start Start web application
stop Stop web application
undeploy Undeploy web application

Default target: compile
Almost all of the custom Ant tasks that come with the deployer were already included in Tomcat 4.1, but they weren't packaged as a component separate from Tomcat. Mainly, this deployer serves as a rough but functional example of how to instrument an Ant build system to perform these functions.
Better Support for JMX
Tomcat 5.0 has substantially better JMX instrumentation than Tomcat 4.1. How much better? I did a direct comparison between the two versions by counting all of the MBeans, attributes of the MBeans, and operations (method calls) exposed by the MBeans in each version of Tomcat. Here are the numbers as of this writing:
Number of items exposed through JMX

Tomcat Version MBeans Attributes Operations
4.1.30 52 282 79
5.1.18 68 391 148

As you can see, Tomcat 5.0 adds a significant number of attributes and operations that are exposed via JMX. Basically all of Tomcat's internal objects are exposed as MBeans in both versions, so both do a great job of exposing enough objects as MBeans. For the purpose of monitoring, the number of attributes is the most important: Tomcat 5.0 exposes 109 more of them than Tomcat 4.1. For the purposes of management/administration and dynamic configurability, operations are the most important. Tomcat 5.0 really shines here, exposing 69 more operations -- almost double that of Tomcat 4.1.
If you download a Tomcat 4.1 binary release, it comes bundled with the open source MX4J version 1.1.1 implementation of the JMX 1.1 Specification. This version of JMX does not include the JMX Remote API (JSR 160), since the JMX Remote API only works with JMX 1.2 implementations. This means that there is no standard network protocol for managing and monitoring Tomcat 4.1 via the network. The Tomcat 5.0 binary release comes bundled with Sun's JMX 1.2 reference implementation, along with Sun's JMX Remote API 1.0 reference implementation (although it could just as easily be bundled with the MX4J 2.0 implementation of JMX 1.2 and the JMX Remote API 1.0 -- it's still in beta but it works great).
As it turns out, both of these versions of Tomcat can be compiled against a JMX 1.2 implementation, and both can run with them. But, if you're not building your own Tomcat (as you'll see in the next section, it's easier to do with Tomcat 5), then Tomcat 4 doesn't come with JMX 1.2 and Tomcat 5 does. But Tomcat 5 doesn't yet offer any way of turning on a JMX Remote API connection server. That's coming soon for Tomcat 5, but as of this writing it isn't included yet.
Improved Tomcat Build System
Tomcat 5's build system is quite a bit more automated than that of Tomcat 4. It has also been cleaned up in many ways.
Anyone who has tried to build Tomcat 4 can tell you that it isn't easy to do -- you have to download and carefully install a swarm of jar files from many different web sites, pull down Tomcat 4's source code either via a source snapshot archive or from CVS, set some paths in a properties file, and then try to build it. Most people do all that only to have the build fail due to either missing jar files or due to improper jar file versions (despite properly following directions from Tomcat 4's BUILDING.txt file). Tomcat's dependencies changed frequently in Tomcat 4; the BUILDING.txt file wasn't always kept up-to-date with the exact version numbers that were necessary; and the paths where the build expected to find them are exact and inconsistent. The Tomcat committers did quite a bit of work to keep everything up-to-date and building cleanly, but assembling a working build environment from scratch was still mainly a manual, error-prone process.
Tomcat 5's build system, on the other hand, has been automated so that it can assemble its own build environment, all except for installing the JDK and Apache Ant (they're using version 1.6). Just download the top-level build file and invoke the default target and away it goes! It will do all the pulling and installing of the jars and Tomcat 5 source code, configure the build, and then start building Tomcat 5. Of course, you may want to make your own custom-build properties file if you have special build-configuration needs -- if you have no special needs then why not just use a binary release? See this page for info on customizing the build. Regardless, the build is so automated it feels like it's on autopilot.

Session Clustering Code as a Module

Tomcat 4 did not implement nor include any servlet session-clustering, except for some old, mainly broken code that was once a valiant attempt at implementing session-clustering via IP multicast. A new implementation of session-clustering was implemented for Tomcat, and worked with Tomcat 4.1 as an add-on feature, but was never included nor bundled with Tomcat 4.1.
Tomcat 5 includes this newer session-clustering implementation as a module. The default server.xml configuration file contains some text about how to configure it, but it is turned off by default as most people only run one instance of Tomcat and do not use session-clustering. But it's included in Tomcat 5 for those who want it.
This session-clustering implementation barely worked for Tomcat 4, but has been significantly refactored for Tomcat 5. Tomcat 5.0.16 included lots of improvements over Tomcat 4, but then many more improvements were made after 5.0.16, and I recommend only using version 5.0.18 and higher if you want to use session-clustering! Many important performance enhancements and serious bug fixes have been applied since version 5.0.16.
For background information about how this kind of session-clustering works, you might want to see our book Tomcat: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly). In Chapter 10, Tomcat Clustering we go over many details about distributed web applications and how servlet session-clustering works. Also, see the Cluster How-to for information specific to this session-clustering implementation.
This clustering module is the first (and so far the only) Tomcat 5 module included in the distribution. It will be interesting to see what other modules get added to Tomcat 5 in the future.
Increased JSP Tag Library Efficiency via Tag Pooling and Tag Plug-ins
Since JSP is popular, and JSP custom tag libraries are becoming popular, Tomcat needs to keep these features efficient and scalable by implementing ways to speed things up behind the scenes in the implementation of the JSP engine. To avoid unnecessary object instantiation and garbage creation, which are costly in terms of time and memory, two techniques are being used in Tomcat 5 to speed things up: tag pooling and tag plug-ins.
Tag pooling is much like servlet pooling, or any other object pooling, for that matter. The idea is that you may have many request threads at once that each need the same kind of object, and that object does not need to be stateful across more than one request. In that case, the server can instantiate a pool of them that it can draw from instead of instantiating new ones all the time. When a request is done with the object, it gets returned to the pool after any request state is first purged.
Tomcat 5's JSP engine, Jasper 2, can pool JSP tag objects this way, which speeds things up nicely. Tomcat 4.1 also had an early implementation of tag pooling, but the implementation in Tomcat 5 is more mature.

Another feature of Jasper 2 is "tag plug-ins," not to be confused with tag files (discussed earlier in this article). Tag plug-ins are not a JCP standard, but instead something specific to Tomcat 5's JSP implementation. In short, it is a modular way of optimizing the Jasper 2 JSP engine to render a custom JSP tag library as fast as possible. Probably the best explanation about it that I could find on the Net (other than the source code) is the original tomcat-dev mailing list thread where the concept was first introduced.
Tomcat 4 does not implement tag plug-ins. Tomcat 5.0 is the first to do so. This means that Tomcat 5 should be faster at rendering some JSP pages than Tomcat 4, especially when one or more tag libraries being used is accompanied by tag plug-ins.

The Balancer Web App

Also new in Tomcat 5.0 is the Balancer web app, a rules-based load balancer implemented as a web application. Balancer is useful for anyone who doesn't already own a hardware load balancer (or doesn't want to spend the money to buy one), and who needs to load balance across more than one Tomcat instance.
There are many ways to load balance HTTP requests, and not all methods are right for your site. But Balancer is a free, pure-Java implementation of a software load balancer that uses infrastructure that Tomcat users already have running: Tomcat. It doesn't do low-level TCP NAT or TCP tunneling, but instead load balances via HTTP redirects.
In Tomcat 5.0.16, Balancer is a new implementation and lacks many features people will want. And it's probably not a good solution for load-balancing requests for very high-traffic web sites. But the Balancer web app is useful for some people as it existed in Tomcat 5.0.16, and is included in part so that it is possible to install and configure a 100 percent Java cluster using only what comes with Tomcat 5.0. With the inclusion of the Balancer web app, Tomcat alone now implements a clustered servlet and JSP container, implemented in pure Java. See the Balancer How-to for details about how to use it.

Conclusion

Tomcat 5.0 contains many substantial updates and improvements over Tomcat 4.1. Many of the underlying technologies that Tomcat builds upon have been updated, enabling Tomcat 5 to offer a wider range of solutions and features to the administrator and developer. This, combined with many performance enhancements and a smaller memory footprint during heavy loads means that Tomcat 5 does a better job with the same web apps than does Tomcat 4. Tomcat 5 is also more manageable, more easily monitored, and is easier to build. Tomcat 5.0 is production-ready now. The Tomcat community tested many releases of Tomcat 5 before it was voted stable late last year. I recommend you consider upgrading to Tomcat 5.0.

Whizlabs SCBCD (J2EE- EJB Certification)

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:52:00 +0000

Whizlabs Software announced the release of the first SCBCD (Sun Certified Business Component Developer) certification exam simulator.

Authored by highly experienced and certified professionals, it offers 5 mock exams (350 thought-provoking questions) on the latest pattern in a simulated environment. Its high level of customization features allows you to prepare according to your strengths and more important weaknesses. Not to forget, it also offers the “Use it Anywhere, Anytime!” advantage, by offering a Free “web-based online exam simulator version”; with its unique “percentile-grading” feature.

Coupled with value added offerings like Quick Revision Notes, Interactive Quizzes (with over 150 questions) and Tips N Tricks, it provides an effective learning platform. Last but not the least; it comes with Free Technical Mentoring and “Unconditional Test PASS Guarantee”. Check out the FREE demo version.

After this launch, Whizlabs now offers complete suite of exam simulators for various Sun Java certification exams: SCJP (1.4, 1.2 and Upgrade), SCWCD, SCBCD and SCEA. Whizlabs also offers Instructor-led, Online trainings for SCJP and SCWCD exams.

About Whizlabs
Whizlabs is a leading provider of IT skill assessment and certification exam preparation. Whizlabs' suite of offerings include "IT certification exam simulators and online trainings" for various exams by Sun, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, BEA, Cisco and other leading IT vendors and "IT skill Assessment Management Solution" for Corporations, Training Institutes and Universities."

Sun apologizes to developers of Java on Linux

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 04:49:00 +0000

Sun Microsystems Inc. apologized Wednesday to members of Blackdown, the open-source development group that made the port of Java 2 to Linux possible.

Sun, already under fire for withdrawing Java from standards consideration (see "Sun abandons Java standards effort," link below), sought to put out another fire it and Inprise Corp. started when the companies failed to give Blackdown credit in this week's announcement of the port (see "Sun, Inprise plan to port Java 2 to Linux," link below).

"Our stance is an apologetic one,'' said Rick Schultz, Java 2 standard edition product manager at Sun. The company, he said, values Blackdown's work and wants to continue its relationship with Blackdown.

Blackdown has been porting Sun's Java technology to Linux for years and contributed substantially to the port of Java 2 as well.

It's unclear whether Sun and Inprise need Blackdown's expertise to complete future ports, or whether the Linux community would endorse a Sun/Inprise port that didn't include -- and acknowledge -- help from Blackdown. As an alternative, IBM has ported older Java technology to Linux.

Several Blackdown developers said earlier today they have just about had it with Sun.

"The recent press releases were a slap in our face,'' said Juergen Kreileder. "Sun wants us to continue our work and also to port extensions APIs to Linux. Why should we do this if they don't honor our work?"

Another key Blackdown developer, Kevin Hendricks, resigned from the project in protest, developers said. Schultz said he called Hendricks but Hendricks didn't say that he would reconsider.

Blackdown developer Paul Michael Reilly said: "Having watched the Sun/Blackdown relationship for over three years, my take is that it will die because it will take a major change from Sun to heal this deep wound, on top of hundreds of small cuts. I see this kind of change as very unlikely. Also, there are fast becoming other choices, most notably IBM."

However, Blackdown developer Karl Asha said the dispute might not have a big effect in the long run: "As the Linux community goes, I suspect they'll follow the most stable, most recent, and best-performing JDK [Java Development Kit], regardless of who produces it."

J2SE Version 1.3 ...a great development

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 04:38:00 +0000

Sun has released the newest version of "desktop" Java 2, designed to run faster and use less memory than its predecessor.

Java 2 Standard Edition is a Java implementation intended for client computers. The newest release is Version 1.3. The performance improvements, mainly through use of Sun's Java HotSpot Client Virtual Machine, are vital if Java is to be more viable on client computers.

According to Sun, the new version is 40% faster at start-up compared to the prior release, and uses 25% less memory.

Also new are several security features: RSA-based electronic signing, X.509 certificates and verification of Netscape-signed files.

Sun also added the RMI/IIOP protocol (for communications with back-end systems using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, and the Java Naming and Directory Interface, for access to enterprise directors that use the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.

J2SE source code is available free from www.sun.com/communitysource. The software runs on Windows 95/98, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. Beta test versions for Linux and Sun Solaris are planned for June.

The Java 2 Software Development Kit binary download is at java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/download-windows.html. It also can be downloaded as a bundle with Sun's Forte for Java, Community Edition, which is a development tool set.

Little known PC facts

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 08:20:00 +0000

Little known PC facts
The development of the modern day computer is the result of advances in technologies. How the PCs came to be what they are today is a story of inventions and innovations. Sometimes, these technological advances were driven by the man's need for faster calculations (abacus the first computing machine), sometimes man’s need to telecommute (laptops).

But ever wondered about viruses, crashes and animation, which too form an integral part of computing. The first computer sold commercially, origin of cyberspace… Here’s going down the time machine for some interesting facts that made computing history.

Crash saga begins
On September 9, 1945, Grace Hopper recorded the first actual computer “bug” -- a moth stuck between the relays and logged at 15:45 hours on the Harvard Mark II. Hopper, a rear admiral in the US Navy, enjoyed successful careers in academia, business, and the military while making history in the computer field.

She helped programme the Harvard Mark I and II and developed the first compiler, A-0. Her subsequent work on programming languages led to COBOL, a language specified to operate on machines of different manufacturers.

Machine of the Year
In 1982, Time magazine altered its annual tradition of naming a “Man of the Year,” choosing instead to name the computer its “Machine of the Year.”

While introducing the theme, Time publisher John A Meyers wrote, "Several human candidates might have represented 1982, but none symbolised the past year more richly, or will be viewed by history as more significant, than a machine: the computer."

His magazine, he explained, has chronicled the change in public opinion with regard to computers. A senior writer contributed, “computers were once regarded as distant, ominous abstractions, like Big Brother. In 1982, they truly became personalised, brought down to scale, so that people could hold, prod and play with them.”

At Time, the main writer on the project completed his work on a typewriter, but Meyers noted that the magazine's newsroom would upgrade to word processors within a year.

Animation comes to movies
In 1982, the use of computer-generated graphics in movies took a step forward with Disney's release of "Tron."

One of the first movies to use such graphics, the plot of "Tron" also featured computers -- it followed the adventures of a hacker split into molecules and transported inside a computer. Computer animation, done by III, Abel, MAGI, and Digital Effects, accounted for about 30 minutes of the film.

First PC sold
Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, which was the first commercially produced computer. The company's first customer was US Navy.

It held one million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. Drums registered information as magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder.

Read/write heads both recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second.

Cyberspace arrives
In 1984, William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his novel “Neuromancer.” He also spawned a genre of fiction known as “cyberpunk” in his book, which described a dark, complex future filled with intelligent machines, computer viruses, and paranoia.

Gibson introduced cyberspace as: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”

First laurel
In 1988, Pixar's "Tin Toy" became the first computer-animated film to win an Academy Award, taking the Oscar for best animated short film. A wind-up toy first encountering a boisterous baby narrated "Tin Toy." To illustrate the baby's facial expressions, programmers defined more than 40 facial muscles on the computer controlled by the animator.

Founded in 1986, one of Pixar's primary projects involved a renderer, called Renderman, the standard for describing 3D scenes. Renderman describes objects, light sources, cameras, atmospheric effects and other information so that a scene can be rendered on a variety of systems.

The company continued on to other successes, including 1995's "Toy Story," the first full-length feature film created entirely by computer animation.

Computer bombs
In 1941 the first Bombe is completed. Based partly on the design of the Polish “Bomba,” a mechanical means of decrypting Nazi military communications during World War II, the British Bombe design was greatly influenced by the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and others.

Many bombs were built. Together they dramatically improved the intelligence gathering and processing capabilities of Allied forces

Training bombers
Project Whirlwind begins. During World War II, the US Navy approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for building a flight simulator to train bomber crews. The team first built a large analogue computer, but found it inaccurate and inflexible.

After designers saw a demonstration of the ENIAC computer, they decided on building a digital computer. By the time the Whirlwind was completed in 1951, the Navy had lost interest in the project, though the US. Air Force would eventually support the project which would influence the design of the SAGE programme.

Pricy PC
In 1960, the precursor to the minicomputer, DEC's PDP-1 sold for $120,000. One of the 50 built, the average PDP-1 included a cathode ray tube graphic display, needed no air conditioning and required only one operator.

Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerised video game, SpaceWar! for it. The SpaceWar! creators then used the game as a standard demonstration on all 50 computers.

Happy birthday virus
Regarded as the first virus to hit personal computers worldwide, “Elk Cloner” spread through Apple II floppy disks. The programme was authored by Rich Skrenta, a ninth-grade student then, who wanted to play a joke on his schoolmates.

The virus was put on a gaming disk, which could be used 49 times. On 50th time, instead of starting the game, it opened a blank screen that read a poem that read: “It will get on all your disks. It will infiltrate your chips. Yes it's Cloner! It will stick to you like glue. It will modify RAM too. Send in the Cloner!” The computer would then be infected.

Elk Cloner was though a self-replicating virus like most other viruses, it bears little resemblance to the malicious programmes of today. However, it surely was a harbinger of all the security headaches that would only grow as more people get computers -- and connected them with one another over the Internet.

A brief comparision between development with Hibernate and Entity beans

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 06:08:00 +0000

I hope to get a rough performance comparison of an enterprise application using entity beans for persistance compared to using Hibernate soon, in the meantime I thought that a brief comparison of the development effort involved in using the two approaches might be in order. Comparisons are based on JBoss 3.2.2 running MySQL.

Installation

JBoss comes as a working EJB environment, therefore no extra installan over and above getting JBoss itself installed is required. For Hibernate, due to a JBoss-related classloader issue you have to deploy the Hibernate jar and related dependencies to the server’s lib directory.
Application development

JBoss requires an application.xml file, and ejb-jar.xml XML file containing the entity and session mean mappings, and a jboss.xml file containing the JNDI mappings. Hibernate requires a single Hibernate config file, and a single XML mapping file per bean – this defines the mapping between JavaBean property and database fields, as well as inter-bean relationships. If you were using Hibernate in a webapp, you would of course require a web.xml, and if you were using it in an normal Enterprise application (for example you we using Session beans to manipulate Hibernate objects) you would need the aforementioned application.xml, ejb-jar.xml and jboss.xml files. For JBoss when adding new entity beans, mappings need to be changed in the ejb-jar.xml and jboss.xml files – Hibernate requires a new bean mapping file and a related entry in the Hibernate config file.
Development

Creating a standard entity bean requires a new Java class to be created, a stub interface that will be used by clients, and a home interface which will be used to access finder methods and creation methods, and optionally 2 more interfaces (if you want both local and remote interfaces) in addition to having to add a JNDI entry and a mapping in the JBoss config files. There are a mass of consistency checks that have to be carried out (often by the developer due to the poor validation provided by many EJB containers) – for example the parameters in your Home interfaces create method must match perfectly with the parameters in your bean implementation’s ejbCreate method, which in turn must match the ejbPostCreate method. Few of these consistency checks can be carried out at compile-time – they have to be confirmed by the container itself. Once created, you’ll have to create the database structure for your new bean.

With Hibernate, you create a single Java class which is a standard JavaBean. You then create a mapping file which maps the JavaBean’s properties to database columns. Hibernate in fact includes tools to either create the JavaBean file from a mapping file, or a mapping file from a JavaBean class. In addition it ships with the SchemaExport program which can read your database mapping and automatically create the database structure (including columns required for mapping relationships).

When it comes to actually persisting data, Entity beans perform this completely transparently. You just have to call the relevant setter method on the bean, and it gets written to the database (depending on your transaction management). With Hibernate a specific call to the session is required.

Defining relationships between objects in both JBoss and Hibernate is done via configuration files, however Hibernate’s method seems much simpler despite being at least as powerfull.
Conclusion

Whilst is probably too soon to say (I’ve been using EJBs for three years now and Hibernate only in my spare time for about a week) I am really warming to Hibernate. I suspect that baring any real problems with its performance or more advanced capabilities my next Enterprise application will use Hibernate for persistence.

Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

noreply@blogger.com (zameer) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 05:59:00 +0000

If anything about current interaction design can be called “glamorous,” it’s creating Web applications. After all, when was the last time you heard someone rave about the interaction design of a product that wasn’t on the Web? (Okay, besides the iPod.) All the cool, innovative new projects are online.

Despite this, Web interaction designers can’t help but feel a little envious of our colleagues who create desktop software. Desktop applications have a richness and responsiveness that has seemed out of reach on the Web. The same simplicity that enabled the Web’s rapid proliferation also creates a gap between the experiences we can provide and the experiences users can get from a desktop application.

That gap is closing. Take a look at Google Suggest. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps. Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload.

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.
Defining Ajax

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

* standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
* dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
* data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
* asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
* and JavaScript binding everything together.

The classic web application model works like this: Most user actions in the interface trigger an HTTP request back to a web server. The server does some processing — retrieving data, crunching numbers, talking to various legacy systems — and then returns an HTML page to the client. It’s a model adapted from the Web’s original use as a hypertext medium, but as fans of The Elements of User Experience know, what makes the Web good for hypertext doesn’t necessarily make it good for software applications.

Ajax Overview 1

Figure 1: The traditional model for web applications (left) compared to the Ajax model (right).

This approach makes a lot of technical sense, but it doesn’t make for a great user experience. While the server is doing its thing, what’s the user doing? That’s right, waiting. And at every step in a task, the user waits some more.

Obviously, if we were designing the Web from scratch for applications, we wouldn’t make users wait around. Once an interface is loaded, why should the user interaction come to a halt every time the application needs something from the server? In fact, why should the user see the application go to the server at all?
How Ajax is Different

An Ajax application eliminates the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction on the Web by introducing an intermediary — an Ajax engine — between the user and the server. It seems like adding a layer to the application would make it less responsive, but the opposite is true.

Instead of loading a webpage, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine — written in JavaScript and usually tucked away in a hidden frame. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user’s behalf. The Ajax engine allows the user’s interaction with the application to happen asynchronously — independent of communication with the server. So the user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something.

Ajax Overview 2

Figure 2: The synchronous interaction pattern of a traditional web application (top) compared with the asynchronous pattern of an Ajax application (bottom).

Every user action that normally would generate an HTTP request takes the form of a JavaScript call to the Ajax engine instead. Any response to a user action that doesn’t require a trip back to the server — such as simple data validation, editing data in memory, and even some navigation — the engine handles on its own. If the engine needs something from the server in order to respond — if it’s submitting data for processing, loading additional interface code, or retrieving new data — the engine makes those requests asynchronously, usually using XML, without stalling a user’s interaction with the application.
Who’s Using Ajax

Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach. All of the major products Google has introduced over the last year — Orkut, Gmail, the latest beta version of Google Groups, Google Suggest, and Google Maps — are Ajax applications. (For more on the technical nuts and bolts of these Ajax implementations, check out these excellent analyses of Gmail, Google Suggest, and Google Maps.) Others are following suit: many of the features that people love in Flickr depend on Ajax, and Amazon’s A9.com search engine applies similar techniques.

These projects demonstrate that Ajax is not only technically sound, but also practical for real-world applications. This isn’t another technology that only works in a laboratory. And Ajax applications can be any size, from the very simple, single-function Google Suggest to the very complex and sophisticated Google Maps.

At Adaptive Path, we’ve been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we’re realizing we’ve only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide. Ajax is an important development for Web applications, and its importance is only going to grow. And because there are so many developers out there who already know how to use these technologies, we expect to see many more organizations following Google’s lead in reaping the competitive advantage Ajax provides.
Moving Forward

The biggest challenges in creating Ajax applications are not technical. The core Ajax technologies are mature, stable, and well understood. Instead, the challenges are for the designers of these applications: to forget what we think we know about the limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a wider, richer range of possibilities.

It’s going to be fun.
Ajax Q&A

March 13, 2005: Since we first published Jesse’s essay, we’ve received an enormous amount of correspondence from readers with questions about Ajax. In this Q&A, Jesse responds to some of the most common queries.

Q. Did Adaptive Path invent Ajax? Did Google? Did Adaptive Path help build Google’s Ajax applications?

A. Neither Adaptive Path nor Google invented Ajax. Google’s recent products are simply the highest-profile examples of Ajax applications. Adaptive Path was not involved in the development of Google’s Ajax applications, but we have been doing Ajax work for some of our other clients.

Q. Is Adaptive Path selling Ajax components or trademarking the name? Where can I download it?

A. Ajax isn’t something you can download. It’s an approach — a way of thinking about the architecture of web applications using certain technologies. Neither the Ajax name nor the approach are proprietary to Adaptive Path.

Q. Is Ajax just another name for XMLHttpRequest?

A. No. XMLHttpRequest is only part of the Ajax equation. XMLHttpRequest is the technical component that makes the asynchronous server communication possible; Ajax is our name for the overall approach described in the article, which relies not only on XMLHttpRequest, but on CSS, DOM, and other technologies.

Q. Why did you feel the need to give this a name?

A. I needed something shorter than “Asynchronous JavaScript+CSS+DOM+XMLHttpRequest” to use when discussing this approach with clients.

Q. Techniques for asynchronous server communication have been around for years. What makes Ajax a “new” approach?

A. What’s new is the prominent use of these techniques in real-world applications to change the fundamental interaction model of the Web. Ajax is taking hold now because these technologies and the industry’s understanding of how to deploy them most effectively have taken time to develop.

Q. Is Ajax a technology platform or is it an architectural style?

A. It’s both. Ajax is a set of technologies being used together in a particular way.

Q. What kinds of applications is Ajax best suited for?

A. We don’t know yet. Because this is a relatively new approach, our understanding of where Ajax can best be applied is still in its infancy. Sometimes the traditional web application model is the most appropriate solution to a problem.

Q. Does this mean Adaptive Path is anti-Flash?

A. Not at all. Macromedia is an Adaptive Path client, and we’ve long been supporters of Flash technology. As Ajax matures, we expect that sometimes Ajax will be the better solution to a particular problem, and sometimes Flash will be the better solution. We’re also interested in exploring ways the technologies can be mixed (as in the case of Flickr, which uses both).

Q. Does Ajax have significant accessibility or browser compatibility limitations? Do Ajax applications break the back button? Is Ajax compatible with REST? Are there security considerations with Ajax development? Can Ajax applications be made to work for users who have JavaScript turned off?

A. The answer to all of these questions is “maybe”. Many developers are already working on ways to address these concerns. We think there’s more work to be done to determine all the limitations of Ajax, and we expect the Ajax development community to uncover more issues like these along the way.

Q. Some of the Google examples you cite don’t use XML at all. Do I have to use XML and/or XSLT in an Ajax application?

A. No. XML is the most fully-developed means of getting data in and out of an Ajax client, but there’s no reason you couldn’t accomplish the same effects using a technology like JavaScript Object Notation or any similar means of structuring data for interchange.

Q. Are Ajax applications easier to develop than traditional web applications?

A. Not necessarily. Ajax applications inevitably involve running complex JavaScript code on the client. Making that complex code efficient and bug-free is not a task to be taken lightly, and better development tools and frameworks will be needed to help us meet that challenge.

Q. Do Ajax applications always deliver a better experience than traditional web applications?

A. Not necessarily. Ajax gives interaction designers more flexibility. However, the more power we have, the more caution we must use in exercising it. We must be careful to use Ajax to enhance the user experience of our applications, not degrade it.