Fish and Rice

2005-08-17T10:52:00.000+05:30

This is s test post

To hell with the JDK really!

2005-05-09T00:20:00.000+05:30

First of all a big congratulations to the Apache team for dreaming up one of the most fantastic pieces of cinematic ideas ever imagined.

The Apache team is going on a journey “Where no one has ever gone before” and aims to create a “Compatible, independent implementation of J2SE 5 under the Apache License v2”.

WOW! This is George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry rolled into one huge block buster. I can't wait for Christmas or Durga Pujo for that matter.

It is not that people have not tried to re invent the JVM/JDK wheel. The open source landscape is strewn with failures such as GCJ and Classpath, which are currently being used by all but a large group of 3 students in the University of Timbuktu!

How many more commercially irrelevant JVMs do you want?

IMO it will be almost impossible to re create or re write a vast and quite complicated API like Java. You see the JDK is just not java.util.* and java.lang.*, but contains a whole lot of stuff like Swing, AWT, Naming, Java 2D, JDBC and of course a state of the art Garbage Collection mechanism in it's JVM.

I suggest an alternate to the Apache team.

Do not re-write the entire JDK. If you want, you could for instance just re-write the java.io.* package, bundle it in a jar archive and let people drop this into their lib/endorsed directory. This would ensure that users get a better implementation if IO, but do not have to deal with a crappy implementation of Swing. All JVMs support this modular architecture as of today, where by if I wanted to replace a JVM supplied class with my own implementation (same package name), I can just drop into an endorsed directory and JVM class loaders would pick this up.

Give users the option of native compilation instead of the currently prevailing Just In Time native compilation, if that is what they require. The Excelisor JET JVM with its Ahead of Time compilation could be a good guide towards that end.

In fact, if I were running the Apache Foundation today, I would rather have the best people within the group build the next generation Rich Internet Web Application architecture and a new Apache Web Server to support this architecture. In other words do exactly what Microsoft is doing Smart Clients and Macromedia(Oops Adomedia) is doing with Flex. To hell with the JDK really!

Would you choose a JSR-168 Portlet implemenation?

2005-05-02T22:25:00.000+05:30

If you ever have to build a non trivial portal, composed of things like Charts, Tree Table views, Sortable tables etc, would you choose a JSR-168 Portlet implementation like Liferay, Stringbeans or Exo as your basic platform?

I have put my problems with the JSR-168 specification here, and I thought, it would be nice if I could take a second opinion. So this poll.....

Add MHTML saving capability to Firefox

2005-03-22T10:59:00.000+05:30

The problem

Normally when you save a web page, this creates a .Html file and a single or more folder containing all the images used in the web page. This is really inconvenient if you want to move the .Html file to different folders, drives etc. Generally people cut paste the .Html but forget to move the ancillary images folder, or worse still they do copy the images folder, but mess up relative locations by changing the directory levels.
The solution to this problem is clear a mechanism that allows us to save a web page as a single file, and not a group of files and folders. Such a single file can be moved around easily without loosing the images or styled texts within the web page.

The solution

Internet Explorer has this really nifty feature that allows you to save a web page as a single document. In order to use this option, open a web page that you want to save, go to the "File" menu and choose "Save As". In the "Save Web Page" dialog, focus on the "Save as type" drop down. Choose the "Web Archive,single file(*.mht)" opton, provide a file name and click "Save.

This creates a single .mhtml file. The way Internet Explorer handles it, is by serializing(writing) all images and css in the same html file where the content originally resides.

Sadly this feature was missing in Firefox.

The Firefox solution

MAF extension is a plugin that allows us to save a web page in a number of formats including .mhtml. Click here to download this plugin. To install just, drag and drop the downloaded .xpi file to your "Tools>Extensions" dialog window, and then restart Firefox.

CleanSoftware.org

2005-01-12T01:01:00.000+05:30

I found their collection of clean and free software pretty interesting. A really nice collection of free to use software, minus any spyware.

Yes, Firefox is listed :)

A Clever System.println Trick

2004-12-06T20:43:00.000+05:30

This is really a neat trick to suppress unwanted println on which I don't have any control.

Why JSF will not impact in a big way

2004-12-02T20:39:00.000+05:30

Java Server Faces, in case you were living in some cave all this while long, is a new web application development paradigm being touted by Sun. JSF tries do exactly what Swing has done for desktop development years ago.
It is built on a solid MVC foundation, with the VIEW becoming a set of res-usable components each firing their own events. The controller, which listens and responds to these events, is flexible enough to allow for page flow to be defined in a file called faces-config.xml. So the familiar SWING concept of event based programming rather than the currently used request-response web based programming model, is introduced.

You can read all about JSF from this excellent book on the same subject.

JSF has also got competition in the form of Macromedia’s Flex, Microsoft’s Win Forms or even Lazlo.

However, the basic mistake that all of them are making, is that they use the ubiquitous web browser as their delivery medium. In other words these applications run within the web browser. Such an exercise IMHO is like trying to fit a Dodge Viper’s v10 engine on to Rover Mini’s chassis.

Is that doable? Yes of course, but why would someone in heaven’s name do that? Why can’t there be a Rich Internet Client Platform, where one can deploy and run Rich Internet Applications. Why target the poor old browser. The web browser was created just to browse a set of hyper-linked documents. That’s it. Later on, somebody wanted the browser to host data entry forms, and so we added Java Script to allow for client side validations. When the e-commerce boom happed, the browser was now asked to participate in transactions. Thousands of web developers were now, inventing solutions to alleviate the “back button problem”, “the double submit problem” and so on. You see the web-browser was never designed to participate in transactions, which lead to these classic problems. And finally, now as if we have not made enough mistakes, this Rich Internet clients wave, is again targeting the web browser to manage something, which it was never designed for.

The browser is dead, html is dead, we have got to move onto something that is similar to Eclipse’s Rich Client Platform, although Eclipse’s RCP is still not the right thing.
In my view the best RCP would be something that provides me with the following

1.A set of communication API’s
2.A robust and flexible GUI toolkit
3.An application development framework.
4.Tools to quickly create rich, compelling and interactive web applications.

No more sorting on the serve-side period.

Oracle App Server:Just the Server

2004-11-22T17:30:00.000+05:30

I was trying to figure out, as to how one can run Oracle's AppServer outside of Jdev, and that too without any flab like Oracle Portal or Enterprise Manager. Just the damn app server and nothing else!
Now I thought it should be possible considering the "orion" roots of this product.

Turns out that this is indeed possible.
This link is a good resource for anyone who wants to download and run just the appserver, or just the appserver and a whole lot more.

Another link points towards the documentation. Check out specially this link, which is the Oracle App Server Standalone User Guide.

For other documents check out this link also.

Open Software and the Nation

2004-11-22T13:24:00.000+05:30

This should be an eye opener for those who still advocate closed source OS and software products. What is happening in Kerala today needs to be replicated all over the world.

I as an Indian feel really ashamed when the country's prime minister reserves time for Microsoft's CEO . The guy has come here to promote the use of “Windows” in more and more government offices!
As a Prime Minister Mr Singh should be more concerned about running the country.

JVM Options : Black Magic Once Again

2004-11-17T16:55:00.000+05:30

This document is a compilation of all the JVM options for various versions of the JVM on primarily SPARC/Solaris Platform. The descriptions for each option are taken mostly verbatim from the reference documents.

A must see for every Systems Engineer, or even us ordinary developers. The only thing is that a lot of the options actually work or are effective on the Solaris Platform.

For options on Linux and Windows see the following

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/tooldocs/windows/java.html
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/tooldocs/linux/java.html

Great Listing of JTable Customizations

2004-06-03T23:24:00.000+05:30

Some the customizations include
1. Displaying any JComponent inside a JTable cell.
2. Merging Cells.
3. Creating row headers.
4. Sorting a table (look for the latest edition of java tutorial for a better solution)
5. Displaying a JButton inside a JTable cell.
6. Showing data tips.

etc.

About Swing Usability.

2004-05-31T23:05:00.000+05:30

I have been reading the forum discussion taking place at java.net over the last couple of days, and here is a summary of what I think a lot of us Swing developers want.

1. For Swing components to be more usable, it seems that they, not only have to emulate the look of native components, but also the feel of native components as well. A case in point is this..This is where I think Sun's current implementation of Swing lacks in.

2. More "Out of the Box" components. If you go through this list of Swing components page you will find that there at least 5 implementations of a Calendar Dialog, a Font Chooser and numerous other implementations of Wizard frameworks. With so many open source projects cropping up, we developers tend to choose implementaion of components on our own whims and fancies as most of the listed implementations are stable. Now this creates a situation where every John on this planet gets presented with a new type of Calendar Dialog while using any swing gui. If Sun could provide more out of the box widgets this will go a long way towards gui standardisation, which in turn would benefit application users by cutting out the surpsrise element in their user experience.
Other ideas for "Out of the Box" widgets are
A>A professional property sheet.
B> An enhanced Datagrid (like the ones provided by JClass etc)

3. Change in the JInternal Frame behaviour. When you place a JInternal Frame inside desktop pane, you would expect that when you maximise this internal frame the entire close,minimise and maximise/restore button group would appear to the extreme right of the menubar of your application. Instead they appear in the extreme top-right corner of the desktop pane. This is irritating .The internal frames (top components as they call it) inside the Netbeans 3.6 IDE corrects this problem and I think there is no reason why Sun cannot adapt this solution into the Swing's JInternalFrameUI.

4. Adopt and Add widely used open source layout managers like TableLayout, JGoodies Forms layout etc into the layout package.

5. Last but not least please give us an Application Development Framework over Swing API. I am talking about exactly the same features that JFace adds over the SWT API.

My first image upload using the "hello" software.

2004-05-30T16:12:00.000+05:30

Me and my friends at Raichak. Circa 2002. I am the third person from left, sitting next to the guy wearing the blue shirt.

If asked to build a Portal, would you choose any of the Java Portlet Specification-JSR168 implementations?
	Yes, a JSR -168 implementation would be an ideal candidate.
	No ways, I would actually choose PHP based portal solutions like drupal.
	No, I would roll out my own Meta Data Driven UI Framework.
	No, I would simply deliver a JSP,JSP Taglibs, Servlet, JDBC based solution.
	No, I would roll out my own Meta Data Driven UI Framework, which also incorporates JSF, Tapestry, Spring , Hibernate and other best of the breed components

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