By Gavin Clarke 21 Dec 2005 21:07
The next few weeks could be crucial in the evolution of Windows Vista, Microsoft's next client operating system. Microsoft engineers will crunch through feedback from 500,000 beta testers who evaluated the latest Windows Vista Community Technology Preview (CTP).
At stake is a "feature complete" Windows Vista CTP due for release in "early" 2006. At last, after three years of big promises and broken dreams, we should be able to cut away the hype and get a realistic idea of Windows Vista's features and capabilities.As Microsoft decides what to put into Vista, one thing has become clear: after months of glitzy presentations Microsoft must explain in unambiguous terms why exactly corporate IT departments should bother upgrading, instead of waiting to receive the new software when they buy their next round of PCs.
more...Online retailers are not known for rapid fire, high-profile business moves.
But that has not been the case lately. In the last few months, two leading companies have made major acquisitions, and two others began the process of raising capital, signaling that investing sprees may continue in 2006.
Why so much activity in a market sector that typically churns away unnoticed? Some say it's Google Inc.'s doing.
Google's financial and business clout is such that it can introduce a new business venture, then sit back and watch the market incumbents scramble to adjust.
That's apparently now the case for companies that serve as online stores, comparison shopping sites and other peripheral services.
In May, Google unveiled Google Base, a free classified service with overtones of an eBay-like online store. The company has also been leaving clues of an online payment system, known as Google Wallet and/or Google Automat, that's now under construction.
The problem arises from the different treatment of the characters in the users mind and the computer's programming. From the viewpoint of the user, a Cyrillic "?" within a Latin string is a Latin "a"; there is literally no difference in the glyphs for these characters in most fonts. However, the computer treats them differently when processing the character string as an identifier. Thus, the user's assumption of a one-to-one correspondence between the visual appearance of a name, and the named entity, breaks down.
In a typical example of a hypothetical attack, someone could register a domain name that appears identical to an existing domain but goes somewhere else. For example, the spoofed domain "p?ypal.com" contains a Cyrillic a, not a Latin a. In many ways, this is not a new thing. For example, even staying within the old character set of A-Z, 0-9 and hyphen, G00GLE.COM looks much GOOGLE.COM in some fonts; or, using a mix of uppercase and lowercase characters, googIe.com (capital I, not small ell) looks much like google.com in some fonts. Or, displaying characters in lowercase alone, rnicrosoft.com (" RNICROSOFT.COM") looks very much like microsoft.com in many fonts. What is new was that the expansion by the internationalized domain name system of the character repertoire from a few dozen characters in a single alphabet to many thousands of characters in many scripts greatly increased the scope for homograph attacks.
During a keynote at the Apache Software Foundation's ApacheCon in San Diego, Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun and XML specification co-editor, said Sun was incorporating the open-source Java DB into the Sun Java Enterprise System and providing additional support for the database with the NetBeans IDE (integrated development environment) 5.0 plug-in.
JSR-286, the Portlet Specification 2.0, is now under review at the JCP. This version of the Portlet specification "plans to align with J2EE 1.4, integrate other new JSRs relevant for the portlet, and align with the WSRP specification V 2.0."
Current specification members are Vignette, Sun, BEA, IBM, Oracle, and SAP; the expert group membership is still open.
According to the proposal, the following areas are to be addressed:
A computer disc about the size of a DVD that can hold 60 times more data will go on sale in 2006, according to its American developer InPhase Technologies, a Lucent spin off.
The discs, holding 300GB each, use so-called Tapestry holographic memory technology to store data by interference of light. They are also able to read and write data at 10 times the speed of a normal DVD
HttpSession in a web application) or database query results (i.e., entity data). Since many enterprise applications run in clustered environments, the cache needs to be replicated across the cluster. Furthermore, if greater reliability is needed, the in-memory cache should also be persisted to the hard disk or database.Marketing is based on the importance of customers to a business and has two important principles:
1. All company policies and activities should be directed toward satisfying customer needs.
2. Profitable sales volume is more important than maximum sales volume.
To best use these principles, a small business should:
A mindset, in decision theory and general systems theory, refers to a set of assumptions, methods or notations held by one or more people or groups of people which is so established that it creates a powerful incentive within these people or groups to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviours, choices, or tools. This phenomenon of cognitive bias is also sometimes described as mental inertia, " groupthink", or a "paradigm ", and it is often difficult to counteract its effects upon analysis and decision making processes.
A well-known example is the "Cold War mindset" prevalent in both the US and USSR, which included absolute trust in two-player game theory, in the integrity of command chain, in control of nuclear materials, and in the mutual assured destruction of both in the case of war. Although some consider that this mindset usefully served to prevent an attack by either country, the assumptions underlying deterrence theory have made assessments of the efficacy of the Cold War mindset a matter of some controversy.
Most theorists consider that the key responsibility of an embedded power group is to challenge the assumptions which comprise the group's own mindset. According to these commentators, power groups which fail to review or revise their mindsets with sufficient regularity cannot hold power indefinitely, as a single mindset is unlikely to possess the flexibility and adaptability needed to address all future events. For example, the variations in mindset between Democratic and Republican Presidents in the US may have made that country more able to challenge assumptions than the Kremlin with its more static bureaucracy.
Modern military theory attempts to challenge entrenched mindsets in dealing with asymmetric warfare, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction . In combination, these threats represent "a revolution in military affairs" and require very rapid adaptation to new threats and circumstances. In this context, the cost of not implementing adaptive mindsets cannot be afforded.
Monkeygrease serves the same purpose as Greasemonkey, however, instead of being a client-side solution, Monkeygrease is a server-side solution. This allows all your users to benefit from enhancements you deploy to your site through Monkeygrease. You might be wondering, "why not enhance the underlying web page or web application?"
Consider all of the packaged web applications you have deployed. Many of these web applications are not that easy to enhance. Some web applications are just not conducive to being customized. Also, some of these web applications are "black-boxed" or closed source products that just can't be customized. Other products are just too complicated and require expert knowledge to carry out interface based customizations.
With Monkeygrease, you can forego customizations to the underlying web application. Instead, you can rely on the power of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets as a means to customizing a web application's interface. A few examples of interface enhancements may include:
* Changing the look and feel of a web application
* Adding DHTML/AJAX features/effects on your site
* Adding WYSIWYG editing to any textarea field on your site
* Enhance pages by contextually adding content from external providers
* Fix usability issues on any page
For more details, visit the Monkeygrease website .
Microsoft and SAP AG ran a benchmark test that allowed 93,000 concurrent users of SAP's software with Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 database, which became generally available Monday. That's 10 times more users than can be supported in the largest SAP installation today, Ballmer said. Ballmer also said SQL Server 2005 running Microsoft's .Net middleware has beaten an IBM benchmark result using its WebSphere middleware running on Oracle's database.
MIT's newly upgraded wireless network--extended this month to cover the entire school--doesn't merely get users online in study halls, stairwells, or any other spot on the 9.4 million-square-foot campus.
It also provides information on exactly how many people are logged on at any given location at any given time. It even reveals a user's identity if the individual has opted to make that information public.
Even before company Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates had finished explaining Microsoft Corp.'s new Windows Live and Office Live offerings, industry observers and analysts were already saying that search giant Google Inc. still has the upper hand and warning that Microsoft needs to overhaul "its culture of derivative innovation."
In his Oct. 31 online commentary, "My View: The Google Future," Forrester Research Inc. Chairman and CEO George Colony said his Cambridge, Mass., company is predicting that Web pages will be replaced by a new software model known as the executable Internet, or X Internet, that will allow users to do much more than is possible with old, static Web pages.
Code division multiple access (CDMA) is a method of multiple access that does not divide up the channel by time (as in TDMA), or frequency (as in FDMA), but instead encodes data with a certain code associated with a channel and uses the constructive interference properties of the signal medium to perform the multiplexing. CDMA also refers to digital cellular telephony systems that makes use of this multiple access scheme, such as those pioneered by Qualcomm, or W-CDMA.
Level: Intermediate
Nicholas Lesiecki (ndlesiecki@apache.org ), Software engineer/Programming instructor, Google
01 Nov 2005
AOP makes it easier than it's ever been to write tests specific to your application's crosscutting concerns. Find out why and how to do it, as Nicholas Lesiecki introduces you to the benefits of testing aspect-oriented code and presents a catalog of patterns for testing crosscutting behavior in AspectJ.more..
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Here are a few examples of Flash memory:
In this article, we'll find out how Flash memory works and look at some of the forms it takes and types of devices that use it.
OnJava has published an article by Brad Neuberg on handling the back button and bookmarking in an AJAX application . These two issues are some of the most often cited problems with AJAX outside of application design. The article covers the use of the "Really Simple History" library to provide workable functionality for AJAX.
More and more mission-critical and large scale applications are now running on Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Those mission-critical applications such as banking and billing ask for more high availability (HA), while those large scale systems such as Google and Yahoo ask for more scalability. The importance of high availability and scalability in today's increasingly inter-connected world can be proved by a well known incident: a 22-hour service outage of eBay in June 1999, caused an interruption of around 2.3 million auctions, and made a 9.2 percent drop in eBay's stock value.
J2EE clustering is a popular technology to provide high available and scalable services with fault tolerance. But due to the lack of support from the J2EE specification, J2EE vendors implement clustering differently, which causes a lot of trouble for J2EE architects and developers. Following questions are common:
The best way to understand the limitations and considerations is to study their implementations and uncover the hood of J2EE clustering.
http://www.theserverside.com/articles/content/J2EEClustering/article.htmlLevel: Intermediate
George Franciscus ( george.franciscus@nexcel.ca), Principal, Nexcel
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| Eric Lundquist | |||
| Opinion: After Google and Sun held a press conference, the buzz was overpowering, and sometimes that is all that is required to move markets, shake the competition and get customers to consider new alternatives. |  | |
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Once, when mainframes ruled the Earth, IBM could make or break its competitors by merely mentioning the name of the next generation of big iron. The early announcement of a new mainframe could freeze the entire market as customers held off purchasing or leasing any new boxes until the next IBM system appeared. A simple price change would roil the market for months. It was indeed the time when dinosaurs ruled. | ||
In this article, Frank Teti shows us how to architect for RBAC within an environment centered on J2EE using a TAI.
J2EE security is still all about application-bound authorization and authentication not perimeter security. However, in a highly distributed J2EE architecture, the evolving Java 2 Security “Sandbox Model”, including Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) 1.0 plus vendor extensions is essentially a ubiquitous, enterprise-wide security model.
The power of JAAS is in its ability to use almost any underlying security system, such as, the local operating system, LDAP, RACF or Oblix NetPoint. Increasingly, one of the more popular alternatives is to use a Trust Association Interceptor (TAI). A TAI provides support to J2EE resources for role-based access and user-based single sign-on and is becoming one of the more popular alternatives.
Read "The Power of JAAS: Security System Alternatives"
About five years ago I worked on a web app project where one of the primary requirements was that it should look, work and feel like a Windows-based fat client. Now, ignoring the question of why it was not in fact done as a Windows-based fat client in the first place, that can be a rather tough requirement in the world of web development, certainly it was five years ago when not very many examples of such a thing existed.
As a result of a number of proof-of-concepts, I stumbled upon some techniques for doing things that were at the time rather atypical approaches to web development. The end result was an application that, to this day, many people cannot even tell is web-based, aside from the fact that you access it with a browser!
Little did I know that only a few years later the basic concepts behind what I had done would re-emerge in the world as something called Ajax. Ajax is a term coined by the folks at Adaptive Path and is shorthand for Asynchronous Javascript + XML.
This just goes to show, patenting every idea you ever have is indeed a good way to riches! If only I would have thought what I did was anything special! But I digress…
Google is doing it. So are many others. But what is it? In a nutshell, the Ajax concept, which is not a concrete technology implementation but rather a way of thinking and a set of techniques that go along with the mindset, is concerned with the idea that rebuilding a web page for every user interaction is inefficient and should be avoided.
Brian Goetz continues to lift the lid and peak into the inner workings of Java in Java Urban Performance Legends . In this article he exposes the fallacy behind some of the more common performance myths found in the annals of the JVM.
The article takes a deep look at memory management has improved over the years and how this improvement has invalidated many of the techniques that developers generally believe help performance. The article winds up an explanation of escape analysis and how this technology will further improve the JVMs ability to manage memory.
Is the JVM technology fast enough for you or does you JVM cause you performance grief?
February 18, 2005
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.
-- Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
-- Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
-- Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
-- View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
-- Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
-- Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
-- Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
-- Immediately resize the browser window to 800x600 or a custom size.
-- Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
-- Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
-- Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.
The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.
| Jakarta Struts Cookbook | ||
| By Bill Siggelkow | ||
| Publisher | : O'Reilly | |
|---|---|---|
| Pub Date | : February 2005 | |
| ISBN | : 0-596-00771-X | |
| Pages | : 526 | |
Under the agreement, the two firms will explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies like the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suite and the Java Runtime Environment.
Although the jury is still out, it is evident open-source software has and will continue to impact the software industry and the business models of new and existing companies, as both start-ups and large entrenched players vie to keep ahead of open-source projects.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1866023,00.asp
PostgreSQL has benefited well from its long history. Today, PostgreSQL is one of the most advanced database servers available. Here are a few of the features found in a standard PostgreSQL distribution:
Object-relational In PostgreSQL, every table defines a class. PostgreSQL implements inheritance between tables (or, if you like, between classes). Functions and operators are polymorphic.
Standards compliant PostgreSQL syntax implements most of the SQL92 standard and many features of SQL99. Where differences in syntax occur, they are most often related to features unique to PostgreSQL.
Open source An international team of developers maintains PostgreSQL. Team members come and go, but the core members have been enhancing PostgreSQL's performance and feature set since at least 1996. One advantage to PostgreSQL's open-source nature is that talent and knowledge can be recruited as needed. The fact that this team is international ensures that PostgreSQL is a product that can be used productively in any natural language, not just English.
Transaction processing PostgreSQL protects data and coordinates multiple concurrent users through full transaction processing. The transaction model used by PostgreSQL is based on multi-version concurrency control (MVCC). MVCC provides much better performance than you would find with other products that coordinate multiple users through table-, page-, or row-level locking.
Referential integrity PostgreSQL implements complete referential integrity by supporting foreign and primary key relationships as well as triggers. Business rules can be expressed within the database rather than relying on an external tool.
Multiple procedural languages Triggers and other procedures can be written in any of several procedural languages. Server-side code is most commonly written in PL/pgSQL, a procedural language similar to Oracle's PL/SQL. You can also develop server-side code in Tcl, Perl, even bash (the open-source Linux/Unix shell).
Multiple-client APIs PostgreSQL supports the development of client applications in many languages. This book describes how to interface to PostgreSQL from C, C++, ODBC, Perl, PHP, Tcl/Tk, and Python.
Unique data types PostgreSQL provides a variety of data types. Besides the usual numeric, string, and data types, you will also find geometric types, a Boolean data type, and data types designed specifically to deal with network addresses.
Extensibility One of the most important features of PostgreSQL is that it can be extended. If you don't find something that you need, you can usually add it yourself. For example, you can add new data types, new functions and operators, and even new procedural and client languages. There are many contributed packages available on the Internet. For example, Refractions Research, Inc. has developed a set of geographic data types that can be used to efficiently model spatial (GIS) data.
The Spring Framework is an open source application framework that aims to make J2EE development easier.
| Important | Spring is an application framework. Unlike single-tier frameworks such as Struts or Hibernate, Spring aims to help structure whole applications in a consistent, productive manner, pulling together best-of-breed single-tier frameworks to create a coherent architecture. |
Since the widespread implementation of J2EE applications in 1999/2000, J2EE has not been an unqualified success in practice. While it has brought a welcome standardization to core middle- tier concepts such as transaction management, many — perhaps most — J2EE applications are over- complex, take excessive effort to develop, and exhibit disappointing performance. While Spring is applicable in a wide range of environments — not just server-side J2EE applications — the original motivation for Spring was the J2EE environment, and Spring offers many valuable services for use in J2EE applications.
Experience has highlighted specific causes of complexity and other problems in J2EE applications. (Of course, not all of these problems are unique to J2EE!) In particular:
J2EE applications tend to contain excessive amounts of "plumbing" code. In the many code reviews we've done as consultants, time and time again we see a high proportion of code that doesn't do anything: JNDI lookup code, Transfer Objects, try/catch blocks to acquire and release JDBC resources. . . . Writing and maintaining such plumbing code proves a major drain on resources that should be focused on the application's business domain.
Many J2EE applications use a distributed object model where this is inappropriate. This is one of the major causes of excessive code and code duplication. It's also conceptually wrong in many cases; internally distributed applications are more complex than co-located applications, and often much less performant. Of course, if your business requirements dictate a distributed architecture, you need to implement a distributed architecture and accept the tradeoff that incurs (and Spring offers features to help in such scenarios). But you shouldn't do so without a compelling reason.
The EJB component model is unduly complex. EJB was conceived as a way of reducing complexity when implementing business logic in J2EE applications; it has not succeeded in this aim in practice.
EJB is overused. EJB was essentially designed for internally distributed, transactional applications. While nearly all non-trivial applications are transactional, distribution should not be built into the basic component model.
Many "J2EE design patterns" are not, in fact, design patterns, but workarounds for technology limitations. Overuse of distribution, and use of complex APIs such as EJB, have generated many questionable design patterns; it's important to examine these critically and look for simpler, more productive, approaches.
J2EE applications are hard to unit test. The J2EE APIs, and especially, the EJB component model, were defined before the agile movement took off. Thus their design does not take into account ease of unit testing. Through both APIs and implicit contracts, it is surprisingly difficult to test applications based on EJB and many other J2EE APIs outside an application server. Yet unit testing outside an application server is essential to achieve high test coverage and to reproduce many failure scenarios, such as loss of connectivity to a database. It is also vital to ensuring that tests can be run quickly during the development or maintenance process, minimizing unproductive time waiting for redeployment.
Certain J2EE technologies have simply failed. The main offender here is entity beans, which have proven little short of disastrous for productivity and in their constraints on object orientation.
To make the most effective use of Spring, it's important to understand the motivation behind it. Spring partly owes its success to its being based on a clear vision, and remaining true to that vision as its scope has expanded.
The key Spring values can be summarized as follows:
Spring is a non-invasive framework. This is the key departure from most previous frameworks. Whereas traditional frameworks such as EJB or Apache Avalon force application code to be aware of the framework, implementing framework-specific interfaces or extending framework- specific classes, Spring aims to minimize the dependence of application code on the framework. Thus Spring can configure application objects that don't import Spring APIs; it can even be used to configure many legacy classes that were written without any knowledge of Spring. This has many benefits. For example:
Application code written as part of a Spring application can be run without Spring or any other container.
Lock-in to Spring is minimized. For example, you could migrate to another lightweight container, or possibly even reuse application objects in an EJB 3.0 EJB container, which supports a subset of Spring's Dependency Injection capability.
Migration to future versions of Spring is easier. The less your code depends on the framework, the greater the decoupling between the implementation of your application and that of the framework. Thus the implementation of Spring can change significantly without breaking your code, allowing the framework to be improved while preserving backward compatibility.
Of course in some areas, such as the web framework, it's impossible to avoid application code depending on the framework. But Spring consistently attempts to reach the non-invasive ideal where configuration management is concerned.
Spring provides a consistent programming model, usable in any environment. Many web applications simply don't need to run on expensive, high-end, application servers, but are better off running on a web container such as Tomcat or Jetty. It's also important to remember that not all applications are server-side applications. Spring provides a programming model that insulates application code from environment details such as JNDI, making code less dependent on its runtime context.
Spring aims to promote code reuse. Spring helps to avoid the need to make some important hard decisions up front, like whether your application will ever use JTA or JNDI; Spring abstractions will allow you to deploy your code in a different environment if you ever need to. Thus Spring enables you to defer architectural choices, potentially delivering benefits such as the need to purchase an application server license only when you know exactly what your platform requirements are, following tests of throughput and scalability.
Spring aims to facilitate Object Oriented design in J2EE applications. You might be asking "How can a J2EE application, written in Java — an OO language — not be OO?" In reality, many J2EE applications do not deserve the name of OO applications. Spring aims to remove some of the impediments in place of OO in traditional designs. As one of the reviewers on this book commented, "The code I've seen from my team in the year since we adopted Spring has consistently been better factored, more coherent, loosely coupled and reusable."
Spring aims to facilitate good programming practice, such as programming to interfaces, rather than classes. Use of an IoC container such as Spring greatly reduces the complexity of coding to interfaces, rather than classes, by elegantly concealing the specification of the desired implementation class and satisfying its configuration requirements. Callers using the object through its interface are shielded from this detail, which may change as the application evolves.
Spring promotes pluggability. Spring encourages you to think of application objects as named services. Ideally, the dependencies between such services are expressed in terms of interfaces. Thus you can swap one service for another without impacting the rest of your application. The way in which each service is configured is concealed from the client view of that service.
Spring facilitates the extraction of configuration values from Java code into XML or properties files. While some configuration values may be validly coded in Java, all nontrivial applications need some configuration externalized from Java source code, to allow its management without recompilation or Java coding skills. (For example, if there is a timeout property on a particular object, it should be possible to alter its value without being a Java programmer.) Spring encourages developers to externalize configuration that might otherwise have been inappropriately hard-coded in Java source code. More configurable code is typically more maintainable and reusable.
Spring is designed so that applications using it are as easy as possible to test. As far as possible, application objects will be POJOs, and POJOs are easy to test; dependence on Spring APIs will normally be in the form of interfaces that are easy to stub or mock. Unlike the case of JNDI, for example, stubbing or mocking is easy; unlike the case of Struts, for example, application classes are seldom forced to extend framework classes that themselves have complex dependencies.
Spring is consistent. Both in different runtime environments and different parts of the framework, Spring uses a consistent approach. Once you learn one part of the framework, you'll find that that knowledge can be leveraged in many others.
Spring promotes architectural choice. While Spring provides an architectural backbone, Spring aims to facilitate replaceability of each layer. For example, with a Spring middle tier, you should be able to switch from one O/R mapping framework to another with minimal impact on business logic code, or switch from, say, Struts to Spring MVC or WebWork with no impact on the middle tier.
Spring does not reinvent the wheel. Despite its broad scope, Spring does not introduce its own solution in areas such as O/R mapping where there are already good solutions. Similarly, it does not implement its own logging abstraction, connection pool, distributed transaction coordinator, remoting protocols, or other system services that are already well-served in other products or application servers. However, Spring does make these existing solutions significantly easier to use, and places them in a consistent architectural approach.
| option | purpose |
| -Xdebug | Enables debugging support in the VM |
| -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n | Loads in-process debugging libraries and specifies the kind of connection to be made. |
