Also, it is many a times, error prone since you might forget some preferences and end up factoring why your code is not behaving the same way as it used to in your earlier workspace.

The secret to make this easier is to find out where does eclipse store this settings and thankfully it is easy enough. Eclipse stores all preferences in text format, properly separated for each individual plugin. So, migrating the settings from one workspace to another is just simple, copy-paste the setting files.

The location where the preferences are kept is :
<workspace_location>\.metadata\.plugins\ org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings

Check the folder and try to see what is within each file and you will see all your plugin settings in it.

So what you would need to do is to copy org.eclipse.core.runtime folder and paste it in your other workspace inside \.metadata\.plugins. Do not copy any other folder or else it may lead to some unusual workspace behavior.

If you want to transfer only the preference for a particular plugin then you just need to copy that individual file alone, from within this folder.

Action Steps:

• Switch your existing workspace to a temporary workspace.
• Close eclipse
• Copy the above folder and start eclipse with the temporary workspace
• Now check all your earlier settings will be reflected

Simple, isn’t it? Let me know if it worked for you.

Related posts:

• Java 5 Generics – Changing for good
• What Do You Dream For In An IDE?
• Eclipse Europa Has Ruined My Day
• The Technique of Virtual Deployment in Tomcat
• Development and Deployment Structures – the perfect way to build a web application

Having said that, the major question which strikes anyone who does majorly JDBC is that how does a Hibernate DAO layer look like. Without looking at a practical implementation one cannot be easily convinced to work on it. This is the only compelling reason why I intended to write The Great Hibernate Tutorial.

This tutorial is aimed at those developers who want to get a quick breifing on how to implement a DAO layer using Hibernate. This tutorial does not cover the basics of ORM nor a detailed explanation of Hibernate configurations or api. It follows on the same route as the Great Ant tutorial which many readers liked.

5 Steps to Designing a DAO in Hibernate:

1. Identify the tables which are required as entities in your project
2. Create the Hibernate Configuration file
3. Create the Hibernate entity mapping files (hbm) and entity classes
4. Make the DAO layer with the required functions
5. Test the DAO classes

Required Softwares

The versions of the various open source software’s required for the implementation are

• MySQL 5.0.5 for Windows
• MySQL ConnectorJ
• Hibernate Core 3.0
• JDK 1.5 or above
• Eclipse 3.3 or above

So lets get going with the Great Hibernate Tutorial. The steps will explain you the specific details from the code while the actual code is present in the format of links at the bottom of this tutorial. You can open the links in different tabs of your browser and then start reading the tutorial for getting a better understanding.

Step 1. Identify the tables which are required as entities in your project

For the tutorial I am designing a basic Attendance System for a company which currently has only two tables Employee and Dept. If your MySQL is not setup at the moment you may visit the tutorial on how to setup Mysql in windows XP.

 
CREATE TABLE `employee` (                                                                                       
            `psno` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',                                                                          
            `name` varchar(50) default NULL,                                                                              
            `pass` varchar(50) default NULL,                                                                              
            `proj_cd` varchar(45) NOT NULL,                                                                               
            `dept_name` varchar(45) NOT NULL,                                                                             
            PRIMARY KEY  USING BTREE (`psno`),                                                                            
            KEY `FK_employee_newfk` (`proj_cd`,`dept_name`),                                                              
            CONSTRAINT `employee_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`proj_cd`, `dept_name`) REFERENCES `dept` (`PROJ_CD`, `DEPT_NAME`)  
          ) 
 
 
CREATE TABLE `dept` (                   
          `PROJ_CD` varchar(45) NOT NULL,       
          `DEPT_NAME` varchar(45) NOT NULL,     
          `START_DATE` date default NULL,       
          `TYPE` varchar(45) default NULL,      
          PRIMARY KEY  (`PROJ_CD`,`DEPT_NAME`)  
        )

The Employee and Dept have a one to many relationship. From the DDL it is evident that Dept table has composite keys. Usually composite keys are considered evil , but I am using it just for the sake of presenting a use case of configuring composite keys in hibernate.

Step 2. Create the Hibernate Configuration file

The Hibernate configuration file is where you provide all the connection level details. It is very straightforward configuration and appears similar to your JDBC connection statements. But unlike JDBC, you can specify many more things here like caching, dialects, debug queries. One important aspect of this configuration file is providing path of hbm files. Check the following two line of XML.

<mapping resource="com/abc/entities/Employee.hbm.xml"/>     
<mapping resource="com/abc/entities/Dept.hbm.xml"/>

These lines are important. They specify the paths to your entity mapping files. Entity mapping files are those XML files which tell hibernate as to how the entity classes relate to the tables. It defines how the data should flow from class properties to the table columns. But you have to be careful in mentioning the paths to the mapping files. It is not required that the files be kept in the packages as I have done but it is considered a convention.

Step 3. Create the Hibernate entity mapping files (hbm) and entity classes

In this step we would be actually defining the mapping. I have kept all the entities in the package com.abc.entities along with the mapping files. The first element is obvious <hibernate-mapping>. Within this element you would most of the times define 3 elements: Class, ID and Property.

Class – the class for which mapping to the table is being defined

<class name="com.abc.entities.Employee" table="employee" lazy="false">

One extra attribute of the element you would notice is lazy=”false”. This is the lazy loading technique of ORM the details of which are beyond the scope of this tutorial. You may even not mention it.

ID – Primary key is an absolute must in hibernate mapped tables. Primary Keys are mapped to ID as follows

<id name="psno" column="psno">
	<generator class="assigned" />
</id>

Generator means how the primary key is populated. If it was auto generated in the table then the value should have been “auto“. The value “assigned” means we will set it in the application itself. In case of Dept, since composite key exists we should define it as

<composite-id name="deptPK" class="com.abc.entities.DeptPK">
	<key-property name="projCode" column="PROJ_CD" />
	<key-property name="deptName" column="DEPT_NAME" />
</composite-id>

Property – These are columns which would be made as properties having getters and setters in the class definition

<property name="name"/>

this would map name property of Employee class to the name column of employee table.

Associations in Hibernate

The above 3 are majorly used. Apart from that you can also mention cardinality mapping if required as follows:

<many-to-one name="dept" class="com.abc.entities.Dept">
	<column name="proj_cd" not-null="true"/>
	<column name="dept_name" not-null="true"/>
</many-to-one>

Since I have a composite key in Dept table I have mentioned two columns in the above mapping. This mapping can be read as “MANY Employees are related TO ONE Dept with help of COLUMNS proj_cd and dept_name“. These mappings are called as Associations in hibernate.

In the Dept mapping file since one dept can return multiple Employees, they would be returned in the form of a set. Hence we would have to map the set of Employee as:

<set name="employees" inverse="true">
	<key>
		<column name="proj_cd"/>
		<column name="dept_name"/>
	</key>
	<one-to-many class="com.abc.entities.Employee" />
</set>

The inverse=”true” says that the association is bidirectional which is another important concept in hibernate. In a bidirectional relationship you can reach an associated element from within one element and same applies the other way too. On the contrary you may even have unidirectional relationship in which you don’t specify mapping in the other classes.

Defining Entity classes

This is straight forward. Entity classes are simple Java Beans. You can view the class definition in the links provided at the bottom of this post. A no argument public constructor is a must in case you define a custom one.

One special case here would be for composite keys. Composite keys are defined in a separate class. After this, In the class where composite keys are required you would have to make a property of the composite-class-type.

Step 4. Make the DAO layer with the required functions

Finally we are the moment of salvation. The thing which we were waiting eagerly for implementing. The DAO layer. It is always a good practice to make a separate DAO class for holding utility functions. Hibernate requires that you always open a session before accessing the database and making transactions when you update the database. This requires repeatable lines of code.

So in order to avoid repeating ourselves its better to keep these lines of code in a DAO class as shown in the links below. Check for com.abc.dao.DAO.java. You may use the class as it is since it is a routine code. For coding your own classes to make use of the utility functions in the DAO extend your class with this DAO.

Lets have a look at AdminDAO. Since I belive in interface based implementations I have provided AdminDAO as an interface and AdminDAOHibernateImpl as its implementation which extends DAO. The code is kept simple for understanding purposes. The things worth pondering are:

In functions which do an update on the tables you have to carry the following steps:

1. begin();
2. getSession()….; // save or update
3. commit();
4. rollback();  //in case of HibernateException and throw any custom business exception if required

For fetching data you don’t need transactions so you don’t need to do the above steps. In this case you can just execute a query via the getSession() as follows:

Query q = getSession().createQuery("from Employee e inner join fetch e.dept where e.psno = :psno");
q.setString("psno", psno.toString());
Employee emp = (Employee) q.uniqueResult();

Hibernate Query Language

The above query syntax is called HQL (Hibernate Query Language). It is syntactically very similar to JDBC with the difference that HQL queries are based on objects and not on tables so the names are case sensitive and aliases to objects are a must.

In HQL, you can either fetch a single result when you know that there would be exactly one row fetched. When you know that mutiple records might be returned then you can fetch the list as follows:

Query q = getSession().createQuery("from Employee");
List<Employee> list = q.list();
return list;

Paging in Hibernate

You can obtain paging in Hibernate very easily without any additional efforts by applying a max results criteria

q.setFirstResult(firstResult);
q.setMaxResults(maxResults);

Doesn’t it feel really good. JDBC users might feel jealous at this time1

Step 5. Test the DAO classes

Now, to our final strike. The testing can be done with POJO’s. For the tutorial I had created a service layer since I usally access teh DAO layer through the service layer. So the testing was done on the service layer instead of the DAO as this application was small. You can however test out directly the DAO functions.

static void listTest(){
	try {
		List<Employee> employees = adminService.getAllEmployees();
		for(Employee emp: employees)
			System.out.println(emp.toString());
	} catch (AppException e) {
	System.out.println(e.getMessage());
	}
}

Wasn’t that a breeze? I hope that it was. Once you gain a thorough knowledge of ORM concepts then you would appreciate working with Hibernate even more. For further knowledge, I would recommend you to go through the impedence mismatch theory to know the fundamental flaws surrounding JDBC. Working with Hibernate would then be real fun.

Enjoy folks!

Resources for the tutorial

The below files are required for running the above tutorial. Copy these to your eclipse project and add the required libraries of hibernate and mysql before running the project.

Configuration
hibernate.cfg.xml

Package: com.abc.entities
com.abc.entities.Employee.java
Employee.hbm.xml
com.abc.entities.Dept.java
com.abc.entities.DeptPK.java
Dept.hbm.xml

Package: com.abc.dao
com.abc.dao.DAO.java
com.abc.dao.AdminDAO.java
com.abc.dao.AdminDAOHibernateImpl.java

Package: com.abc.service
com.abc.service.AdminService.java
com.abc.service.AdminServiceImpl.java
com.abc.service.DeptService.java
com.abc.service.DeptServiceImpl.java

Package: com.abc.exceptions
com.abc.exceptions.AppException.java

Package: com.abc.tests
com.abc.tests.DeptTest.java

Related posts:

• The Technique of Virtual Deployment in Tomcat
• The Great Ant Tutorial – a great jump start
• Impressive Google Chart Generator Scripts
• Tracing the route of technology
• Mozilla’s New Killer App – The WebRunner

Reflection in Java is done by using using the java.lang.Class class. This class provides access to all the information within your own applications classes or even the regular java library classes. Let’s say you have a class in a package called com.tt.company.Employee then if you need the metadata of the Employee class you would have to first assign it to the Class as :

Class c = Class.forName(“com.tt.company.Employee”);

Accessing Fields, Methods and Constructors with Reflection

If you are not sure which fields and methods are declared in a class and you don’t have access to the source code then you can easily get this information by simple looping.

For example, if I wanted to access the fields and methods declared in the class Employee then its as simple as the below code.

Field[] fields = c.getFields();
 
Method[] methods = c.getMethods();
for (Field f : fields)
 
System.out.println("Field: " + f.getName());
 
for (Method m : methods)
 
System.out.println("Method:" + m.getName());

You might get some additional methods if you use the getMethods() method. This is because, the getMethods() definition also chooses those methods which are present in any of the super classes present. In this case, if Employee class does not have any super class, but still it is a subclass of Object. Hence methods defined in the Object class would also form a part of the output.

In order to avoid the methods defined in the super class you should use the getDeclaredMethods() instead.

Note: An important point worth mentioning over here is that, the loop would produce only those methods or fields which are marked public. If you don’t have a public field or method it won’t be considered. In order to loop over them, use the getDelcaredFields() or getDeclaredMethods()

Fun Things to do with Relection in Java

You can discover new techniques of programming once you feel the power of Reflection in your hands. The new techniques would include instantiation of objects dynamically, setting of values to fields and invoking methods without calling them explicitly.

Let’s take the case of a Singleton class into consideration for showing the true power of Reflection. For a Java novice, a singleton class is the one which has a private constructor. It isn’t practically true, but let’s assume that it is. Using reflection, this concept of singleton can be broken.

Here is an example of a Singleton class:

public class SingleCandidate {
 
private String name;
 
static int counter = 0;
private SingleCandidate() {
 
counter++;
 
System.out.println("Instance #" + counter);
 
}
public void showName() {
 
System.out.println(name);
 
}
 
}

A Singleton pattern dictates that only one instance of the object must be present at a given point of time in a JVM. So now, let’s take the above Singleton class for a ride with Reflection:

Class singleton = SingleCandidate.class;
 
Constructor privateConstructor =  singleton.getDeclaredConstructors()[0];
 
privateConstructor.setAccessible(true);
//This is scary
 
SingleCandidate obj = (SingleCandidate) privateConstructor.newInstance();
 
SingleCandidate obj2 = (SingleCandidate) privateConstructor.newInstance();

The code is self explanatory and you will realize that in this way you can easily create many instances of the possible candidate for a singleton class in the JVM. How fool proof was that?

Setting Values to Private Fields!

What did you learn in encapsulation? Was it making fields private and public so that private fields could be accessed only by the class in which they are declared?  Reflection can break this too.

//Even more scary
 
Field privateField = singleton.getDeclaredField("name");
 
privateField.setAccessible(true);
privateField.set(obj, "You are not a singleton anymore");
//Access private Constructor
 
System.out.println("Accessing private Constructor: " + privateConstructor.getName());//Get a private field value
 
System.out.println("Accessing private Field: " + privateField.get(obj));
//Invoke a method
 
Method method = singleton.getDeclaredMethod("showName");
 
method.invoke(obj);

Reflection with Generics

If you have tried out the above code in Eclipse you might see some warnings for the Class or Constructor usage. The warning message will be:

Class is a raw type. References to generic type Class<T> should be parameterized

Constructor is a raw type. References to generic type Constructor<T> should be parameterized

To suppress these warnings you will have to use the generic parameter “?” as follows:

Class<?> singleton = SingleCandidate.class;
 
Constructor<?> privateConstructor =  singleton.getDeclaredConstructors()[0];

The questions mark symbol is a wildcard type used in generics. This only applies only if you using Java 5 or higher versions.

Uses of reflection

Reflection is powerful technique when used appropriately. The major usage of reflection comes in when you are building your own framework, compilers or development tools in which you need access to the metadata of the classes created by end users. You surely might have already used the best products of Reflection without even knowing about it.

• JSP gets converted to Servlets using Reflection.
• The Spring framework uses Reflection to administer the references which you declare in your spring-config.xml without you explicitly instantiating any object. The whole concept of Dependency Injection (Inversion of Control) is conveniently implemented with Reflection.
• Reflection also gave birth to the concept of aspect oriented programming.

Reflection is not limited just to this post and nor Reflection is used for the purpose of breaking security. This article was aimed at showing you a direction with which you can explore Reflection more and discover new principles and techniques to build better applications.

Related posts:

• Convert Date to String and String to Date in Java
• Getting started with IoC – A simplified tutorial
• Java 5 Generics – Changing for good
• J2EE or JEE, Java 5 or Java 1.5 – Is SUN Crazy?
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 – Nothing Special

Future Smackdown

I am not pretty sure behind the motive of the launch however. It might have got something to do with the browser wars in particular. You see, when the giants are busy fighting a dwarf can easily run away with the bounty. If the saying is anywhere close to truth then Google Chrome just might be the next big thing we have to wait and watch. What makes me say this you might wonder. Well, Internet Explorer is busy getting decked up for its version 8 release which Microsoft must be really pushing in with its best efforts. On the other hand Firefox has had a majestic release of its version 3.0. So where does Google Chrome fit in here? Remember, they say its in beta! Gmail was too!

Google Chrome has already been stated to possess best features of Firefox and other browsers. Bloggers have been ranting about this, the most. That is true since Google Chrome may not support plugins and themes feature as of now, on which Firefox has found its enormous success. But the first question to put up front is, is Google Chrome really just another browser or a desktop application which connects to the internet. Well both say the same thing but the mention of a different memory processing model for Chrome is something which you have to consider. Google won’t be silly to reinvent the wheel. It just might be a futuristic vision of Google which we are currently witnessing on a miniature scale. Google Suggest, Maps or GMail must ring the bells as I mention this.

People may crib and rant about Google Chrome but it hasn’t hampered the success of launch down even by a pint. In fact Google has made a smart move to get as many feedbacks as possible since it has made Chrome right from scratch. Now its motive would definitely be to do a write up once again and make a surprise launch with power packed features in the next version. I can see people waiting with baited breath keeping a hawks eye on every single move Google does.

In For a Tough Competition?

Google Chrome has been launched amidst Adobe Flex going mainstream with its enterprise presence and while Silverlight is being pushed into your face. You must have some or the other time come across Flex and Silverlight applications which left your mouth wide open to see the magic they do. Can a browser reduce these giant’s market share? Why do I ask?

If you carefully notice Chrome has heavily emphasized that it is going to support the standards of web technologies like CSS, Javascript, HTML5. This means that Google Chrome would be a perfect foundation for web developers who always have been frustrated with browser dependencies when working with these web technologies. By using Chrome you might really enjoy developing a web application. This translates to more web developers being happy, more usage of standard features of Javascript, CSS and HTML, more usage of open technologies viz. Ajax, XML, JSON, leading to more usage of free tools & less use of propreitary products.

All this means, more market share for open source and Google already has set its base up front with a plethora of tools. You name it, Google Gears, GWT, Google App Engine, Google Analytics, Google Maps etc for the web developers. More standards attribute to better web applications and all which is supported by Chrome inherently. The survival of Flex or Silverlight will be a debatable issue henceforth if Google Chrome manages to captilize on its intentions.

This sounds a huge success to Google Chrome. If this falls in line, then Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera will be competing with Chrome rather than with themselves. Google will rise to the top and rule the universe. All of this is a distant dream for me and I don’t want to sound preachy now. You do the analysis as I will wait for a surprise in the next version of Google Chrome. It might just be the next big thing, you may never know!

The things I admire in the current release of Google Chrome :

1. Full screen interface
2. Draggable tabs to windows and back into tabs
3. Neater display of history links and thumbnails of recent visits

Testing Google Chrome

The thing you might be wondering at the moment is how to distinguish Chrome from the rest of the browsers. As Google mentions, Chrome sports a different memory management model which implements each tab as a whole new process instead of a thread. On opening a tab you would notice that the task manager would have a new process listed. In order to try out Chrome’s ability with this regards you should try opening a Javascript heavy page first in browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Heavy Javascript attributes to browser hanging which is considered often as a painful process since all the tabs hang and the browser itself has to be killed to stop the loading. As far as Chrome goes, this nature would be handled in a completely different manner since you can now directly kill a tab process from the task manager without affecting the other open tabs.

While the above concept is not much useful for the casual surfer, it will be a must for web application users in times to come, since the advent of Web 2.0 has in fact spruced up the usage of Ajax which in turn has made the web application heavy for processing. Such a model would have been required any time in near future, but with Chrome stepping the right foot at the right time you can relax down a bit now. If you are a staunch Ajax developer then Chrome surely would come to your rescue.

Related posts:

• Search Results
• Unleash the Power in Your Blog with Google Custom Search
• Google Experiments are Brilliant
• Minesweeper – Back with a Bang
• Drool Over the all new Google Android UI

I am thoroughly satisfied with Google Reader for reading my RSS feeds but I felt its been a long time I have spent on it and it has now started to bore me a bit. So I started some search for good desktop applications which would give some eye candy and also improve my productivity while learning from the feeds.

I have found one nice solution which has relieved me to some extent and which is certainly an impressive effort in the direction of web desktop integration. Its called ReadAir. It is a really nice application for feed reading and I am impressed by its potential.  The reason I liked it was because it is built on Adobe AIR. I had become a fan of Adobe AIR when I had read about it for the first time.

Seeing a live usable application built on it was something I had waited for and ReadAir has confirmed my belief that sometime later in the future we are going to see amazing applications built for the desktops but running on the web. Mozilla Prism is a yet another effort in this field.

Okay, coming back to the ReadAir. ReadAir is a desktop feed reader for reading your Google Reader feeds. The features that I can place my votes on are:

• Easy setup and login straight into Google Reader
• Direct synchronization of read posts with Google Reader
• You can star any post directly inside it which is also visible later in your Google Reader
• Add/Remove tags or feeds from within it
• It has got a very minimalistic Interface yet its pretty neat looking
• The feed post colors and fonts are soothing to the eye
• It is quick in loading.
• Clicking on the post title marks the post as read (This is better than scrolling the entire length of the post as in Google Reader)

I was satisfied by the above basic features and also expect them to improve them in the future. Since the application is in its early days, some features can be cranky at times. For example, I found the auto update feature somewhat unnecessary. It updated the application with some new features which later started to show some errors. Also, the search is not fully functional and currently ReadAir does not support keyboard shortcuts.

Leaving apart the shortcomings, the synchronization was the best part of ReadAir. At least I have got a different reader for my taste and also due to the synchronization with Google Reader, I do not have to worry about re-reading the same posts if I happen to access Google Reader from a different location. I appreciate the commendable effort put up by Adam Mcgrath for bringing this idea to life and am looking forward for addition of more features.

Try it, its nice to have a change sometimes and I would always root for web desktop applications like these. For installing ReadAir you need to have Adobe Air installed on your system. Download Adobe Air from here.

Related posts:

• Web and Desktop Apps – the 3rd World War!
• Mozilla’s New Killer App – The WebRunner
• Unleash the Power in Your Blog with Google Custom Search
• Google Reader Search Goes Live!
• Adobe Reader 8.0 – Fully Loaded

Without letting any of my excitement down, I am going to tell you the amazing things that I found in Firefox 3. First of all the startup time of Firefox 3 is much quicker than Firefox 2. The next things which strikes as it starts is its appearance. I have fallen in love with the two little glowy buttons for back and forward browsing.

Now We Have The Awesomebar!

The show stealer of the entire futuristic parade of Firefox 3 is its address bar or awesomebar. Its awesome in its true sense. You wouldn’t even have imagined that the lame old address bar can sometimes mean so much than just typing in URL’s. With this revolutionary address bar in Firefox 3 you would soon forget having to remember URL’s.

Yes, you don’t have to remember those lengthy creepy URL’s once you have Firefox 3 in your control. The address bar is so smart it can detect  the correct URL when you just type in the actual keywords which had made you open that page. For example, if you had opened a page which contained some information on “Firefox” and later on forgot which URL you had opened, just type in “Firefox” and the page URL would prompt up the list with “Firefox” highlighted. Incredible I must say.

You may be guessing already what makes it so smart?  Well, from the past, Firefox has been keeping a store of the web page titles by caching in the URL’s you were opening up. But until the launch of Firefox 3, it was never used to good effect. Now in the new version, it makes a really good use of these title’s. Its a high probability that you would remember something in the page titles if you want to get back to the page you had visited earlier. So, its likely that instead of putting in the actual URL you would be putting the right keywords, and the right keywords are always present in? You guessed it right, in the page title of the page. This trick, has really transformed the address bar into Awesomebar.

The Amazing Download Manager

It was a lenghty wait and now the wait has been sweetly fulfilled by the Firefox 3 team. The much needed pause and resume feature of the download bar actually works in Firefox 3. Earlier, even though this feature was present, it lacked proper functioning and so you couldn’t rely on your resuming the downloads. But this time works. Yeehaa! With the amazing Download Manager you can again visit the page from where you had downloaded the file and also if you haven’t cleared the list you can search for the downloads.

I would expect the next version to have multiple simultaneous connections so that I would not have to use Flashget.

The Amazing Addon Manager

This is another show stealer after the Awesomebar. Remember those good old times when you wanted to add you favorite addons, you first searched Google or the addon’s page of Mozilla. Then you used to go to the page to read about the addon, see the ratings and then actually download the addon. Zip forward to Firefox 3, the good old days will become more better with the new addon manager. It’s got an inbuilt search engine which displays not only the relevant addon’s based on the search criteria but also the description which you would have seen on the actual addon page and it also shows you the rating! It was unbelievable for me when I saw this in action.

To be true the when I said that my behavior has changed from the instance I downloaded Firefox 3, the feature which made it happen, was the Addon Manager. I have stopped being lazy in searching addons, and since I have an embedded search option, I have started to download addons like crazy. Its driving me mad. In just a day I have found so many amazing addon’s that had made my web browsing experience much much richer. I would put up a post soon for telling you about the addons which are my favorites.

Firefox 3 is a browser that you must not wait for downloading. The record of 8 million Firefox 3 downloads in just 24 hours is enough to prove this. The world is waiting for more. So without wasting much time, grab it here fast!

Related posts:

• URL History – Firefox beats IE in URL Ordering
• Firefox 3 is Arriving Shortly – Gear Up!
• Feast Your Eyes With Firefox Piclens
• Power of XRAY for Web Designers
• The Power Of Google Chart API

Enter Web 2.0, and you do not have to ponder much over lost time for waiting to get hold of a tool. In this era, whatever you think of is already available online. So without fretting just google up your requirement and you would be amazed by what kind of power the internet can provide you. Coming back to the question, I responded him coolly, to use an online photo editor! He was totally baffled at the thought. If you are too, then I might as well introduce to you the best tools for photo editing online.

Online Photo Editors

The most important thing for a photo editor is to provide the features such as, cropping, editing brightness and contrast, sharpening and blurring, resize, effects and saving in multiple file formats. In a standalone editor you are most likely to find these features. But in an online environment the features will be severely limited with regards to flexibility of usage, since they are entirely web based which make them complicated to implement. I will suggest you some nifty tools which would actually make your work easier and lot more fun. Browsing across several editors I would recommend you 3 of the most liked online photo editors.

1. Phixr

Phixr is an interesting tool which does not use Flash. It is completely Ajax based and has got the potential to give the user a complete satisfaction. The most likable feature I found in this was the ability to convert your photograph into an artistic polaroid snapshot, comment bubbles and effects. It gives you the facility of direct upload of the edited photo to numerous photo sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, Picasaweb and so on. Moreover, its free to use.

Its not a compulsion for registering for using the tool. You can try out the demo from the photo shown on the front page itself and check the features for yourselfs. Look what I could come up in a few minutes of playing with this tool.

2. SplashUp

If you are a Photoshop addict and cannot think of any other tool besides it, then you are in for a real surprise. SplashUp, earlier called Fauxto is a very well designed application which closely resembles Photoshop. It has the same look and feel and is completely made in Flash. The bonus of using SplashUp is that you can actually save your work in its own file format so that you can continue working on it later. It is the first online tool, to give a layered editing environment and work on multiple images at the same time without your browser getting hanged up. Doesn’t that sound exciting enough?

3. Picnik

Picnik one is one of my favorites and one of the most used tools while editing photos online. This is because, Flick has recently bought it, and it has been directly integrated into flickr. This makes editing your online flickr photos even more simpler. Just go to a flickr photo and choose the Edit Photo button, which opens up in a picnik editor mode. Check out for the humorous load messages it shows. The only thing I dislike about it is it takes a lot of time to load the photo which is not the case in SplashUp.

Picnik has a lot of amazing features to offer but they all do not come for free. Yet you are free to use some commonly used features with ease. Check out for fancy text effects and custom shapes. They are surely fantastic. With a tool like Picnik you wouldn’t need Photoshop around for common usages.

Related posts:

• Create Beautiful Collages Out Of Your Photos
• HP Snapfish India, For Cost Effective Printing
• Feast Your Eyes With Firefox Piclens
• Web and Desktop Apps – the 3rd World War!
• GOA Parade!

So today without any procrastination, I intend to put down the simplest of the steps to configure and run MySQL on Windows XP in the quickest of the time. First and foremost, as I always tend to follow a course is, break down the task into 3 steps. They are:

Step 1: Getting the software

Download the latest version of MySQL from the community site. Unpack it into your desired folder. It is always a good practice to download the zipped archive of MySQL binary distribution since using the one click installer, you might sometimes lose the power of configuration manually.

Its also a better way to understand configuring manually since if you switch to a Unix based environment later on, you will have to carry out a similar procedure and there is usually no one click installer in such environments.

I unpacked MySQL in C:\Program Files\mysql-5.0.45-win32

Step 2 : Configuring the environment

While configuring in the Windows environment you have to do two things. One, putting a file having a name my.ini in the Windows folder of the operating system. Two, setting the path in your system environment variable. Here’s what you have to do:

Creating Option File (my.ini)

Go to your installation path of MySQL (In my case it is: C:\Program Files\mysql-5.0.45-win32) and rename the file my-medium.ini to my.ini. Open the renamed file in notepad and add the following lines, just beneath the line which says, # The MySQL server and above the line port = 3306:

[mysqld]
# set basedir to your installation path
basedir=C:/Program Files/mysql-5.0.45-win32
# set datadir to the location of your data directory
datadir=D:/workspace/data

The second line as shown above is, configuring your database directory. This means, the path which you assign to datadir will be the path where your databases will be created. You have to make sure that the path exists before you assign it. There will a data directory in the MySQL installed path. If you provide a different path to the data directory than this default one, you must copy the entire contents of the data directory in that path.

Finally, drop the my.ini file into your Windows directory. In my case, I copied the file into the path C:/Windows

Setting the environment variable

After completing the above step, goto

My Computer > Properties > Advanced >Environment Variables > System variables > Path > Edit

In the Value box, goto the end of the line and put a semi colon and the path of the MySQL bin folder. In my case I have put it as:

;C:\Program Files\mysql-5.0.45-win32\bin

Click OK 3 times and thats it with the configuration of MySQL. You are all set to test the installation.

Step 3: Final Configurations and Running MySQL

You are actually good to go for running mysql. For this, open up your command prompt and type in the command mysqld –console. This will start the mysql database server. Whenever you run this command henceforth you will see these lines at the end:

[Note] mysqld: ready for connections.
Version: ’5.0.45-community-nt-log’ socket: ” port: 3306 MySQL Community Edit
ion (GPL)

When you see these lines, it means that mysql has started successfully. Its time to party!

Leave the command prompt open and start up another command prompt. For the first time you should do this:

C:\>mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

When it will ask for a password, just hit Enter. It will allow access to you without a password and will show up a prompt as:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 12
Server version: 5.0.45-community-nt-log MySQL Community Edition (GPL)

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the buffer.

mysql>

Note that your database has anonymous access. It is not a secure thing to let it like that. You should always access the database with a password. So for setting up the password you will have to do the below steps. Put in the commands which are highlighted as shown:

mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD(“admin”) where User=’root’;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 3 Changed: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit
Bye

Once you have done this, try logging into the server again without a password. It must show the below error:

C:\Documents and Settings\xpuser>mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: NO)

This means, now your database is secure.You should be relieved that your mysql setup has got completed. Now every time you want to start in your database start the server in one command prompt and in the second command prompt login to the database server by doing:

C:\>mysql -u root -p
Enter password: admin

Thats it. Phew! I hope I remember the steps myself and now for my cup of cappuccino.

Related posts:

• How To Install Windows Live Writer
• XP Installation – The 34 minute hiccup
• The Great Hibernate Tutorial – a great jump start for beginners
• Setting Up SSL on Tomcat In 3 Easy Steps
• Feast Your Eyes With Firefox Piclens

Whatever the reason may be, editing a photograph is no layman’s job. Sometime people give up half way through when they do not find the required results. I recently found a something which might make your spirit rise higher when you will notice the results you get out of it. The name of the tool is Picasa. Its a tool from Google. I am sure you must have used it many time to upload your photos to the online Picasaweb. But did you ever try making collages from it. Picasa can generate some really amazing collages out of your precious photos and make them really gift worthy or send it amongst friends as a memoir.

So here’s how you can make collages out of your photos:

• Download and install Picasa if you don’t have it already from here
• When you open it Picasa will start indexing all your image folders
• Choose a folder of which you want to make a collage from
• Now carefully select the photos which are your favorite and which you want inside the collage
• Click the Collage button in the bottom bar
• Your collage will be loaded in the dialog mode
• You might not be satisfied with the collage at first so you can try one of the 2 tricks
• Press Shift and drag your mouse pointer on the collage window. You will see a change in the layout
• Keep trying till you are satisfied with a layout
• Sometimes, you might like a layout but not how the pictures are placed
• In this case press Ctrl and drag the mouse pointer. The layout will be same but the pictures will start to randomize in their placement.
• Once you are done, hit the Create Button and specify location as the “current folder”
• The collage gets created and gives you a chance to edit the collage
• Here you can try out interesting presets which include making the collage black and white or giving it a sepia tone or soft focusing it. You can have real fun over here.
• After finishing with the effect choose file > save. A backup of the original will automatically be made
• So here you are with a amazing memorabilia of your treasured photos. Sounds simple isn’t it?
  

You can do different types of collages in Picassa. The one above is called the “Picture Pile“. The other types include:

Picture Grid

Contact Sheet

You can always edit the collage features after saving it. But however there is no provision to change the photos of it later. You would have to again do the above steps for making a new collage.

Related posts:

• Feast Your Eyes With Firefox Piclens
• Best Tools For Editing Your Photos Online
• GOA Parade!
• Contact
• HP Snapfish India, For Cost Effective Printing

Firefox has released the full feature release candidate which is said to be quite stable, but its not yet the final release. From what the bloggers have been publishing about this release candidate it seems quite evident that the features are simply eye popping. The major surprise comes in the form of a fast browser loaded with features. One thing the Mozilla guys have stuck to their mission, is improving the browser speed and load capabilities. From the reports on comparisons of the performance of various browsers Firefox 3 has passed out with flying colors. Also the new version sports a more native look and feel of the underlying OS. This means, but obviously, that, you must switch over to Firefox 3 once it releases.

If you are thinking that a speedier browser owes to compromises on its feature set, then Firefox 3 is all set to prove you wrong. The earlier much wanted features are already there. In fact, they have been upgraded to a marvelous level. If you loved the last update in the clubbing of add-on and themes manager, this time they have put in a search right within it! Believe it or not, Firefox 3 will allow searching for plugins and themes right through your add-on/ theme manager.

If you are indeed a hard core surfer then you must be having loads of bookmarks stacked up in your folders of the Firefox bookmark manager. But if you always thought that tagging was a feature required to quickly access the bookmarks then you thought it right. Firefox 3 has upgraded its bookmark manager and made it “places organizer“. With the new organizer, you can now tag your bookmarks along with some nifty smart searches and time line ordering of bookmarks.

One of the most difficult things to work within Firefox 2 is the download manager. When I download a particular thing I always save it to a different location. But later on, I always tend to forget the location where I had downloaded it from because of my frequent downloading habits. Firefox 3 is going to be a major upgrade for me in this aspect, since it includes a download manager which shows the link where the download came from. It also would be supporting resume states in event of a system crash. I am not sure if this, because till now my resumes have never worked, especially in Firefox 2. But I am being confident this time around.

Besides the above major upgrades, they also have made many other tweaks, which include, their password remembering prompt. It is not obtrusive any longer with the popup every time you try to log in. This time, it allows remembering only those passwords when you actually log in, which means, no storing of wrong passwords.

Firefox 3 is about to arrive. I am excited and absolutely thrilled about it. Its gonna be a wild ride yet again. Gear up!

Images Courtesy: Lifehacker

Related posts:

• Firefox 3 Review – It’s Simply Amazing
• Firefox 2.0 – Winner Of The Browser Wars
• Feast Your Eyes With Firefox Piclens
• URL History – Firefox beats IE in URL Ordering
• Power of XRAY for Web Designers