Lesson: JavaBeans Concepts (The Java™ Tutorials > JavaBeans(TM))

Lesson: JavaBeans Concepts (The Java™ Tutorials > JavaBeans(TM)) - A good tutorial from Sun about Java Bean

OpenGrok

I came to see one of my colleague using a source code browser today which is called as OpenGrok. A very good source code browser and its straight away catch my eye because of the name, i see an 'Open'. I did some research behind this app and found some thing interesting, the application is built using java, yes it is, worth take a look back at the source code. Another important thing to note is that this tool can very well exist with most of the source control systems. It use apache Lucen indexing and so on. Lot many exciting features. I'm thinking of installing this in my group as well

Google video chat

Yet another fundoo from google. Yes the simplicity again, video chat in google. Really amazing, but one thing which i didn't like is this So yes i need to wait for some more time :(

Miro - The internet TV software

I was searching for one video library software for my linux box for the past couple of month, and i came to know about Miro from this months Linux4u, the software impressed me a lot in the first look itself. One thing which is really exciting is the way how the software uses the web2.0 features. Webservice is being utilized quiet brilliantly in this desktop application. It will give you huge set of internet tv channels you can add, you search your favorite video from youtube, google video and other n numerous online video search engines. Another feature which i liked a lot is this software does have the ability to aggregate all my hard disk video files. All together this is one of the amazing software and all linux users should have one instance of Miro running in boxes

jvisualvm

jvisualvm - the application which provides the in and out of java apps running in a VM is out with jdk now. It is available with the jdk1.6 update. Really cool graphical interfaces which will show you the running threads, monitor the heap etc, and you can even profile the application using this tool. Nice set of plugins contributed by the community make this app a perfect choice for all folks who drink and eat java.

Internet archives

waybackmachine gives you the opportunity to look back to the web many a years ago and check how the webpages looks in older ages with out flashy css or web2.0. Do check out the web pioneers section at the bottom of this website.

Google's ajax search api

This api is available for quiet a long period of time, but i noticed this api today only. After going through couple of blog posts and search api homepage, i feel like writing a blog entry about this api is really worth. One of the striking thing with this api is, this api can give you an aggregation of various search options available in the google homepage. Its a kind of all in one shot. This api can crawl through web searches of various flavours including * Web * Local search * Video * News * Image * Books * Patents It is very simple to incorporate this ajax search api into the web page. We can call the appropriate javascript method will give you the search result in json. Include the script src url and load the script using google.load("search","1") Create a GSearchControl instance and call the predefined method. searchControl.addSearcher(new GlocalSearch()); // Local search searchControl.addSearcher(new GwebSearch()); // Web search searchControl.addSearcher(new GvideoSearch()); // Video search searchControl.addSearcher(new GblogSearch()); // Blog search searchControl.addSearcher(new GnewsSearch()); // News search searchControl.addSearcher(new GimageSearch()); // Image search searchControl.addSearcher(new GbookSearch()); // Book search GSearchControl can control the draw modes also, it can display search results in Linear mode (GSearchControl.DRAW_MODE_LINEAR) or Tabbed mode (GSearchControl.DRAW_MODE_TABBED) These are some of the exciting features. But still more inside this set of API. Do read the - documentation section in google

Yet another browser!!!

Yes its a fact, Google is coming up with a new browser named as Chrome. Its going to be real buzz soon - will this be an end of Firefox era? I'm afraid :(. The google analytics report says that the 8.6% of the internet users are hitting the internet apps from Chrome browser. This is defenitely not a small amount of users. At this point of time most of the people will be downloading this software and testing this application. I believe google can really grab the browser market with their simplicity. Some of the real addons google team says about this browser when compare with other browsers are

• Well designed to execute todays applications (web2.0)
• This browser can load javascript faster than other browsers
• Loading of components to the browser is multi-threaded. (All the other browsers load content single threaded. For eg:- if the browser is loading javascript, it won't do any other set of operation) Google addressed this as one of the major enhancement as this is going to increase web2.0 apps performance drastically, because of this asynchronus architecture
• Tabbed browsing
• One of the interesting feature - If the browser crashes while loading one of the webpage due to some bug (either in code or in browser code) it wont crash the entire browser, just the tab will be crashed. User can continue using all other tabs (Great feature isn't)
• Each tab will be addressed in diffrent memory space. When ever we close a tab, the memory will be freed up and the total process is going to end
• From google chrome's task manager user will be knowing how much memory a particular website is taking to load (All the tabs, plugins are run as seperate process)
• Webkit is the renedering engine google used for renedring the webpages
• The url bar offers not only visited url's, but also search suggestions, popular sites, ranked sites that you have not visited and more interestingly, you can search over the url bar history.
• The home page browser is going to change, The new browser is going to give users a tab which contains the most recently visitied 9 pages and a search engine towards the right of the screen
• This browser can work in read-only mode also. If the user do not want to save any of his/her visited url's cache etc on to the hard disk, user can do this if they start the browser in read only mode (Cool one)
• Chrome can automatically detect malwares and can block the further actions of these malwares. Chrome code can block this malware to a particular tab and once we close that tab, the malware will also go off with out much harm
• The entire user experience is sandboxed. Sandboxed security is enabled to the users and plugin
• When we login to a phishing website, chrome can really warn us. This is available with the help of google search engine crawling logics. Anybody can make use of this feature as this is a Public API from google (Now gmail warns emails from phishing websites. Might be the same feature)
• And the last but not the least "Open Source" - like all other google apps. (I hope google won't come up with a paid version which can give X times faster). The entire browser code is available in the internet

Google has not released a Linux version of this browser yet, I'm eagerly waiting for that to come up. I'm praying that they won't tell users to run the application using wine (Like they disappointed Linux user when release Picasa). I hope google will come up with a Linux compiled chrome. The entire scraps i have taken from this finely readable help approach from google. I really like this simplicity google. My hats off to you folks.

Collections class inside java.util

The utility class contains static methods that operate or return collections. Some of the useful static methods for developers daily use

• sort – Collections.sort
• binarySerach – List should be sorted first before invoking the search
• reverse – Reverse the order of elements
• swap – Swaps elements at the specified positions in the list
• copy – Copies all the elements from one list to another
• min – Returns the minimum element in the collection. Elements should implement Comparable (Overloaded method available which accepts a Comparator as the second argument)
• max – Returns the maximum element in the collection. Elements should implement Comparable (Overloaded method available which accepts Comparator as the second argument)
• replaceAll – Replaces all the occurrences of one specified value in a list with another
• unmodifiableCollection – Returns an unmodifiable view of the collection. UnSupportedOperation exception will be thrown in any attempt to modify the returned collection. (UnModifiable List, Set and Map are also available)
• synchronizedCollection – Returns a synchronized (thread-safe collection). (Synchronized Set, List and Map are also available) Its is very important to note that the end user who is doing the iteration over the collection has to manually do the synchronize.
• checkedCollection – This is one of the useful method if programmers are not using java1.5. This will returns a dynamically typesafe view of the specified collection. An attempt to insert an element of the wrong type will result in a immediate ClassCastException (Checked List, Set and Map are also available)
• singleton – Returns an immutable set containing only the specified object (Singleton List and Map are also available).
• disjoint – Returns true if two specified collections have no elements in common
• addAll – Adds all the specified elements to the specified collection

Off to Wayanad

A long trip, which gave me a pleasent mind. 3 days off to Bangalore city, it was a real nice experience. Went for one of my nice friends marriage. We explored the real beauty of the God's own country. I heard from lot many people about the beauty of wayanad, and i realized the fact that what i heard is not a gimmy. I have never seen such a beautiful place before. The lush of green, the misty cloud, the skyscrapper rock!! all make wayanad the HQ of God's Own country Kerala. I felt disappointed couple of times during the trip. I was very afraid of climbing rocks and walking through slippery treacherous mountain paths. Those of love to take risk, edakkal caves and Meenmutti waterfalls are real pleasures. But i did not enjoyed both these places coz of my fear towards climbing height. I realized the fact that i'm a slight altophobic. Some of the cool snaps are uploaded. http://picasaweb.google.com/mailtoshinu/Wayanad

Vnstat GUI in JavaFX

After long analysis and exploration about the technology to use in developing the new gui project, i decided i'll go with the lates JavaFX. Evaluated java-gnome also. But the lot goes to JavaFX. One of the main thing which strikes me with JavaFX is the richness in creating gui applications and the easiness in porting the this app to web with less effort. The prototype is on her way and is in the very basic stage. Once the prototype is done, my plan is to create the project in google code and invite opensource developers around the world to contribute. All folks who are interested in playing with JavaFX and Linux can join and contribute. The prototype which really influence me is the StockWatcher sample application. The vnstat gui will also look similar to this interface only. Keep watch this space for more updates.

NetworkManager & network status

NetworkManager applet is one of the good network status tool i found with my Fedora box. One of the good thing with this tool is, its quiet easy to configure both wirless and wired network through this tool. I faced one slight problem today with my NetworkManager applet which prompted me to write up this blog post. I made some slight adjustments in my network configurations as i want to connect to my friends wireless network. After my job i turned back to my home and tried to connect to my wired network and see a problem with my NetworkManager applet, suddenly it shown me my network is not connected, After some debugging i came accross the nm-tool utility which showed me that my eth0 is disconnected. But the interesting thing is i'm able to browse and login to my chat servers. Whats going wrong with my NetworkManager applet? Hmmm yes i found some debugging commands of NetworkManager which is NetworkManager --no-deamon which throws some input about whats going wrong with the applet. After some googling and debugging i was able to fix the issue. The issue lies with my ifcfg-eth0 script. The NM-CONTROLLED flag is somehow got turned off. I simply changed the value to NM_CONTROLLED=yes Voila!! applet suddenly got the wake up and showed me, Yes I'm ready to serve you!!!

Off to Mysore

Extended weekend came to an end at last. Weekend was awesome coz my trip to Mysore, the historical town which is around 130 Km from Bangalore. A pleasent trip which freshed up my mind and my soul. I can go back to work with a calm and quiet mind. Th historical ruins of the city made my mind to think a lot. I see lot of palaces, lot many cultures. One place which striked me a lot is the place where Tipu's dead body found. Some of the cool snaps are uploaded in picasa. http://picasaweb.google.com/mailtoshinu/MysoreTrip

Swing application framework

Swing application framework - a framework which will really give swing application developers a second life. Over a period of time swing applications gain more maturity and stability, but lack a framework and I believe this is the one which fills the gap. Some of the very common problems faced by swing developers are well addressed in this framework and provided implementations for them. Some of the exciting features from my angle are 1. Application Life cycle managment 2. Action management 3. Task management 4. Saving session state of the application 5. Local storage 6. Resource management I'm planning to use the same framework for the creation of the swing based vnstat gui. I got some issues with my java install, my gui is not starting up properly. My AMD 64bit and java versions have slight hiccups with java gui's. google is telling me to upgrade my java to the latest one will fix the issue. I need to upgrade my java tomorrow and start working.

Internet usage using vnstat

My internet bill gave the first surprise yesterday. I got amazed after seeing my usage for the last one month. Unfortunately i do not have any option to check my usage from my provider. I decided to look for a good montoring tool in my opensource world itself. I came across nearly 15 good tools for monitoring the bandwidth usage, all are good but lacks some of the modules/functions i require. My search got ended up after seeing the cool small application vnstat. All the information i require is available at a single command. Just amazed to see such a wonderful command. But one thing which clearly lacks is a wonderful gui which alerts me whenever i exceed my daily usage, hmmm quiet an annoying requirement, but yes i need that. Finally i decided to come up with an interface for this cute command line in which I can incorporate my requirement also. I will be starting the work tomorrow. As a java developer, i need to find a real base for creating java desktop apps for Linux. I was evaluating some of projects for the past couple of days. One project which strikes me is the java-gnome project. But for developing an interface for vnstat i do not really require api's from this particular project. I believe core java api's can provide me the stuff what i was looking for.

Java development in Linux

Lot many folks have issues while getting start development in Linux 64bit. Here are some of the workarounds i did in my Fedora Core 9 for the favorite editor eclipse to start showing up it clumsy interface. The default java package coupled with FC9 is Open JDK 1.6.0-b09 (Nice to see Open JDK appearing when i type java --version). Hiccups starts straight away with your default eclipse installation, this does not contain any plugins required for web application. As a web application developer I need my editor equipped with all cool plugins to explore my potential. Okay for a second thought i must download one of the much respected eclipse ide from JBoss community which contain all the wtp plugins. Download the ide from jboss.org. Untar it in one of your specified location (I put it under /usr/local/). When you start eclipse, you suddenly see error in your console, eclipse will complain about the Gtk nodoka theme not found error. Even if you install the gtk-nodoka theme this error won't go off. For eclipse to run its requires gtk+-nodoka-engine.i386 package is required for an x86 architecture. Don't worry yum comes in handy here also, yum repository can install this package for you. yum install gtk-nodoka-engine.i386 After installing this package also eclipse may not startup, it sometimes can complain about about a linkage error which is related to libXtst not found. This package also you can install it from yum repository. Be careful this package also you need to install the i386 arch. yum install libXtst.i386 All the error logs while starting the eclipse can be found in the /workspace/.metadata/.log file. Its is pretty easy to rectify the problem once you understood the problem correctly. After installing all the required packages I was able to see finally the cute JBoss IDE splash. Happy coding

My Fedora box with compiz & xfce4

Okay its time to share my eyecandy desktop. I should explain some past history before going to touch up on. Xfce is the first window manager which impressed me a lot in my college days. Such a cool desktop with hell lot options and too runs with memory less than 100MB. When i joined my first company i was so lucky to work in the environment I admire a lot, but the real issue i faced there is the memory. I faced issues even with my eyecandy xfce also. (Real culprit java + eclipse), as a java developer i can live with out these bread and butter. When ever i run eclipse and starts my Jboss, my desktop starts drags me like a donkey carrying 1000 pounds in her :) back and climbing mount everest. I forced back to use twm.. hmmm not much eyecandy but still memory wise yes, i was able to find memory to my eclipse and JBoss. Yes now i installed FC (Fedora Core 9) kde as my window manager. But kde4 disappointed me totally, yes is should not expect much, its still getting matured. And i decided i must go back to my good old friend my Xfce. Woila the real yum, the updater yummy for fedora systems, installed xfce4 in just a matter of minutes. Yes i'm done I installed xfce4 in my desktop. Just for a second I thought xfce4 is not much updated coz i can still see the old looks for xfce4 also. Then i thougt I'll go my 3d windowing system compiz which can enhance my xfce4 like anything. yum helped more to install compiz from livna repository in just a matter of second. Okay its enough letmme copy couple of snapshots of my eyecandy desktop. A picture can convey more.

Got wonder with the woobly menu bar. Yes folks its not mac, its my linux box with xfce. Okay breaking the suspense, its is the application cairo which will give you this eyecandy feature. This too my yum repository picked it up for me. No more hickups in installing apps. No more lib dependencies and no more sleepless nights. Hats off to folks maintaining yum repository and the yum mmy updater tool. See couple more enhancements of my compiz managed desktop

Folks don't you really want something like this on your desktop too. Wait is over now, install Linux. Come to the opensource world.

Yes I too started blogging

Blogging - I was thinking this for the last one year, but my mind was not prepared at all for start blogging. And at last i decided, yes i should start blogging. Yes its time to start something really special, yes i need to change my daily routines, and yes i need to be more focused on my future. And i was wondering at this moment why i took this much time to make up my mind. I don't have an answer, but i'm trying to find something out of my bad day today. Yes its them who are the real motivators, yes its them who kicked my head, and who are they... folks whom they feel are really the masters in all, yes i want to do much much more, I'm want to crap off my aggressiveness and start listening, and yes i want to prove myself and to them that you can't learn all things in world in our small life time, and what they doing is not a kick ass science. I tried to find lot many answers from my side to my y mind keep up the pace. But... :( I felt really bad today... why.. why..why.. Yes I found the answer at last, prove yourself, you can do it. and i need to do it. and i will do it, i swear. I am taking the oath of continuous improvement today. I swear i will spend hours in improving my abilities, i swear i won't stop doing this until i recognized by the same folks. I m going to keep this pace and keep the darker side as an unforgettable black day in my life for ever.