tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78753380752751553082012-01-19T22:30:28.778+11:00A Techie's blog on technology, philosophy and life in the middleJohn Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.comBlogger821100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-53744841013613878782012-01-19T22:16:00.002+11:002012-01-19T22:19:52.392+11:00

Setting up an authentication module is one of the primary tasks that come across a web-developer's canvas when coding a web-application.In this post, I'll detail the basic steps needed to set up a database backed authentication realm and outline the configuration files that need to be updated when using a Tomcat 7.0.0 servlet container. This post is NOT about security or securing the web-app

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-2760743677496122692011-12-28T16:16:00.005+11:002011-12-28T16:22:58.373+11:00

ColorBrewer is an excellent library for creating dynamic color palettes that can be used to apply colors to a map based on the spread of data values. The ColorBrewer web tool allows you to select a color scheme based on the nature of the data (sequential, diverging, qualitative) and  the number of data classes present in the data. You can opt to select a color scheme that is color blind safe and

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-59462175376299279342011-12-25T23:12:00.001+11:002011-12-27T23:16:43.954+11:00

The last time I put together my thoughts before India (the then Twenty20 World Champions) toured Australia, and predicted an exciting time, little did I realise that the tour would become infamous for all the wrong reasons. This time around, both teams have resolved to play cricket in the spirit that it is meant to be played. Michael Clarke will be leading a relatively inexperienced side

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-53279061871747650582011-11-25T11:53:00.003+11:002011-11-26T11:32:23.176+11:00

After 2.5 years, JFreeChart came out with a new release of the toolkit on Nov 21,2011.Version 1.0.14 promises bug fixes, improvements in the TimeSeries graphing and much more. Over the last few years, JFreeChart has been a popular open source choice for charts and graphs in Java.  The previous version has been download close to 430,000 times and while there are not many examples available

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-71739882137026611492011-11-19T11:12:00.005+11:002011-11-19T22:20:07.162+11:00

Spent the last few nights experimenting with the bleeding edge of Java Server Faces (JSF), Prime Faces and Tomcat and expectedly came away bloody and a lot more wiser. Java Server Faces has come a long way in the last 5 years or so but a steep learning curve and relatively poor documentation makes it even harder to adapt. The latest specification release of JSF is 2.1, compatible with JavaEE

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-43743210741719716372011-11-10T13:42:00.012+11:002011-11-10T14:04:59.433+11:00

Deploying your web-application using the tomcat-maven-plugin can be done by as follows: 1. Create a user in Tomcat with the manager-script role. Before Tomcat 7.0, this was accomplished using the manager role. The user details can be sepecifed in the conf/tomcat-users.xml file as follows: 2. Now you need to tell maven that it can deploy applications to Tomcat using this role. To set this

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-50833171306700520482011-11-02T20:16:00.010+11:002011-11-14T21:04:15.426+11:00

log4j has been a popular logging framework in Java applications for several years. It is simple to implement, thread safe and light weight. While there are no current major releases planned, it is still a popular download among the Apache Logging Services toolset.To add log4j to your project using Maven, add the following dependency snippet to your code log4j log4j 1.2.16 Maven will

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-44463396264410494842011-10-29T20:10:00.000+11:002011-10-29T20:10:06.398+11:00

I recently tried out the 'R' toolkit for performing some statistical operations and was impressed with the power and the extensibility of the toolkit in manipulating terra-byte sized data and its ability to produce publication ready graphs. Being open-source, it is available under the GNU GPL and can be downloaded from a CRAN site and set up to run on Windows, UNIX or Mac OS. The toolkit

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-61244688765224023632011-10-18T11:31:00.001+11:002011-10-18T19:13:52.454+11:00

GeoTools is an excellent Geographical Information System (GIS) toolkit for Java. It is open-source and has regular updates. The last released version at the time of writing is 2.7 released on the 7th of October 2011. The toolkit also serves as an engine for some other GIS based open-source tools such as uDig, GeoMajas and GeoServer.GeoTools also has some good supporting documentation with

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-74613938273889534232011-09-24T13:52:00.000+10:002011-09-24T13:52:32.712+10:00

With the transition of the Maven2Eclipse plugin project from the Sonatype boys to the Eclipse umbrella, support for running Maven from within Eclipse has become smoother and definitely easier. To get started, install the Maven2Eclipse plugin from within Eclipse using the Help->Install new software menu option. The link to the plugin download is http://download.eclipse.org/technology/m2e/releases

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-66102861866354915942011-09-16T23:05:00.001+10:002011-09-16T23:06:24.400+10:00

Consider the situation where you have been given a database schema to work with but there is no E-R diagram documentation available and you need to re-design the database schema. The first step would be to try and understand the existing schema by generating an Entity-Relationship (ER) diagram from the existing database schema.To get an E-R diagram where none is provided, use SchemaSpy. SchemaSpy

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-46209181663454233392011-09-10T13:12:00.000+10:002011-09-10T13:12:12.638+10:00

The Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) is another useful tool within the Eclipse suite that offers an open source framework for the designing model driven applications. In terms of technology, EMF unifies Java, XML and UML. Given a 'model' described in either of the three technologies i.e Java, UML or XML schema, it is possible to generate the other two. To get an idea of what type of applications

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-68889100169327564892011-09-03T15:05:00.003+10:002011-09-06T12:09:09.711+10:00

The latest release of Eclipse code named Indigo includes the WindowsBuilder project as an open source project within the Eclipse umbrella of projects. WindowsBuilder which is a significant GUI designing tool in its own right provides a WYSIWYG editor for desgining Swing and SWT interfaces from within Eclipse. WindowsBuilder comes bundled with the standard download 'Eclipse IDE for Java Developers

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-64660996391207816442011-08-28T19:35:00.001+10:002011-09-11T18:49:15.362+10:00

JGraph  has an excellent open source Java based diagram creation tool. The guys who have developed the tool also give access to a free online diagram creation tool which is pretty nifty and useful if you don't have MS Visio installed and need a quick diagram on the fly. Once created, the diagram can be downloaded as in xml, jpg or png formats.

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-16395908353245579382011-07-23T00:10:00.004+10:002011-07-23T00:17:30.481+10:00

If you have been living in the Test Driven Development (TDD) world, then Mocks and Stubs will be second nature to you. The very philosophy of writing a test case before writing any code sounds like putting the cart before the horse but when you start implementing the practice, it all begins to make sense. Your tests before 'smaller'. They don't have dependencies between them and your code is  

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-50174971725776590842011-07-14T10:54:00.006+10:002011-07-14T11:12:55.310+10:00

With Java 7 (codename : Dolphin, Project Coin) slated for an official July 28, 2011 release and a developer preview available, it is encouraging to see the excitement generated by the Java 7 celebration webcast. Its been around 18 months since Oracle absorbed Java and there was a bit of uncertainty when all one would see in the Java updates was be the re-branding of JDK with the Oracle logo.While

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-46792447257157319252011-07-02T11:43:00.011+10:002011-07-17T19:49:43.173+10:00

While Eclipse is a well known and respected development platform, it also serves as a basis for the development of RCP (Rich Client Platform) applications. In doing so, Eclipse presents itself as an open tools platform. Since the architecture of the Eclipse platform is modular and is built upon the plugin methodology, it is possible to reuse the core components of the Eclipse platform and build

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-7280644624288721022011-06-28T19:40:00.006+10:002011-07-15T23:15:28.359+10:00

Eclipse Indigo became available for download on June 22,2011. 62 teams coordinated in bringing together 46 million lines of code to make this release possible.I download a copy and noticed a marked improvement in Project Refresh rates. While Indigo appears to be faster, it has bought in some key features such Better support for using GIT, WindowsBuilder for GUI development and automated

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-48954728726995964612011-04-14T23:30:00.007+10:002011-09-10T15:13:10.031+10:00

"If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul".- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Writing a research paper is an art. Some people get it right in the first go and some don't even after several attempts. My readings have educated me to a couple of simple facts. I will share them with you in

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-47784642723393255832010-10-25T10:52:00.013+11:002011-09-11T18:00:17.492+10:00

James, M.,Grozev, G.,  Page, J., & Yum, K., "Using Genersys to model electricity generation expansion", In Proceedings of International Congress on Modelling and Simulation (MODSIM 2011), Perth (Australia), December 2011 Yum,K., George, G.,James,M., &. Page,J., "Solar Power Supply to Mitigate the Diurnal and Seasonal Electricity Demand in Victoria", In Proceedings of Solar2010, the 48th

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-64005894290719139922010-06-16T11:54:00.003+10:002010-10-25T10:54:18.834+11:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More security

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-35804044892985795112009-11-05T15:10:00.001+11:002009-11-05T15:16:05.118+11:00

Serializing XML to (Java) objects and back just became simpler with what is being touted as the fastest and the simplest XML serializer, XStream.According to this bench marking excercise, XStream is the fastest Serializer to hit our Java objects. While marshalling and unmarshalling is a time consuming task, using XStream would definitely be a performance boost. But while speed and its low memory

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-40946348843554053252009-10-20T13:57:00.004+11:002009-10-20T14:03:09.707+11:00

Sometimes it is more convenient to package your Java application into a single JAR which includes all dependencies and works just like an executable. This seemingly simple objective becomes complicated when the dependencies include otherJAR files as one can run into JAR Hell with the Java Class Loader. One possibility of achieving the goal of having a single executable jar is using One Jar.

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-48955728038846868002009-10-06T14:25:00.002+11:002009-10-06T14:28:57.683+11:00

Scalable Vector Graphics provide a rich source of functionality that allow applications to manipulate and respond to the user interactions with the image. Creating and modifying SVG images is possible using one of the several open source tools available. Batik SVG Toolkit is an impressive Java based open source SVG toolkit that provides libraries for the dynamic manipulation of SVG

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-47872347152566922682009-07-06T12:15:00.003+10:002009-07-06T12:29:42.665+10:00

Last night, Federer created history by overtaking Sampras as the all time winner of 15 Grand Slam titles. In doing so, he set another record by appearing in his seventh consecutive Wimbledon final but spare a thought for the man who stood in his way and threatened to spoil the party, Andy Roddick.Roddick came to this final a record of 18 loses and only 2 wins against Federer. This was hardly

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-79375921261176456112009-06-08T12:07:00.003+10:002009-06-08T12:16:52.326+10:00

Federrer finally got what he wanted.A complete Slam!True, he didn't have to overcome the challenge of having to face his greatest nemesis, Rafa over the net in the finals, yet there was no question about his form and ability. After a scratchy beginning to the tournament during which he dropped two sets against Tommy Haas and nearly went to the brink, Federrer regained control and played down the

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-87923037955237498912009-06-06T19:09:00.005+10:002011-11-25T13:25:42.416+11:00

Most applications require a unique id to be assigned to the record. While a unique id can be implemented in several ways, SQL Server offers the option of using a Computed Column to generate and maintain these values. Computed Columns enable the implementation of some complex logic via a User Defined Function (UDF) in generating the value of the corresponding row. For example: Consider an

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-39546860123909320522009-05-17T01:04:00.002+10:002009-05-17T01:21:58.673+10:00

While administering Subversion is a simple task, getting all developers to add comments to their subversion is not. The importance of having comments while checking-in their code helps especially in an Agile environment where in there may be several check ins during the day and comments are an important tool in communicating what was done. Fortunately for those forgetful developers, there is help

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-88225859253673884902009-05-10T14:22:00.007+10:002009-05-10T15:00:57.893+10:00

I recently used Hibernate Annotations in a project and was impressed by the power and relative flexibility offered by annotations and the difference it made with regards to cleaning up the project build. While the major advantage of using annotations was that I could completely get rid of the hibernate mapping xmls, it also made life easier when it came to specifying relationships between my

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-74043876710376077272009-03-21T09:59:00.003+11:002009-03-21T10:22:07.661+11:00

Spring Security (formely ACEGI) is a fairly robust and flexible framework that fits in well with a J2EE solution stack. Some of the main features that made us choose Spring was its flow transition authorization policy and its database backed 'remember me' implementation.Based on this, we decided to use Spring Security 2.0.4 on a JBOSS 4.0.5 server. The Spring component authenticates and

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-6344738869722229792009-02-02T00:48:00.007+11:002009-02-03T14:41:35.162+11:00

Incredible! This one word sums up Rafa's game in the Australian Open 2009 final. As Jim Courier put it "How is this guy even on his feet?". But on his feet he was and for more than 18 hours 54 minutes of playing time which included close to 10 hours in the last 48 hours of the Open.Incredible athleticism combined with a die-hard must win attitude cracked Federer's normally impassive veneer to

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-67775593597711208392008-12-14T20:04:00.014+11:002008-12-14T23:27:21.457+11:00

Given the usefulness and success of a Test Driven Development(TDD) approach for developing (Java based) web applications, it is imperative that a developer chooses a good testing framework for writing unit tests. One such popular open-source test case framework is JUnit.With JUnit 4.x, developer's can annotations to develop unit test cases. Annotations simplify the construction of test cases to

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-63128379267797218832008-12-13T20:25:00.004+11:002008-12-13T20:53:20.406+11:00

If your browsers have started playing up and are opening up new tabs whenever you Google something and these new tabs in turn are redirecting themselves to random sites that you in your normal sense would never visit then chances are high that you are a host to the Vundo Trojan. While the infection appears to stem from a vulnerability in Java 1.5.0_7, I found the infection on a system that was

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-67074897910299776192008-11-27T14:04:00.004+11:002008-11-27T16:14:10.494+11:00

Recently while evaluating Concourse's CRM product, Concursive for a proposed implementation, we nearly got taken in with Concourse's claim of the product being open-source. According to them, the product was "An open source Java-based application.." but on downloading it, the accompanying license stipulates quite clearly "You may not redistribute the code". Fine!! If I cannot redistribute the

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-12748996485971419202008-11-18T15:33:00.003+11:002011-10-18T19:44:30.842+11:00

On a recent engagement, I had another opportunity to work with jBPM. The BPM in jBPM stands for Business Process Management and since its a part of the JBOSS enterprise suite, it works closely with the JBOSS application server and the JBOSS Eclipse IDE. jBPM has its own Process Definition Lanaguage (jPDL) that it based on an XML schema. While learning the jPDL and designing a process is one

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-85429269785064369512008-10-20T00:22:00.007+11:002011-11-25T13:25:13.884+11:00

If you get "Software caused connection abort: recv failed" after attempting to login to your JBOSS server after a long period of idle time then you need to take a cup of coffee and sit down as this is going to take a while to fix. In a web application that we developed,  we were using a JBOSS server version 4.04, connecting to MYSQL 5.0.24 with Hibernate 3.1 and we started getting these

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-11790874912061087692008-10-15T22:36:00.003+11:002011-10-18T19:43:32.753+11:00

One night while half asleep, I had a dream and in my dreams I saw a website. WoW!! People have such cool dreams and I just saw a website. But in my dream, the website was not just a website, it was a cool thing, a platform for students to get together and help each other, a helpline for students. It was something that I had to act upon.Having been an International student myself, I understood

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-79070482864513392682008-09-10T21:06:00.011+10:002011-09-10T15:11:25.009+10:00

      ** Links to Sample Tests **JavaRanch's collection of sample tests and sites that give a very good overview of the questions. This is the most comprehensive set of links and tests. A MUST!! Good set of questions based on SCJP 1.4 but well worth a study. JavaProgramming's  set of tests. ** Links to Study Notes and Materials **Study Notes  on AK Gupta's site. Also visit his compilation of

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-89630688346672915472008-09-06T16:15:00.009+10:002011-07-23T00:19:21.727+10:00

(Please click on the images to get a more readable version). This week I thought of trying out a CodeKata problem and choose Kata 4 . The kata requires you to read a data file, parse it , extract some values and print the difference between them. A simple exercise one would say. To explain the problem in brief. A data file containing the results of the football league is provided. The

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-28651107870419063092008-08-09T16:03:00.008+10:002011-07-02T21:23:31.336+10:00

Late last month Cuil (pronounced 'Cool') became the latest entrant to the search domain. Launched by an ex-Googler, Cuil is old Irish word for 'Knowledge'. Its claim of claim of being the 'world's biggest search engine' and its approach in indexing information based on relavance and content has generated a lot of interest and hype.Barely a week old (It was launched on July 28, 2008), it is seen

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-53994050143020024742008-08-05T22:11:00.003+10:002008-08-07T01:48:39.960+10:00

Microsoft has a new game and its called 'Midori '. The new game looks just like an operating system, feels like an operating and IS an operating system. The only difference is that it will work unlike its much loved big brother -Windows in the sense that it is a 'network-centric' os. With Midori, MS is hopeful of opening the doors of cloud computing.To contain panic and dropping sales, Microsoft

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-30473708663200796982008-08-03T15:25:00.005+10:002008-08-08T10:41:33.167+10:00

With social networking becoming a widely acceptable and usable form of expression, the Web2.0 bandwagon has been able to piggyback into our lives without us really realizing it.I came across this 50 second video wherein Tim O'Reilly when asked a definition of Web2.0 responded with two nuggets. The network is the platform and users add value. I guess this is as clear and succinct that one could

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-40695981750315331782008-07-23T15:27:00.008+10:002011-09-12T14:02:10.115+10:00

Flock built using Mozilla's Firefox technology is a cool browser that implements social networking amongst other Web 2.0 features. The latest stable release available for download is 1.2 while version 2.0 is in beta testing. While configuring and adding different sites (Facebook, Blogger) is easy as pie, uploading photos to a Blogpost is where I pulled a hammy. While this post has been written

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-48131382983810272342008-07-20T15:16:00.009+10:002008-07-20T20:37:25.794+10:00

Last weekend, I had a conversation with a good friend that initially started off as an interesting technical discussion and degenerated into what I can only term 'raw negativity'.The negativity stemmed from my friend's 'firm' belief that a particular country that he had spend a significant amount of time in had made 'no progress in the last 50 years'. The transport system was very bad and no

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-57680816474133624062008-07-20T03:06:00.003+10:002008-07-20T03:22:04.700+10:00

Backbone magazine compiled a list of Canada's Top 20 Web2.0 practitioners. An interesting pick was Jiibe that reportedly helps you compare (hold your breathe) 'workplace culture'. Some of the workplace descriptions I came across were like.."Even if the customer isn't always right, their needs are usually taken care of over the needs of the employees." and"Like back in the wild west, this

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-43171759893596313732008-07-16T22:02:00.005+10:002008-07-17T14:10:07.512+10:00

Portlets have been around for a few years now and after JSR 168 have matured as a technology.Easy plugability, interoperability (of Portlets) with various Portal Servers (post JSR 168) and the rich user interfaces possible in Portlets have made them a popular choice in the J2EE development world. The main purpose of this post is to briefly explain the difference between a Portlet and a Servlet

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-44513355312457774172008-07-07T15:29:00.007+10:002008-07-23T15:34:10.563+10:00

I guess I am not an artist. I am not much of a photographer and moreover don't photograph people naked (especially children) so I guess I wouldn't know what I am 'talking about' but read my views if you care about what by-standers have to say about this whole controversy about nude children being photographed that has been raging in Australia for the last two months. Today, the PM of Australia,

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-65262866802310905762008-07-07T15:19:00.002+10:002008-07-07T15:28:32.464+10:00

Last night / early this morning, I witnessed one of the greatest tennis matches between probably who will be, the greatest champions of the modern day tennis era. Rafa beat the FedEx to win his First Wimbledon and in the process derailed Federer's quest for a sixth straight crown.It was a high voltage match that see-sawed as the champions fought it out, interrupted by rain and hampered by

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-53292633155505079922008-07-01T00:03:00.007+10:002008-07-01T00:27:04.365+10:00

Federer started week 2 at Wimbledon 2008 with a thumping straight sets win against Leyton Hewitt who didn't really play all that bad.Federrer just outplayed him and even though his game wasn't 100% on target, it was enough to earn him a well deserved straight sets victory.Going by the draw, it appears as if we may be treated to another Rafa vs Federrer final. Two finals in two months between

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-2970433865918311062008-06-12T15:14:00.006+10:002008-07-18T15:39:32.112+10:00

While reading up on the security concerns highlighted in this article from the NY Times, I could see many E2.0 evangelists shaking their head in despair. The recent attack on Google /Orkut's network that compromised close to 400,000 users within a few hours is going to scare people even more.Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is all about 'opening up', sharing information, communicating and

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-90760571258098635222008-06-08T14:37:00.006+10:002008-06-08T15:17:01.876+10:00

This morning, I was blessed to hear from Pastor Russel Ames, a very powerful and interesting insight on "Seeing the face of God". I have interspersed Pastor Ames's message with some of my own thoughts and the result is as under.Being a Christian and having professed my love for Christ, I have sometimes wondered what it would be like to 'see' God face-to-face. Moses saw the Glory of God but before

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-59021132738255975422008-05-27T16:35:00.009+10:002011-11-19T11:24:26.654+11:00

I recently happened to browse through Craig Storti's Speaking of India:Bridging the Communication Gap When Working With Indians and while I must applaud Craig for his attempt to explain the difference between Indians and Westerners and how they perceive each other, he appeared to have missed out one key point that is Westerners don't always catch and Indians never let go off and that is 'Spelling

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-8323795299933472312008-05-26T23:46:00.007+10:002008-06-08T01:38:45.508+10:00

I work for a traditional management consulting firm which is just beginning to embrace Web2.0 and its principles of blogging and Wikis. Today was a momentous day in the sense that I was involved setting up the corporate Wiki space where we (or rather projects) could create pages and collaborate using the functionality offered by the Wiki. Some of the managers I discussed the Wiki with, were

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-3287925780386171992008-05-17T15:21:00.006+10:002008-08-09T16:10:58.445+10:00

While reading up on Lucene, which is advertised as a 'high performance, scalable,powerful and accurate' search engine , I noticed that the search function available on the hosting Apache site was 'Search this site with Google'. Wouldn't a search want to use itself for the very purpose it existed??Needless to say, it doesn't inspire much confidence in all those who want to use it. Watch this space

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-22589329116722913292008-04-26T15:33:00.008+10:002008-08-08T11:16:26.318+10:00

I came across this excellent collection of open source tools and tag libraries with a focus on Java / J2EE tools. There are links and reviews of open source AJAX frameworks, content management systems, J2EE Frameworks, JSP tag libraries and a lot of other goodies.Most of the topic reference links are active and the content is relatively current. Worth bookmarking if you are working in the Java

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-54006562638389502612008-04-21T15:22:00.006+10:002008-04-26T15:31:19.146+10:00

With the influx of 'Web2.0' look and feel web-sites, the prevalence of curvy corners has caught the imagination of web-designers. While the majority of web sites having curvy corners require digital editing. In simple language, you would normally create an image with curved corners, cut off the corners and stick it into your web-page to get the appropriate look. However, if you aren't much of a

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-28909553647537945252008-04-05T22:37:00.015+11:002011-11-10T14:02:17.029+11:00

I recently implemented Pagination in my JSPs so that if there were several results returned by a query (Search function), the user could view the results in a page-wise format. The image on the right is what I ended up with after implementing pagination through an open-source tag library, displaytags. In this post I will explain the basic steps that I followed in order to install and use the tag

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-26317663210555113712008-03-02T22:07:00.002+11:002008-03-02T22:23:09.125+11:00

Indian cricket's new youthful face came of age at the Sydney Cricket Ground when they won the 1st final in the Commonwealth Bank Series. The match was special in more ways than one. The Indians lost the toss and saw the Aussies bat first. Something that is daunting in itself but the Indian team did not look down.The bowlers first stymied the Aussie batting Juggernaut by restricting them to measly

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-2248536098946873702008-02-29T14:08:00.007+11:002008-04-21T15:21:11.628+10:00

While Lazy Instantiation is an important feature and does improve performance in J2EE applications, it can be a bit of a headache if not correctly used or should I say implemented.Consider a J2EE scenario where you might have a one-to-many parent-child relationship defined between two classes.In the scenario, data retrieval is handled by the DAO layer. In it a DAO retrieves a dataset and passes

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-60187898719293695762007-12-11T14:27:00.001+11:002011-12-25T23:13:00.557+11:00

Later this month, the Twenty20 champions will be traveling DownUnder to play the mighty Australians on their home-turf. The tour will perhaps be the last visit for a number of Indian stalwarts who will be looking to leave a lasting impression. The team is a good blend of youth and experience and with a new coach (in Gary Kirsten) looking on as a consultant (He joins the team as a coach

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-87626671194649176712007-10-11T13:41:00.001+10:002008-04-26T15:50:17.403+10:00

Following on from my earlier post , I'll now show you how to configure Middlegen and talk to your MySQL database. You will need to have ANT installed in order to run the ANT tasks that I customized to build the hbms and the Java objects.I performed the Middlegen connection tasks using ANT version 1.7, MySQL version 5.0.24-community-nt and MySQL client version 5.1.11 and Middlegen 2.1In your

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-35692445755883969602007-10-07T03:08:00.000+10:002007-10-07T03:43:38.657+10:00

Securing your web application is a multi-step process and requires careful planning.If you are not careful, you can end up leaving the application vulnerable to hacker attacks or lock yourself in and throw away the key which is what happened to me recently.I was securing a web application that was to be deployed on JBOSS. Taking the first step in security, I placed all my web-resources in my

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-77371563969285003942007-09-26T09:42:00.000+10:002007-09-26T09:52:55.709+10:00

5 runs was the difference and India were on the right side of the victory margin for once. They have finally shed the losers tag to pick up the first Twenty20 world championships. On the way to the final they beat South Africa, Australia and Pakistan. All exciting and close matches. It was ultimately a question of who could hold their nerve and hit furtherest and we all know that now.A fitting

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-65153741023838554342007-09-23T13:53:00.000+10:002007-09-26T09:52:32.852+10:00

There are cricket matches and then there are those cricket matches. The India-Australia Twenty20 2007 World Cup semi-final was one of those cricket matches. It began at 2am Australia time and we got to see some scintillating cricket from both teams.The Indian team, written off before the start of the tournament was a revelation. Sensible batting, clean hitting and some top class bowling in the

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-72822248894607885782007-09-14T17:53:00.000+10:002007-10-11T13:53:33.801+10:00

If you have been working in the Hibernate or in the EJB space, chances are high that you have had to write intermediate files such as hbms, in the case of Hibernate, that bridge the gap between the database tables and the Java objects (read POJOs) that exist within the application and are responsible for transporting data around.While writing the hbm files manually, is a good idea if you really

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-10342340669188552782007-08-14T20:18:00.001+10:002008-07-01T00:28:13.277+10:00

The Indian cricket team finally has something to smile about after the final test ended in a tame draw. To say that India outplayed the match and took it beyond the reach of the English would be an understatement, although losing three quick wickets in the second innings showed a glimpse of what could have happened.Rahul Dravid, justifiably proud finally has something to talk about and for once

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-83990314744376531082007-08-12T16:59:00.002+10:002008-07-31T16:58:50.060+10:00

Subversion has been gaining popularity as a robust and easy-to-manage version system over the last few years but are there specific advantages for a project to use Subversion as a source code control system? This post briefly examines some of the benefits of using Subversion and brings together a collection of resources that can be used to understand, set-up and start using Subversion as a

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-44693359480918611102007-08-02T21:22:00.000+10:002007-08-02T21:39:14.628+10:00

On my way to work today, in the train, I couldn't help noticing the lights were on while the sun blazed in through the windows.Yeah..Yeah..Melbourne has underground stations..a grand total of 4 but do we need the lights on all the time? I think not. Making the lighting system intelligent is the key.Power could be saved in such scenarios by fixing a light intensity meter in the engine compartment

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-82244908937673160392007-07-23T22:17:00.000+10:002007-07-28T14:43:08.861+10:00

While playing around with Mozilla's FireFox, I came across Foxmarks, one of the recommended Firefox add-ons. The main advantage of the tool, apart from the fact that it is free, is that it allows the synchronization of Firefox stored book marks on different machines. I find option to be a pretty useful feature in the consultancy world, where we move from one system to another and sometimes have

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-72198874110461188932007-07-23T21:10:00.000+10:002007-07-25T11:18:14.887+10:00

This weekend, I was blessed to hear an amazing and inspiring message at OCF Caulfield's Annual July camp, held at Lyrebird camp site, located 300 kms south-east of Melbourne. The camp in itself was an exhilarating experience and it was one of the few instances in the year when I managed to keep myself away from a laptop for over 24 hours.The camp offered excellent lodging facilities and it gave

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-73355126779794981762007-07-15T22:47:00.000+10:002007-07-24T13:10:51.007+10:00

Wimbledon 2007: The FedEx equaled Bjorn's record of five championships at the All England Club by overwhelming the challenger in Rafa but only just.Rafa made the FedEx run for every point. The FedEx had to bring out his best tennis before he could get pass..It was a good match up and for a change, the rankings (No 1 and 2) appeared befitting to the two players.I guess, we can look forward to some

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-37925387100641757952007-07-08T00:53:00.000+10:002007-07-15T22:47:43.997+10:00

The scoreline 6-4,6-1 doesn't really say it but I just saw one of the toughest fights by an under dog.Marion Bartoli won the crowd over at Wimbledon but could not win the championship. It was not the lack of effort that killed her chances but the lack of chances that the experience of Venus Williams fed her with. Marion fought hard, taking serves at 200 kmph well inside the base-line but there

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-21999183582394853922007-07-06T17:32:00.000+10:002007-07-08T17:28:42.551+10:00

I believe that'Every object should be able to secure itself against malicious access by another object.''Randomness in object behavior can be an effective approach in securing themselves against malicious manipulation'Jumping Folders is a proposal to secure folders and thereby contained Files from malicious access by introducing a default security behavior at creation time. The 'security

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-61372660851785362132007-07-01T15:07:00.001+10:002008-05-26T23:43:00.258+10:00

I was watching the 1964 classic Zulu last night and as the story goes 4000 Zulu warriors attack a post manned by 149 British soldiers. One of the Christian missionaries living with the soldiers asks the sergeant to call upon the Lord for his own salvation and the sergeant responds with a rendering of the Psalms 46:8-11.8 Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-54440599250417073512007-06-30T16:28:00.001+10:002011-12-25T23:13:59.980+11:00

After a disappointing, OK..that was not right, horrendous World Cup campaign, the Indian cricket bandwagon seems to have shaken off some of its sluggishness to overcome the Spring Boks yesterday,after losing the first match. Yes, they did crush Bangladesh a month ago but then Bangladesh is not Australia and 1 billion people want to see India perform and equal giants in the cricket world. There

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-56689400120460657022007-06-30T16:01:00.000+10:002007-06-30T16:07:33.922+10:00

Just a few weeks ago, I saw The FedEx being blown away by Rafa at Rolland Garros. The scripts were reversed and the FedEx looked completely in control as he blew away Safin in straight sets. The temperamental Safin, apart from breaking his racket had little to offer to test the FedEx. So the only guy, who in my opinion that could have stopped the FedEx got steam rolled.Hmmm.. Does this mean,

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-31634932515886960242007-06-24T17:10:00.000+10:002007-07-01T15:49:40.651+10:00

I had been browsing through The Holy Bible, Mark ch 11 all this week and got a chance to experience the meaning of Faith and Forgiveness, that is the essence of this chapter first hand. The verses I am referring to are:24 Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. 25 And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-17881124115939310932007-06-23T01:50:00.002+10:002009-11-05T15:17:14.854+11:00

We often come across useful information in our development phase and store it away as a book mark but we don't really index or summarise the information for later use and end up Googling for the same information when we need it again.I intend to maintain this page as a collection of links related to various J2EE tools and technologies, that can be used for as a one stop shop for finding my

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-77294271776376703142007-06-23T01:26:00.000+10:002007-07-28T00:51:18.778+10:00

I have been using Maven for the last couple of projects and have begun to realise the cool things that are possible. Claims that Maven is much more than a build tool and rather a project management tool appear justified.Maven is best suited for setting up a project structure ( I mean the essential directory structure for a web based project) without minimum fuss. There are several public

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-68876953032990923962007-06-16T16:28:00.001+10:002008-06-12T15:49:15.916+10:00

Well, I have been working all this week on a small Enterprise 2.0 application and have got a fair hang of how the Google Maps API works. I must say, it is really cool and it is easy as pie to hook into the maps and place your own stuff on different locations.We saw two different ways of retrieving the Geo Coordinates of a particular location (one with Javascript and the other with Java). Both are

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-60804860000857747012007-06-11T02:48:00.000+10:002007-06-30T16:07:12.206+10:00

Well, the bilboards predicted it, the commentators forecasted it but you couldn't help hoping for more of a fight. Rafa blew the FedEx away in four sets to claim a 3P. Simply amazing....

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875338075275155308.post-69163214508521068162007-06-10T19:48:00.000+10:002007-07-23T23:01:25.712+10:00

Having completed a PhD in computer science last year and having spent the last 12 years earning 3 degrees and a diploma in computer science, I felt it was high time that I started a blog and joined the push towards a Web 2.0 world, so here we go.I intend to post stuff on a weekly basis on not only techno matters but also on different aspects of my life so if you are interested, please visit this

John Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13452676391665945225noreply@blogger.com0