Virtual Workspace

WebSphere sMash aka Project Zero

2008-07-04T04:55:00.001-07:00

IBM recently announced a official release of WebSphere sMash, a licensed version of Project Zero. Zero is a CDCD (Community based commercial development) project but the stable and licensed (IBM) version of it is sMash.

Also Project Zero is based on REpresentational State Transfer (REST). The good thing about it is the rapid development of web applications. This is actually intended for situational apps which are needed immediately. And after you developed a applications, you don't need the application server, you applications itself is a server .. umm sounds interesting.

But this is not it yet, it supports all the web 2.0 stuff like Ajax, Feeds, Json and all. Pretty good security support is also there LDAP, file based, openID.

If you are a web developer and you want to get your hands dirty in web 2.0, you gotta check out this one. Nice work! (www.projectzero.org).

Technorati Tags: Project Zero,sMash,Web 2.0,Ajax,Dojo

Windows Live Writer

2008-05-23T03:00:00.001-07:00

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer

.. I really like this tool from Windows Live team ..

as usual I always like to try out new thing in technology and came across this windows live write tool .. its really amazing .. better than all the blogging tool I used so far .. it copies your blog theme and you can see how it will look while you are writing ..

Like you can see on left :-) .. I'm sure that I'll use this one for blogging .. the kind of usability and easiness is there in this tool is amazing .. and it gives you a feeling of your blog .. LIVE .. I would recommend it to all the blogging freak guys out there .. check it out here .. you goona like it .. thanks to Windows Live Team for this ..

Android

2008-05-09T04:01:00.000-07:00

.. by Google..

Google has just launched a new SDK for mobile .. Android .. opensource .. and it has been put to developers all around the world to explore .. it comes with a simulater and eclipse plugin to ease the development effort .. check out more here .. you can develop cool apps for you mobile (coding in Java) .. I just finished "Hello Android" .. it looks good .. and the emulater is a nice one :-) ..

There is also a Android Developer Challenge launched .. motivating developer's to explore the sdk as much as they can .. and the motivating factor is .. this challenge will give $10 million in awards :-) .. Race is ON guys .. jump in and show your skills !!!

Can not see desktop icons neither can right click on desktop - Linux

2008-05-09T00:41:00.000-07:00

.. I installed linux on my office desktop few months ago.. things were kewl and I was excited as I have a windows laptop and linux desktop .. so now I can enjoy working on both .. it went smoothly till I started facing this problem .. suddenly one day I can't see my desktop icons neither I can right click on my desktop .. also I can't browse any folder in GUI mode .. i have to have to use terminal :-(

Tried lot of things .. searched Google .. no luck :-( and today I found in one of our internal forum regarding "gconf-editor" :-) .. thats was my best shot .. i installed it and followed the steps:

Under apps/nautilus/desktop, ending with '=icon_visible" ..

and I can not see anything under apps/nautilus/desktop :-( :-( :-( .. then I searched for nautilus in our internal repository and installed few of the libs (few were already installed) .. now I can see something (infact many things :-D ) under apps/nautilus/desktop .. I just left things to default and restarted my box .. and bingo! it worked .. I can see desktop icons and all .. "Nautilus is a file manager for GNOME .. seems like it was currupted :-D" .. I heared people saying ur X is currupted etc etc .. but nothing like that .. my desktop is feeling much better now :-D .. c ya..

Looks good in IE

2008-03-23T03:55:00.001-07:00

I'm trying my hands on Dojo Toolkit from sometime and right now testing it with 1.0.2. After doing some dev, I found that dojo page looks very good in IE but not that successful with Firefox etc..

Below is the example of how a filtering selects looks in firefox and IE. See the difference..

(With Firefox)

(With IE)

Does anybody faced this issue before ..

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Flock .. a new Firefox..

2008-03-21T04:25:00.001-07:00

a social browser ..

This is my first blog post from the new browser "Flock" .. its built on top of firfox .. with some new look and feel .. also some kewl features ..

Some of the feature I like was .. doing this blog post .. and web clipboard sidebar .. also it seems like it is pretty faster than the other browsers (atleast IE i'll say) ..

I hope we'll see more of these kinda sidebar's/widget's in Flock .. good luck guys .. nice work ..

Blogged with the Flock Browser

.. do not use hammer ..

2008-02-08T03:27:00.000-08:00

..

"All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use hammer." -- IBM maintenance manual, 1975

Thread dump analyzer.. WebSphere..

2008-02-05T00:44:00.000-08:00

Many times we might wait for our app server to respond back to us for some action.. and it never comes back (might be it doesn't like our action ;) ..) .. I got stuck in same kind of problem yest.. after deploying an app to WebSphere and click the save button, to save the changes to master config.. server didn't liked my action/application I deployed and I kept on waiting for it to reply back..

next I thought of taking a thread dump .. infocenter describes it well that how to take a thread dump but it didn't tell u where the dump file will be created :D .. finally i got the dump file inside the profile directory :) .. and got to know that server is busy talking to Tivoli Access Manager on my action of saving the config :) ..

Then I also got to know about a nice utility on alphaworks (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/jca/download) .. its "IBM Thread and Monitor Dump Analyzer for Java Technology".. its a pretty nice gui .. gives u some analysis of dump u have taken very quickly .. just start it up and open the dump file ..

Microformats..

2007-10-29T11:14:00.001-07:00

lets define some standards..

Microformats is not something new.. but its something interesting. Its basically defining some standards around the data on a web page.. its a kinda data formats which are used to fetch important information from a webpage. As an simple example, you use some defined keywords in your webpage to fetch this imp information..

Lets take an example where we have a webpage with some addresses defined on that.. now there can be someone who is just interested in fetching those addresses from that page and want to do some action on that.. like looking them up on a Google Map.. So there are two part of it.. fetching the info + taking the action..

lets have a look at the microformat adr defined here ..

<div class="adr">
<div class="street-address">215 xyz St.</div>
<div class="extended-address">more address here</div>
<span class="locality">City</span>
<span class="region">State</span>
<span class="postal-code">ZipCode</span>
<div class="country-name">Country</div>
</div>

and here come some standards.. here we are using adr as class name for any address defined on this web page, using country-name as class name for defining country and so on.. by this it is fairly easy for a tool to check for these important notations, collect them, put them together and provide some actions on that (check The Operator Firefox Extension for the same)..

Same way, you can define your own microformats, create your own tool/plugin to read them and define some useful actions for them..

Why do I really need a WebService?

2007-10-15T22:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was doing some bits and pieces around Java WebServices and then I realized that do I really need a WS.. it's a kinda difficult question (for me ;) .. ) so here i'm putting my thoughts around it..

There can be couple of different scenario's for why someone should opt for WS or need of a WS in business application..

if you are going to use this app for a B2B scenario.. then WS is one of the good option for it.. not just to connect your org internally, but ya talking to clients .. partners .. suppliers etc.. which is like e-business or communication with other apps..

Or there are other different applications interacting with each other or with the backend systems like SAP, mainframes etc.. kind of integration of existing information systems ..

also there might be one more small thing.. that some of the non-java (as i was talkin abt java WS here) apps which need some/all of the functionality of this business app..

this might not be your requirements currently.. but let's talk abt future.. let's talk about expanding this buss application.. n if there is a some kinda need (like B2B etc) in near future.. there might be a req for WS..

and yes ofcourse, one definitely have to check with other advantages which comes with WS like.. its based on well-defined and well-used standards.. service re-usability.. loose-coupling.. SOA.. etc..

Finally, I decided to re-think on what I was doing.. so think again.. think twice.. whether you need it or don't..

Comments/feedback are always appreciated.

DRools BRMS

2007-09-11T06:14:00.001-07:00

..Business Rule Management System

JBoss DRools has launched a new 4.0.1 BRMS in the latest release.. this is a web based admin console which can be used to author/edit/deploy/manage business rules and as it is a plain war file, it can be deployed on any application server..

From the deployment perspective, the good thing is that you can make use of Rule Agent to automatically checks and deploy the rule if there is any change.. Rule Agent basically talks to BRMS with the help of a properties file and keep polling for the change in the business rule, based on the time defined in the properties file..

From the Authoring perspective, a Rule/DSL/Function/Rule Flow.. everything can be created and managed using this web based console.. So the business guy doesn't actually need to work on eclipse, once the rules are setup in BRMS.. the only thing which I found missing was, I was not able to find a way to import a DRools Project created from one tool (e.g. rule studio.. i.e. eclipse) to BRMS.. or vice versa..

For more information.. check here..