Another milestone :Tendulkar reaches 15000

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 were two interesting things about yesterday's win.Tendulkar crossed 15000 runs. A mammoth achievement by any standards. If you have ever played cricket and passionately live the game, you'll know what I am talking about. A minor blimp in Tendulkar's achievement was his second failure in a row in missing out on a century after getting into the nineties, but I guess a guy who already has 41 centuries to his name in One-day cricket and another 37 in Test match cricket is only going to shrug this off. Watch Tendulkar's bat for more fireworks.

Wimbledon 2007 :The FedEx steamrolls Safin

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, another championship is in sight for the FedEx?? I think so.

Faith and Forgiveness

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 have aught against any; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.
26	But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.

Interesting, Jesus asks us to forgive first in order to be forgiven for our mistakes. I could think of several instances in the past when I and maybe several of us, have been guilty of holding grudges against our closest friends and enemies and yet living in the hope of receiving forgiveness for our own mistakes.

Jesus taught the notion of forgiving first and then receiving forgiveness several times over. The Lords prayer which was taught by Jesus has "forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us".

The question that comes to me is 'How easy is it to forgive someone for what we think is a great wrong done to ourselves'. To answer this question, I tell myself, "It is not for me to judge what is a great wrong or a minuscule one'. Jesus asks me to forgive, great or small, doesn't matter.

And the answer that I get is "The power of forgiveness is strong and affects all those around you". The movie, To End all Wars is a beautiful illustration of this point, so in conclusion

"Forgive and heal relationships before the rift widens and you will experience the Love"

John's essential links..for the saavy J2EE developer

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 favorite J2EE links regarding a particular technology or the solution to an issue I faced and sharing them with the J2EE community.

Feel free to send me your favorite links with a short summary of what is there on the page and I'll add it to the list.

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• Build Tools

A. Maven

1. This article gives a good conceptual overview of the maven build tool and a handy startup command reference.
2. From the Maven home page, a starter's guide. This page has a handy faq but tries to focus on too many things and so might not answer all your doubts but it does give you something to go on.
3.Another good explanation of Maven concepts and a starter guide.

B. Ant

• Java XML Serialization Technology

JAXB

1. A beginner's guide to JAXB.

• Wikis and Blogging Tools

A. Versionate

B. MediaWiki

C. BaseCamp

• Logging Tools

A. Log4J

• Testing Tools

A. JUnit

B. Cactus

C. JMeter

D. SoapUI

• Web Application Servers

A. Tomcat

B. JBOSS

C. WebLogic

• Presentation / Web Tier

A. Struts

B. JSF

C. AJAX

D. CSS

• Code Standardizing / Bug Finding Tools

A. PMD

B. findBugs

C. lint4J

• Source Control Software
  

A. SubVersion

B. TortoiseSVN

Refer to this post for information, directions and tips on understanding, setting up and using Subversion and TortoiseSVN.

• Useful Tools

Source Generation Tools

A. MiddleGen
B. XDoclet

Tailing Log Files : Cygwin

• Frameworks

A. Spring

B. JEMS

• Interesting APIs

A. Google Maps

1. This article has an excellent collection of Google Maps API usability examples.
2. This post summarises some of the other Google APIs, mainly the Google ToolBar API, Google Gadgets API, the Google Calendar API among others.

• Setting Up / Configuring Tools / HowTos

My experience on building projects with Maven

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 repositories such as http//www.ibiblio.com available for downloading project dependencies and associating them with the project. If your required jar isn't available, you don't need to fret. Download them from somewhere and update the ibiblio repository, so the next time anyone needs them, they can get them.

Another advantage as compared to it traditional rival ANT is that Maven conforms with the OO paradigm and supports the concept of a super class (read Parent POM). Low level tasks like code compilation are carried out by Maven without needing any additional tweaking from the developer.

Maven also breaks new grounds with its project site generation, reporting, source control management and well.. a lot of stuff. I could go on and on singing praises but hey, why not try something out for yourself.
This tutorial has a handy Maven command reference, to get you started.

Enterprise 2.0 and Google Maps

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 easy.

All in all, building applications on top of Google Maps is a definite Yes.

I also saw some of the Google Developer Day videos and came across this interesting one on a Google Map API workshop.
The speaker gave a brief overview of the Maps API and set the guys on developing an application (within 90 mins). The best 3 attempts would win a 3D mouse. Do you know what a 3D mouse is? Well, i didn’t. Its a klunky joystick looking app that allows you to pan and zoom on Google Earth and Google Maps in a much better way than its conventional cousin.
Towards the end, the speaker gave a useful tip on the GeoCoding service saying that the same should not be used on the fly and the GeoCoodinates should be stored in the local database for faster response time. Not to mention the limitation of 50,000 requests that the GeoCoder allows over a 24 hour? (some controversy here)

Another interesting API that was talked about was the use of Mapplets.which allow you to embed data from a variety of sources, into your Google Map.
Give the video a look if you have a spare 30 minutes.

Rafa blows FedEx away

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....

Welcome to John's World

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 blog spot to find out the latest in my virtual world.

Have fun and keep smiling. :-)