Rajesh about prodigious revolution of daily life

Zimbra MySql connection using MySql Clients

2007-10-11T22:32:00.000-07:00

Zimbra uses MySql database and when you try to connect to mysql under zimbra user with following details, it might throw access errors.

user : zimbra

password : [no password]

host: localhost ( or wherever you have installed the zimbra)

Also , if you already have your own mysql installed before , it might conflict for the mysql clients like CocoaMySQL. To make it work you need to specify the right socket path. Specify

/opt/zimbra/db/mysql.sock.

Once you specify above socket it exactly knows what mysql db to connect to. You can make this work for phpMyAdmin or any other MySQL clients.

Setup Zimbra on your home machine to receive emails from your domain

2007-09-30T10:30:00.001-07:00

This was a fun exercise to get Zimbra setup on my laptop to receive emails for some domain that I have registered. Fun came in different shape and size (what I really mean is highs and lows of frustration point). So here it goes.
I have a domain e.g. www.mydomain.com and I wanted to route all the emails sent for this domain to my laptop where I have setup Zimbra. Before you do this few points to remember and work on

You need static IP address or publicly available domain so that MX server can point to your static IP or domain.
If you have firewall setup at your home, you will have to open couple of ports to make it work.

(You can skip this step if you have static IP address)

I have DSL at home, so the Dynamic IP address and I have to get a static IP so that mails can be routed consistently to the same IP or domain. So find your outside world IP address first , best way to get this go to http://whatismyip.com/ and it will tell you your IP address seen by the world. Next thing to do is, map your dynamic IP to some static domain. DynDns provides this kind of support for free. Go ahead and signup and get the free service where you can pick DynDNS domain to map to your dynamic IP address. Let's say you picked yourdomain.webhop.net from the list.

(Note: Make sure you choose "Specific mailserver will route all mail for my DynDNS host" option in mail routing section and specify your actual domain hosting providers mailserver hostname)

Next step is go your hosting provider where you have your domain hosted (www.mydomain.com) . Go to your domain's DNS settings and change your Mail server (MX record) to Other mail server option and set

MX 1 / Prio -> yourdomain.webhop.net 1

Now to your home network firewall setting and open port 80 (http) and 25 ( SMTP) for incoming connections, so that outside world can access your machine on above ports (80 for http connection and 25 for SMTP mail relay). Some firewalls might have port forwarding option also.

Now lets start cranking with Zimbra. Download and install Zimbra as per your operating system specifications. Follow the Zimbra quick start guide for installation . In short

Stop anything running on port 80 before you start the install
When installation starts it will ask you for domain name and say localhost (do not say 127.0.0.1) , ignore the message installation script message about not finding MX record mapped to localhost.

Once installation is complete , script will try to start the zimbra server. Hopefully server started properly go to https://localhost:7071/zimbraAdmin/ login with the admin username/password you created while installation. You will see localhost already under domains. Now you will have to go create new domain with mydomain.com. (your actual domain name) and user for that domain. e.g imsam@mydomain.com by going to accounts option.

That should do it. Now you can go to any of your email clients and send an email to imsam@mydomain.com and you will see email coming right to your zimbra server. To check email click on imsam@mydomain.com in accounts option and click on "View Mail" option on right hand top pane.

acts_as_attachment error : undefined method `find_or_initialize_by_thumbnail_and_parent

2007-08-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

You will possibly be seeing this error when you use acts_as_attachment for thumbnailing.

undefined method `find_or_initialize_by_thumbnail_and_parent'

Basically acts_as_attachment is trying to use dynamic finders ( Good article on that is here ) to find and create new object if it is not found. Developers use acts_a_attachment ( instead of attachument_fu; successor of acts_a_attachment works only Rails 1.2 onwards) because it works with older version of Rails (1.1.6) and when you execute thumbnailing you get above message and the reason the dynamic method find_or_initialize_by_thumbnail_and_parent that internally calls find_or_initialize which is available in Edge rails onwards and Rails 1.1.6 does not have that. So kinda defeats the purpose of using acts_a_attachment for Rails 1.1.6.

In any case don't be disappointed and here is the fix ,so you can use everything as it is. Go to your vendors/plugins/acts_as_attachment/lib/technoweenie/acts_as_attachment/instance_methods.rb and look for method find_or_initialize_thumbnail , you need to patch this method to make it work with Rails 1.1.6 ( basically find and create new object seperately)

Replace following


   def find_or_initialize_thumbnail(file_name_suffix)
        respond_to?(:parent_id) ?
          thumbnail_class.find_or_initialize_by_thumbnail_and_parent_id(file_name_suffix.to_s, id) :
          thumbnail_class.find_or_initialize_by_thumbnail(file_name_suffix.to_s)
       
      end

with

        def find_or_initialize_thumbnail(file_name_suffix)
        respond_to?(:parent_id) ?
          thumbnail_class.find_by_thumbnail_and_parent_id
(file_name_suffix.to_s, id) ||
thumbnail_class.new(:thumbnail=>file_name_suffix.to_s,
:parent_id=>id) :
thumbnail_class.new(:thumbnail=>file_name_suffix.to_s)
      end

This should do the trick.

Facebook micro application success trend started

2007-08-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

Angel community was watching when Facebook platform launched and they were expecting plenty of applications to launch under Facebook umbrella rapidly and eventually some one will cash in the success in terms of user base.

I guess exactly same thing happened to Where I have been. Here is the news ( TripAdvisor buys Facebook app for $3 million). This again proves few simple things about consumer space

User base, User base, User base
Data is more valuable than Technology

Now the race is on and applications will be more aggressive to pan out, attract more and more people. Facebook proved its platform strength after all.

Our first Ajuby meetup

2007-08-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

Even though we have been in quite a few silicon valley ruby meetups with low key Ajuby push by dropping one page Ajuby brochure on the front door, We had our first formal Ajuby meetup today. It went well . Not everyone showed up who RSVP'd for the meetup, there were handfull.

We started with little introduction of Ajuby on how it started, why kind of slides. Then we dived right into high level features of our last release 0.5 ( which I blogged in a seperate post last time). As we were passing thru slides, audience were curious and questions about vision, business model and eventually couple of guys were interested in looking at actual code. I eventually opened Textmate and started walking everyone thru the Ajuby code base. I guess people were curious to know how different Ajuby is from conventional Rails application. Answer was simple, Ajuby is an Rails application with additional directories custom to Ajuby.

Whole take from this exercise was wonderful, curious eyes with valid questions, Discussions will possibly take feedback to feature path, we are helping ourselves and others.

We have a long way to go in this process, lot to learn, lot to provide to the community because we have got from community so much all these years.

Here are the meetup presentation slides

iPhone Frenzy.

2007-07-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

I just could not stop writing about iPhone. Looking at the craze generated by apple's usual brilliant marketing machine, people went nuts buying iPhone and there are huge group of people who bought iPhone just for pure tinkering and push the mobile development to its limit.

We have seen mobile development for so many years, but what is happening with iPhone front is nothing like any other mobile revolution we have seen so far.

Look at the applications developed for iPhone in a hack-a-thon. If you go thru this list, quite a few of them are potential crowd pullers. If executed well can lead to big money making machine.

On the other hand, I'm wowed ! by speed of development. We will see more of these. iPhone can possibly build parallel world of social communication and media and convert lot of people use mobile phone to do everything that they would do on a personal computer, I mean everything right from emails, chatting with friends, business collaboration and transactions. For developers and nerd community Apple might come up with lightweight portable programming platform , where you can dock iPhone , pipe it to big screen and do your application development.

Ajuby releas 0.5 brings business mashup building one step closer

2007-07-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

We are glad to announce Ajuby release 0.5 today. It is very exciting get this release out after long and late hours of work, with tons of fixes and UI consistency across browsers (IE/Firefox/Safari).

This is a milestone release for Ajuby team in terms making integration platform availability (for building Web services/SOAP/XML exchange) , sample applications demonstrating possibility of mashups (SugarCRM and Basecamp conglomerate).

Here is the release information in detail

You can also check out the Ajuby blog for up to date information

To get your hands on this release

It just keeps getting better as wide adoption Rails based application increases, Ajuby slides itself in a right spot to make developers and user community to build integrations to popular business applications like Salesforce, SugarCRM , productivity tools like basecamp and storage solution like Amazon S3 rapidly.

IBM's jump to supply Web 2.0 goodies

2007-06-20T13:30:00.001-07:00

I was just wondering how come IBM did not start building tools around web 2.0 productivity yet. There you go, now they are. IBM providing tools for mashup building and collaboration. How should all these online Web 2.0 companies who do the same thing and their bread and butter is dependent on that.
It should be interesting to see how IBM's push for this piece works out. Only thing that is making me worry is that they are bringing Lotus name back in the limelight. I hated Lotus applications, including their email client, lamest email client I have ever seen including the user interface. Their Lotus domino server did not go anywhere. Not sure their intention of pushing Lotus name with Web2.0 wares they are coming up with.
One interesting thing that these big players will do is to bring enterprise applications together with slick Web 2.0 applications, which will drive towards Enterprise 2.0.

Rails ActionMailer to use Gmail as SMTP relay

2007-06-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

Lot of times we run into a situation, where we do not have sendmail available to test emails because of you are not working on a unix environment, which has sendmail support. The only other option you are left with is SMTP email relay and it gets hard again when you do not have SMTP server available. Best option is to use popular email applications like Gmail to send emails. Gmail will not let you send email directly by specifying basic SMTP auth settings in your rails application. It needs to be more secured.

Following blog post from Anatol Pomozov makes it as a slam dunk. This enables all gmailers to have a capability to send emails from their Rails application.

Another alternative is to setup your own SMTP server. You can try msmtp

Macy's 61st Annual Flower show, featuring India this year...

2007-04-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

We went to city yesterday to spend a evening, eat some good food and there we bumped into Macy's building. What we see is this

Like every year Macy's celebrates one country in their annual event, this year they were featuring India in their "Macy's 61st Annual Union Square Flower Show". This affiche covered the whole building with amazing art work and vibrant colors representing Indian culture.
The interesting part of this whole event was not inside, it was outside. They had a huge Ganesha idol right up in the main entrance and it was fabulous how it was adding excitement to this whole show. This simply reminded us Ganesh Chaturthi whole India celebrates every year August-September.
As we walked inside Macy's most of things was designed around this theme and some part was designed like Indian bazaar where they were selling more contemporary/ethnic things , with Indian dub music running in the background.
Guess we were lucky to be there and see this marvelous piece of work and gala observance because it was last day of the show.

Ruby TypeError (singleton can't be dumped):

2007-04-10T13:10:00.000-07:00

This error is very interesting and can possibly waste a lot of time , if you do not know the main reason behind it. I'm sharing this here, so that all those programmers who will possibly run into this issue, Google it for solution and will eventually land on my blog post and hopefully I will save someones day.

Issue is : TypeError (singleton can't be dumped): Now when you are running a Rails app, this will be dumped into your development.log or production.log depending on your application environment.

Full trace will look something like this

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/pstore.rb:348:in `dump'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/pstore.rb:348:in `dump'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/pstore.rb:326:in `transaction'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/cgi/session/pstore.rb:90:in `update'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/cgi/session/pstore.rb:97:in `close'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/cgi/session.rb:330:in `close'
.//vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/base.rb:1015:in `close_session'

Root cause: In your Ruby/Rails code you are trying to add a singleton class in the session, which is against the compatibility rules. So look for pure singleton class or Modules that's getting added to the rails session.

Solution: Have a class inside the Singelton class which will hold the data that you want to store in session and add that to your session. This will work.

37Signals Highrise; Is it another contact management or CRM ?

2007-03-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

As 37Signals is pushing for Highrise , its so called "CRM" initiative, I'm sure everyone must be thinking about, is it really a true CRM or just another personal data/contact/task management application combined with few CRM features. As per their blog

Highrise was built to satisfy common scenarios like:

See all follow-ups scheduled for this week
Review Susan’s notes before calling her contact at the printer
Set a reminder to write Steve a thank-you note next Friday
Review all conversations I’ve had with Chris from Apple
Organize interview responses for potential candidates online
See a list of all the designers your company has hired in the past
Enter notes from a call with a potential client
See all the people your company knows at The New York Times
Schedule a follow-up sales call with Jim in 3 months
Review all the people tagged “Leads 2006”

So they have proposed features like Leads, conversations, contacts which will fall into mini-CRM domain.
It also sounds like they are taking best of basecamp, campfire, backpack, Ta-Da List and collaborating them in a mini-CRM suite fashion. It would be interesting how this thing gets the wing, and by looking at their track record, I would not be surprised people getting hooked to it. Most of their applications are crisp ,intuitive and great usability. Bottom line gets your and your partner's/customer's job done. Last but not least the first popular "CRM" initiative for Ruby On Rails platform.

Rails 1.2 impact on Ajuby release 0.4

2007-02-10T11:51:00.000-08:00

We are running into quite a few issues with latest Rails version 1.2 starting with Theme generator complaining about "named_route" , following is the exception that we get

=> Booting WEBrick...
./script/../config/../vendor/plugins/theme_support/lib/patches/routeset_ex.rb:26:in `create_theme_routes': undefined method `named_route' for #<actioncontroller::routing::routeset:0xb7d34690> (NoMethodError)
from script/../config/../vendor/plugins/theme_support/lib/patches/routeset_ex.rb:13:in `draw'

Reason is Theme generator is using its own routes extension for its custom routes and as per Rails 1.2 release , Routes section).

So meanwhile we figure out how to fix this or Theme generator comes with fix for Rails 1.2, Following is the fix that you can do

# Lets freeze the Rails for Ajuby release by running following command

> rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_1-1-6

This will take rails 1.1.6 and make rails available within Ajuby framework, (We will eventually go this route. Every release will be bundled with Rails , so one less thing to worry with)

# After above step successfully complete, start the WEBrick and see if you run into any error , if yes possibly you would not have Activerecord core frozen properly. Not sure whether its a bug in the rake process. If you see this error like undefined method "deprecate" or #<Class:......

Copy activerecord/lib directory from your installed Rails (wherever you have installed rails version 1.1.6 before above freeze process) to <ajubyhome>/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib directory

Ajuby Release 0.4 is out

2007-02-08T22:35:00.000-08:00

We are happy to announce latest release of Ajuby (0.4) out for general access/download on source forge/Google code.

Here is the download information
Latest release information

We are gearing up for next release, with interesting features like Module builder. Updates will be on the Ajuby wiki for coming release

Apache Axis namspace quirk in a SOAP response

2007-02-01T11:35:00.001-08:00

When you use Apache Axis for your web services implementation , its a wise move but you got to remember its few one off situations, like this one that I'm going to explain.
Apache axis generates namespaces in every single element of the response , which can be very painful for the client if client is going parse and moreover its additional overhead in your SOAP response back to client, you are pushing more data over the wire where it can be avoided. sample looks something like this

<SOAP ENV..>
<SOAP Header..>
</SOAP Header..>
<SOAP body>
<ns1:elemenntname xsi:type="xsd:string"
xmlns:ns1="http://a.b.c/...." >
<ns2:elemenntname xsi:type="xsd:string"
xmlns:ns2="http://a.b.c/...." >

<ns3:elemenntname xsi:type="xsd:string"
xmlns:ns3="http://x.y.z/...." >

</SOAP body>
</SOAP Env...>

So above if you see , its unnecessary data getting duplicated in each element, where as ideally axis should be doing this internally by aggregating namespaces. So what you have to do is add following code in the your services code

org.apache.axis.utils.NSStack namespaceList = new org.apache.axis.utils.NSStack();
namespaceList .add("http://a.b.c./...", "ns1");
namespaceList .add("http://x.y.z./...", "ns2");
soapRespEnv.setNSMappings(namespaceList .cloneFrame());

Where as soapRespEnv is SOAP response envelope fetched from MessageContext. So what will above code do is, it will notify Axis engine to aggregate SOAP response namespaces in the SOAP envelope root. your response would look like below after above change

<SOAP ENV. xmlns:ns1="http://a.b.c/...." xmlns:ns2="http://x.y.z/....">
<SOAP Header..>
</SOAP Header..>
<SOAP body>
<ns1:elemenntname xsi:type="xsd:string">
<ns1:elemenntname xsi:type="xsd:string">

<ns2:elemenntname xsi:type="xsd:string">

</SOAP body>
</SOAP Env...>

benefitof above approach is

* Sheer data size reduction, that goes over the wire
* SOAP response looks like very clean.

How to use Dynamic Object invocation in Rails for Models (String to Model conversion)

2006-12-28T22:45:00.000-08:00

Requirement
-------------
You have String value of the model (model name) and you want to dynamically invoke methods on this model. This comes handy when you want to parse controller/action and do some neat nifty tricks.

Solution
-----------
model_name = "invoice"

model_name_capital = model_name.capitalize # => this creates "Invoice"

@object = Object.const_get(model_name).find(:all) # => This is equivalent to Invoice.find_all

Ruby 4 Lines of Web service/SOAP Code Magic

2006-12-27T19:09:00.000-08:00

This is amazing to see how easy and simple it is to write a SOAP code in ruby, have a look at the following code. This does call Google search engine by passing some random search query.

require 'soap/wsdlDriver'
factory = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new("http://api.google.com/GoogleSearch.wsdl")
service = factory.create_rpc_driver
@service_output = service.doGoogleSearch("xxxxxxxxxxxxxx", "Ajuby", 0, 10, "false", "", "false", "", "latin1", "latin1")

That's it.. @service_output returns what I call it as "Ruby's intelligent data structure" which you can use to get respective data output

e.g.
- Results: <%=@service_output.estimatedTotalResultsCount%>
- searchTime: <%=@service_output.searchTime%>

Note: Above "xxxxxxxxxxxxx" is the api key that you need to obtain from Google to use their web services, its less than a minute job to get that from google.

Now there is a better and more modular way of writing above code using ActionWebService
where you can manage API's to access outgoing SOAP calls more effectively.

XSD to WSDL Conversion

2006-11-27T15:39:00.001-08:00

# Good site to refer contract-first web service and XSL that translates XSD to WSDL
# Also Christian Weyer's jWSCF for Eclipse
# ObjectWeb's Celtix ESB's xsd2wsdl tool

Surprisingly first 2 generates different type of WSDL for same XSD.

Legends/Great Programmers answer simple but important questions..

2006-10-10T17:20:00.000-07:00

This one is a classic page, should go in a history of software/hardware. Author of this page has done good job in asking simple but interesting (in terms of these great guys and their outlook towards simple things in their day to day life).
I liked the question "If you had three months to learn one relatively new technology, which one would You choose?". Answers to this question can project one vital thing "What is the interesting technology/concept or thing which you would see helping technology future"

Java String replace: java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: No group 2

2006-10-09T14:08:00.000-07:00

Issue

If you see java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: No group 2 , when you are doing <String>.replaceFirst(<source string>, <target string>) or <String>.replaceAll(<source string>, <target string>).

Reason

You possibly have "$" character in your target string.

Solution

Add java.util.regex.Matcher.quoteReplacement(<target string>), before you apply replace function.

Bug reported on Sun site by someone.

OpenAppDotOrg Toolkit hits 100 downloads!!.

2006-10-05T20:50:00.000-07:00

Our Ruby/Rails based open source project OpenAppDotOrg finally hits 100 downloads on sourceforge . Groovy!!... See the captured snapshot of that moment on the left. This is just a beginning, we have a long way to go and I will come back to toast 1,000.....of downloads.

Current release 0.2515 includes, things like

Common user services (sign up/email support/forgot password etc)
User access control
Company/User relationship
First open source Feed management module

More about the project can be found on our wiki
Download the latest version from sourceforge
Our community on Google groups and openapp forum

Rails Association example: has_many relationship

2006-10-03T21:57:00.000-07:00

After a long time, I finally get to write this up. Step by step instructions to build Rails:ActiveRecord: has_many relationship.

Once you start with this , you can sense the power of this meta modeling techique which turns your business application/model building into a snap.

I will write up more going deeper into complex techniques of Rails association, meanwhile few interesting sites explain this as follows

Ruby/Rails tricks and tips with ActiveRecord

2006-08-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

I had a simple problem definition:

Write a installer application in rails which will take database username, password and database name
Creates brand new database
Populate the database with schema and reference data.
Updates database.yml file
Reinitialize the rails activerecord connection context, so that user does not have to restart the application

This is how I solved it. few steps , hopefully this will be usefull for other ppl who wants to do something similar.

# Create new database

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.create_database("rex_boy") #rex_boy new database name.

# Load new database with schema and data.
.........This you can do either by using writing Rake migrate tasks or manually write SQL's to load the schema and data, 1000's of ways to do this. I did using creating using migrations and invoking rake command from rails.

# Read and update the database.yml file with newly created database

## Read the Yml and update with new database name
@config = YAML::load(File.open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/database.yml")) @config['development']['database']= "rex_boy"

## Now update the yml file back. basically write the database.yml back from @config object
File.open( "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/database.yml", 'w' ) do |f| f << @config.to_yaml

# Now the interesting part to reintialize ActiveRecord connection context without restarting the server (Apache or WEBrick or Lighttpd..)

ActiveRecord::Base.configurations = @config ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection ActiveRecord::Base.connection

This should get you very fancy in terms of building rails based installer application.

Framework comparison

2006-08-10T21:03:00.000-07:00

Check this video (almost 340MB) out, Its fun and gives users a quick glance at all the frameworks that author of this video is trying to use. He is comparing J2EE vs Ruby on Rails vs Zope vs TurboGears vs Django.

Rails based framework for Java. Co-existence or contender?

2006-08-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

I was sailing thru the net to see if there is anyone doing Rails framework on Java?. so some of the following guys who are doing few things similar to rails, not all.

# Trails: domain driven development framework in the spirit of Ruby on Rails or Naked Objects. Uses Spring, Tapestry, and Hibernate. Probably this one has a long way to go. Not too much happening in this area.
# Sails: Purely framework designed by keeping Rails in mind. Have a download section.It would be interesting to download and play with it.
# Grails: Sounds the closest one to rails, including controller/model generation, scaffolding etc, its written in Groovy
# JBoss Seam: Probably most active and adopted project as compared to above. Seam uses EJB3 and Hibernate (both, I wonder why?. Probably things around Transaction support and things like heavy weight vs light weight components usage).

I will keep watching this space and add if i run into any other puppy who wants to be or do things like rails in Java.

Quick view on Computer Software/Programming Languages History

2006-06-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

I found this great collection of pictures of Programming language creators/authors, surely a Wall of Fame for all those people who wants to be inspired by probably the best men to walk over this planet earth. Men who made today's world of computer/software/programming/ possible

Apache would not start if Skype is running

2006-06-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

I wasted 30 mins figuring this out without knowing what could be the real reason. If you are trying to start your apache (with or without mod_ssl/:443 port enabled) and if you have Skype already running on your machine, Apache won't start, it will not create any error log, so you go look at your event viewer you will see something like

System Log: "The Apache2 service terminated with service-specific error 1." ; Arghh!! so helpful ;)
Application Log: "The Apache service named reported the following error:
>>> Unable to open logs" , "The Apache service named reported the following error:
>>> no listening sockets available, shutting down . "

Now the last message is little useful and it says that there is something already listening/running on port 80/443 , But hunting down was tough!. Because I don't have any other web server running. Root cause is "Skype"

Go to Skype->Tools->Options->Connection-> Uncheck "use 80 and 443 for incoming connection"

Who would ever thing my IM will waste my time, where as IM's are supposed to be productivity improvement tools :) , Anyways a good find and I hope it will be useful for others too. BTW No complains for skype, its a great tool.

Funky Browser based ruby shell

2006-06-06T15:51:00.000-07:00

Tryruby is Neat!!...but couple of things are hack, Like I type

require 'abracadabra'
=>true

Now I don't think anyone has written gem called abracadabra yet. but this shell is cool, very handy. I tried quick String manipulation test, it works!

Is MySpace becoming IPOD for social community business platform

2006-06-05T15:06:00.000-07:00

As usual I landed on Techcrunch website and what I see first 2 posts (companies), doing their business around MySpace. Like ,

SingleStat.us: Its a funny concept, but works for lot of singles or people with old crush. Techcrunch says "Want to know when that cute friend of yours breaks up with her boyfriend....a service that let’s you type in anyone’s Myspace profile and be notified by email if their relationship status changes".
Nooz: Interactive news service aimed for MySpace users, to start with.
and lot many...

So the question of the day: Is MySpace becoming IPOD for social community business platform. Like IPOD did, people made lots of dough by spinning their business around IPOD, concepts around IPOD. Now MySapce universe is emerging in a way, it's helping lots of Web2.0 startups to grow.

Buttonator....

2006-05-29T19:57:00.000-07:00

Pretty nifty tool/site create buttons. It's very handy. check it out, world of web 2.0 design is getting easier every step of the way.

Ruby Java Bridge is here

2006-05-19T19:51:00.000-07:00

Ruby bridge to Java is here, Not sure how smooth it is but surely worth a try.

How Ruby can be next generation business building block

2006-05-11T20:24:00.000-07:00

As Martin fowler said "As a result it certainly seems to me that certain languages are more suited to in-language DSL than others. Seeing lisp and smalltalk I concluded that the more suitable languages were minimalist ones with a single basic idea that's deeper and simpler than traditional languages (function application for lisp, objects and messages for smalltalk). But Ruby is more conventional and a much bigger language than these two, yet is still suitable for in-language DSLs."

So Ruby certainly sounds like a language which can rapidize (Not sure that's legal word or not, but I felt like using it here) business application building.

Anothe good read on Metaprogramming idea of Ruby [pdf].
How to create DSL using Ruby

What does Rails on Apache mean?

2006-05-11T15:34:00.000-07:00

Assuming you have a running rails application on WEBrick (which comes with rails), its 5 mins job to have rails up and running on Apache. You will need following things.
Remember You do not need FastCGI at all to run rails on Apache. .

Every rails application created is Apache deployable ready (that sounds so good!!), you don't need anything extra, neither FastCGI or Mongrel. You will need these 2 puppies for some other reasons that I will point out soon.

# Apache HTTP server
# Rails application

2 step process

- Open Apache httpd.conf under /conf.
- Add following at the very end and restart Apache

Listen 8027
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:8027>

DocumentRoot [railsapppath]/public/
<Directory [railsapppath]/public/>
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AllowOverride all
Allow from all
Order allow,deny
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Or another better way is to (Use Apache Alias technique) add following in your httpd.conf

Alias /railsappname [railsapppath]/public

Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks

AllowOverride all

Order allow,deny

Allow from all

</Directory>

- Open public/.htaccess file and add "RewriteBase /railsappname "

(With above technique you will not be creating virtual host on different port and this kind of setup makes more sense when you have more than one rails component sitting on Apache)

Here

[railsapppath]/public/: is your rails application public folder. You need to point to this directory, else it won't work.

Port 8027: some random port, on which you are asking Apache to run a virtual host for your rails application.

Now just point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8007/ and you will see the rails running on Apache. How fast was that?. Oh did I ask How fast was that?. Yes now this takes us to our next topic

# Fast CGI: Fast CGI makes ruby run faster on Apache, otherwise by itself ruby is slow on Apache, because it runs native CGI. I will talk on this in detail, in my next blog topic

# Mongrel : This puppy is getting its traction. Right now working good in Linux and Windows, not so good for Mac OSX. But this one is supposed to be better than FastCGI. I still need to experiment that.

Difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

2006-04-13T23:20:00.000-07:00

This is a good one and seriously true. Everything is BETA , even though product is launched for 100 years it will stay BETA forever. Google started it and the whole world is doing it now.

Ruby LoadError, Quick fix

2006-03-30T20:17:00.000-08:00

Ruby library load error, takes long time for a newbie but simple hack could get you up and running with your thing.
I just installed RubyFul_Soup[ Ruby port of the hit Python HTML/XML parser Beautiful Soup.] and wanted get started with RadRails , so when I write this line on top

require 'RubyFulSoup' as per the example given I get following error

LoadError: No such file to load -- rubyfulsoup

The thing is when you install any gem using "gem install" , it installs gem under /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems , so somehow ruby does not really get where to pick up gems from , best thing to do a quick sanity check regarding your setup , and you can do that by "irb" (Interactive Ruby Shell), just type
bash> irb
irb(main):002:0> require 'RubyFulSoup'
LoadError: No such file to load -- RubyFulSoup
from (irb):2:in `require'
from (irb):2

basically gem installed is "rubyful_soup' and its under /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems
and Ruby looks for files under /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/ , So all I did is copied rubyful_soup.rb file from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems to /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/ and also copy htmltools gem files to /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/, then run

irb(main):001:0> require 'rubyful_soup'
=> true

This is a quick fix till I figure out the real solution for this

RadRails puts RoR on Web2.0 development Autobahn

2006-03-22T22:00:00.000-08:00

It took me less than 50% time to get a small database RWD (Read-Write-Delete) application in RoR (Ruby On Rails) as compared to traditional Java application on Eclipse. How I did that, using RadRails
What is RadRails, Its a bomb!, its amazing, seriously I was never this excited, when Eclipse happened to Java/J2EE world. Why because it took me more time get Eclipse up and running with my java project and hook tomcat to it , yadda yadda!. But I could count it on on my fingers how long it took me get one simple rails app up and running with built in WEBrick server. It was just less than 5 mins, I had simple customer application with DB read/write/delete running on my browser.
RadRails is written on Eclipse framework, but extremely sexy, in terms producing components. Like rails/ruby/database/subversion support etc.

Some of the cool features

mvc key bindings : To jump one context of development to another, moving between view (.rhtml ) to app controller faster.
Generate tabs: All rails generate command on your fingertips
Console/Tail : Very helpful in AJAX development where you can see data going back and forth between your client and server.

Oh yeah!, did I say how It was this quick , have a look at the screencast , you got to love this stuff!!..

There is a famous say "You need a reason to convince yourself, why you should do different deed", I guess RadRails is my reason to love Ruby/RoR.

So finally I would say "Got RoR!"

''Home-Sourcing'' vs. Offshoring - Outsourcing - CFO.com

2006-02-23T21:58:00.000-08:00

What is next when offsourcing/offshoring becomes hard to manage in terms of money and transaction monitoring

.htaccess usage on Apache doesn't work?, See what you are missing.

2006-01-16T19:44:00.000-08:00

I wasted couple of hours on this, So sharing this one with everyone so that I can save someone else's time.

Simplest way to implement directory level authorization on Apache HTTP server is to use .htaccess file with password file combinations, You will find How to Implement Authorization on Apache everywhere. But there are couple of things which you will not find in these sites, because they assume that you would have done this before or you know about this already. So let me run thru basic steps and steps which are generally ignored (but very important get this out there)

Basic Steps

Create .htaccess file with all the directives like AuthType,AuthName,AuthUserFile,Require attributes
Create password file (as specified in AuthUserFile) using htpasswd command.

usually Ignored Steps (in your httpd.conf file make sure following lines are not commented out)

LoadModule auth_module libexec/httpd/mod_auth.so
AddModule mod_auth.c
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
Satisfy All
Most important step which makes or brakes this whole exercise

"AllowOverride none" should be replaced by "AllowOverride AuthConfig"

With above you should be up and running with Apache Basic Auth.

BernieMac: Mac OS; DVD ripping/burning dilemma

2005-09-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

Recently I started working on Mac OS-X , Got this fine Apple previous G4 with the Superdrive from friend of mine . I discovered few interesting things as far as DVD ripping and burning is concerned, after a long struggle on few things. I thought this would be useful for folks out there who want something quick about this part of the world.
To burn DVD movie which is as big as 8 GB to 10 GB is a pain. You have couple of options.

Have a Dual layer DVD 8.X GB, and burn your movie or data on that, But bummer is you will need a dual layer DVD-RW drive, which is not a great option
Second and best option is compress the movie or data file which is greater that 4.7 GB and then burn it on the standard blank DVD-R(+R/RW) disk

This gets extremely easy on Windows , just download DVDShrink , this puppy is one of the best of application ever written and best it is free, it does 2 important things

Rips the DVD data from the source
Compresses the data to the best compression % possible with default compression algorithms.

After that all you have to use a normal burning utilities like Nero or Roxio to burn the data. Simple and elegant.

Now How about Mac-OS, it gets little tricky and complex than that, primary reason is there is no DVDShrink available for Mac-OS, moreover its quite a work to find free and good software to find on Mac. So consider following options

MacTheRipper : Tiny little ripping tool (Its free) does a great job of ripping the DVD into VIDEO_TS format. Some of the rips doesn't work good for burning.
DVD2Onex This is a ripping + compression tool, works pretty well. Got to pay, you get one free rip with free download.
Roxio Popcorn This one is ripping + compressing + burning tool , so that makes it best of all of the above , again you got to pay for this one, but I would say it is totally worth it. You put a Source DVD, it will start ripping + compressing and once it is done, you pop out source dvd and pop in blank dvd and it will write the compressed data. With real good quality.

For burning on Mac, you can use Mac OS's in house iTunes, DiskImage, DiskUtility and Free softwares out there or commercial softwares like Roxio Toast Lite/Titanium. For more info on any of the above go to this Wiki

Have a great time ripping _and_ compressing _and_ burning.

American Legend to roll in India

2005-09-06T18:52:00.000-07:00

I'm writing after a long time in here, and I thought this one is really good information to share with all those motorcycle lovers, especially cruisers.
Harley-Davidson is planning to bring its legendry motorcycles to India, via import medium. Believe it or not for few people like me its a damn good news, if it really happens. Call it as craziness or whatever, it will be a big shift for Indian motorcycle industry (I mean motorcycles from India and _NOT_ Indian brand :)). This will add up to one of the reasons why I would move back to India. Here is the article which talks about this possibility.
Price tag is little too over the top for Indian market, but it would still draw lot of upper class people to buy this mean machine, Harley-Davidson is targeting range between 4 Lac rupees to 14 Lac rupees. So lower end price tag might fetch you Sportster brand and higher price tag will possibly have VRSC or Touring , if they plan to release all the models.
As India is one of the biggest market for motorcycles, I was always dreamt these big machines to be a part of Indian roads, where Kawaski and Yamaha sportsbikes was always in demand.
I know few people like Inddie Thumpers who ride and live the Indian manufactured bad boys (Enfield motorcycles) would either try this piece of American history or own it. I would for sure when I get back home and right now I'm enjoying my harley-davidson sportster ride around bayarea.

Quick and Dirty; Apache HTTP Compression

2005-06-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

Following are few steps for HTTP compression on Apache.

Open httpd.conf
Uncomment line #LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so, if it is commented
At the very end of the file, add following lines

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gifjpe?gpng)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

Restart your Apache HTTP server and you are all up and running with compression server output compression.

For more details refer Apache's mod_deflate Documentation

Connect Oracle behind Firewall

2005-06-14T00:20:00.000-07:00

Problem: TNS:operation timed out
Reason : Oracle database server behind any type of firewall.
Solution: Add "USE_SHARED_SOCKET"="TRUE", on the windows registry.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\HOME0]
"USE_SHARED_SOCKET"="TRUE

More information can be found here

Open source started running deep in IBM

2005-05-19T20:58:00.000-07:00

There is a phenomena like open source and there are giants like HP, SUN, BEA who are adopting open source in a different way, and there is IBM who is turning the wheels all around.

IBM's push for

Eclipse project ; the IDE /Application framework swept the developers off their feet.
In-House support for Firefox; pushing the firefox the across the enterprise, making usage of breakthrough browser more prevalent (I don't think they realy needed to do this, people are already jumping onto firefox for its beauty!)
Embracing GlueCode [1+]; With this IBM will back up Apache Geronimo project, which will make JBoss/Novell worry for sure upto certain extent, because of the possible projection of Geronimo in the J2EE application server market. infact experts predicting IBM's wepsphere would be less of threat to BEA Weblogic, than Geronimo going after JBoss.
Last but not least IBM's own open source arena

My list will keep growing, I'm sure IBM will keep pushing and supporting this revolution.

Smart web clients; Ajax way..

2005-04-08T13:22:00.000-07:00

We have been hearing a lot about Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) these days. It is for sure changing the way web clients are presented. Why go far; Google maps (so called poster child for Ajax) /Google Suggest are the few ones to implement Ajax, real time, but implemented extremely well. You will not feel a blink, that browser is talking to server real time, as user enters data.
Probably the driving force behind all this is XMLHttpRequest concept, which makes it quite possible. From the business front, Microsoft is been talking about smart clients for a quite a while reflecting their images on their Windows operating system.
I'm not sure how the scalability of Ajax works for business application type of products/Big data intensive/intelligent applications, where you have heavy database interaction, business models, data controllers, UI limitations etc. It might get clunky do a lot of work in Javascript/client side, if not designed right.

What is next ?

Now people speculate; is Ajax a alternative for Flash, I don't think so. In fact they will be compliment each other in terms of sharing feature sets. xamlon.com went ahead collaborated the Ajax model with Flash and they call it as Aflax (Ajax+Flash). Look at their google maps equivalent in Flash .
Toolkits and API for Ajax; We need toolkit and API's which support Ajax, which will learning curve
Speculations; Sam Ruby about Ajax's other side.

I personally see a good potential in this model, to turn around the UI world, if not 360 degrees, atleast 180 degrees. It gives user of Ajax a better control over user anxiety on waiting for web application to load. Also gives more convincing power to UI seller to paint pretty picture effectively without much impact on performance.
I would watch for it, with experimenting Ajax way.

Yoga; Open sourced...

2005-03-27T01:25:00.000-08:00

Open source is proving to be phenomena , even attracting non-technological fronts like Yoga. Open Source Yoga Unity (OSYU) is a corporation to open source yoga in a right way, which will make people aware about benefits of more than 5000 year old spiritual practice and art of body work.
The fact is it is all gathering under the one umbrella of Open source. Because it sounds right and it was not be that way. Yoga was _NOT_ supposed to patented and copyrighted.. It has been given to students from Teachers for 1000's of years. Open source derives similar idea, with some change assuming it is treated right.

When 3 OS's meet in a imaginary world; iPod bridges the gap

2005-03-11T18:18:00.000-08:00

This is really cool; iPod has done it again; IBM's attempt to use Linux on iPod for boot/recover/backup tasks. Think about this.

iPod is created by Apple; Home of Mac-OS
ipodlinux manage to get Linux on iPod and much more.
IBM uses iPod to boot Linux on PC.

Well there is the love-hate collaboration of 3 operating systems in a very imaginary world.

Like Google is a software development tool these days. iPod is becoming Google of hardware industry. Even though I do not own a iPod, it still intrigues me , this tiny masterpiece is taking the world by storm one inch by one inch.

Is AMQ threat for ESB vendors out there?.

2005-02-09T13:28:00.000-08:00

Financial industry leaders like JP Mogran Chase, gearing up for the new Open source message Queue Platform based on web services and SOA standards. They are calling it as "AMQ" (I'm assuming this will be Advanced Message Queuing :-) ).

Financial industry argument points to following core factors.

Get rid of proprietary factors.
More lenient Support for C/C++/C# technology.
Huge data transfer rate (Close to 100 MB); This is driven from big concerns for regular feeds going back and forth.
Build the whole AMQ architecture right in the Operation System Kernel, (This is the Cool one I liked). Initial release already focusing on SuSE/Redhat/Solaris Kernel.

On the contrary it is not a new concept to have a open source MOM (message oriented middleware). There are few.

Here is the detailed article on this subject.

Check-in/Check-out On Demand Enterprise; Services to Grid

2005-02-07T17:57:00.000-08:00

We have been hearing On-Demand buzz for long time now, last year it received quite an attention. Right from on demand infrastructure thru on demand services to on demand applications, its growing and it makes more sense for a customer to pertain to this trend. Reason is "Mother of all"; Cost benefit ; ROI factor; Customers realize the utilization of their money in a right direction sooner than later in this model. Most of all reduces overhead on maintenance.

IBM is quite an pioneer in this race, and it invested big bucks in this future possibility. As Sam Palmisano said "an enterprise whose business processes—integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers—can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat."

On Demand Platform changes the way you design and implement your systems. It is started as traditional ASP model and gained lot of mileage from the hosting model and eventually got exposed as Enterprise business model because of web services/REST/XML/Utility computing and similar technologies.

Recently we are seeing a real "Check-in/Check-out On Demand Enterprise", across different aspects. From Utility Grid computing to Enterprise E-Commerce. Some of the examples are

Enterprise services [1+]; are opening themselves to On-Demand E-Commerce.
Sun's Grid's availability for global computing; A real Kicker to the Grid world. Data center will be available to the customers, pay per use. $1/hr of CPU usage. What Sun gets out of these is; primarily they can make Customers to use their products and possible venture into different verticals, So that's On-Demand Computing.
Amazon's Message Queue Platform; This is a cool one, Amazon will open up its SQS(Simple Queue Service), as a add-on to its already existing web services infrastructure. Don't forget this again comes with certain usage boundaries. This makes Amazon as one of the few players moving to On-Demand Middleware.

From the technology front, IBM announcing SOMA, extension to current SOA, that will help enterprises to convert their model to On-Demand business.

Big Trinity's "Natural Selection": PeopleSoft as an Advantage.

2005-01-25T22:47:00.000-08:00

Well it "It's a dog eat dog world" for sure. But I guess this one would be best described as "Its a dog eat another dog alive, world". Well everyone of aware of one of the biggest buy out story of this year. Oracle bought PeopleSoft for $10 b . and Oracle is proposing this one as a one of the strategic moves for their future. This is not one of the only attempt of Oracle to acquire big leaders, but this is the successful attempt to wipe out, such a big company and its people with a smart planning. Oracle tried to acquire players like Siebel and BEA in past also.
Now its someone should take an advantage of this whole situation, Big 3 did. Yes!. Its Microsoft , SAP and IBM.

Microsoft discounted migration services,This will migrate customers from Peoplesoft application. So their 25% discount program will be over by end of mid this year. So customers will rush and there goes Microsoft revenue, up again. As they reported revenue growth for their 3rd quarter already up by 13%
SAP buys TomorrowNow [1+]; Huge benefit for SAP going forward. Now they have their own way of spinning the wheel. with this deal, 75% credit towards mySAP ERP, discount for Netweaver integration platform
IBM to buy Corio; Corio is one of the leading ASP for PeopleSoft and Oracle ERP, IBM will kill two stones with this, first it will strengthen its own Hosted ASP business. Second slowly go after customers like PeopleSoft and Oracle, as IBM has its own small business application initiative, to go on CRM market.

interestingly this will go on because its a race but with advantage to your competitors sometimes, whoever wins they need to maintain the reputation, but people who loose or who are watching winners closely, they keep an eye on next revolution and run for it.

SCO's win over IBM/Linux case: Good or Bad for Open source but more formal Open source adoption policy

2005-01-20T18:12:00.000-08:00

is this good or bad for Open source and its forgoing future

Good from perspective of

Open source will be treated right from legal aspects, There will be a better open source adoption policy, chances for Open source compliance to become more formal

Bad from perspective of
Now enterprises will be skeptical about use of Open source technology inside the organization, because of possible legal threat with following loosing of millions of $$.

Bottom line, that brings up a point, Open source governance and right policy implementation to have a healthy environment going between open source vendors/legal experts/CIO's

OSI approves Sun's CDDL, what does it mean??

2005-01-19T18:04:00.000-08:00

Open source initiative (OSI), approved Sun Microsystems's CDDL, What does that mean in short?.

Open Solaris
Create a unhappiness in Linux community and other fellow open source people.
Open source Patent giveaway war; With CDDL, Sun gives away all of its patents to dev community as compared to 500 IBM patents, Now there starts one more round of tug-of-war between these 2 big players.
Open source Operating system group will be more happening, with 2 distinct groups (Solaris and Linux) forming to run against each other.

Torvalds says

"It will be hard for Sun to build a community like Linux. Looks like Sun is trying to play the same track as they did with Java, where they tried to control the whole evolving to maturing process of Java, So they loose real advantage of Open source"

On Demand-Real Time-Human interaction based Customer Service

2005-01-17T20:04:00.000-08:00

Is this annoying or "Minority Report" age for customers ?.

Circuit City's new approach to Customer Service. This changes how customers interact with products in a real store. Circuit City's CIO Mike Jones, want to sell products, infer products and sales to customers. Reminds me of Minority report and presentation of the technology in that movie. Remember guy walking on the subway train station, Camera/Screen on the side of the platform identifies the person and gives the personal advertisements for that person. I knew this will be a future, but did not think it will be this fast.

Optimist will say ?

Revolutionary idea, no representative needed. It is On Demand World.

Pessimist will say?

Are you crazy!, it is annoying, I do not want headphone hanging on my head and screaming at my ear, picthing me about products wherever I focus my eye sight.

Well its a give and take world, Got to loose something to gain. Its a matter of preference.

Here are list of scenario summaries, which Circuit city wants to present to customer.

Personal Thank you from the CEO to the customer who makes big buck purchase.
Personal delivery of the product to customer's home, based on availability of product in customer's home address area.
MP3 Player preloaded with customer's favorite music
Promotions based on customer's interaction with the products and his intrest, RFID based smart cards.

How will competitors react to this infrastructure revolution. We will see it sooner than later.

AudioBlogging Tests the limit of how far human can go; Over and Out Kilimanjaro

2005-01-17T16:54:00.000-08:00

This is amazing. Audioblogging From Kilimanjaro via satellite phone, that too as a memorial for another late officer. Truly remarkable job!. As they were audio blogging MP3 on to the site, they reached the summit.
Needless to say, How powerful this information age is, with tomorrow's social engineering tools like Blogging(Audio/Video)/Wiki/Tagging it is all reachable within few seconds.

Building Open source evangelists; redefining software services model.

2005-01-14T17:02:00.000-08:00

As Mitch Kapor said

"I think that for people who use software, in the long run, open-source products are going to be less expensive and of higher quality. Also, open-source products put more control into the hands of people and organizations that use the software, which is a good thing."; in this recent article.

It is true, it takes a considerable amount of time for revolution, Open source products started growing from developers heart to CIO's heart. It is a long transition from late 90's till date.

As fundamental idea behind open source , Companies have lesser burdern from software cost and more of long term maintenance/service work. Infact it is not only with open source , even with commercial product vendors are facing this problem. There is no "new license" money, its all about Subscription/maintenance model ,
" "subscription" maintenance business as "an extremely high-margin business." mentioned by Larry Ellison's earlier this year in a earnings call, Have a look at this graph (from Forrester Research) of New licenses/Maintenance/Services. It shows Maintenance is a constant growth and reaches close to 40% of total revenue, following that Services superseded New licenses during 2001 to 2003.

So How is open source players are taking this trend?. By proposing services as business model for open source companies, building open source specialists; soon to become evangelists, Who will

Promote and implement open source technologies around different stacks like LAMP/LAMJ and other components
Provide support for existing open source platform and components for different customers.

Companies are taking this real seriously, We currently seeing following service trend for open source industry.

New wave in Global Open source software services, Companies like SourceLabs, Spikesource; providing whole LAMP/LAMJ stack certification. Then Optaros, doing system integration and consulting.
Big players support for established open source prdoducts. (HP's support for JBoss/MySQL, which intern gives competitive edge against IBM/BEA)
Open source vendors (JBoss/MySQL) driving services as one of the key business factors.
Offshore SI/service providers developing open source services practices and expertise.

And there are companies like Apptility who wants to make open source adoption/compliance easier, along with services/support, Blackduck on compliance management.

Following diagram will show the transition of a concept to enterprise value element.

In a true sense it is redefining typical software services model, with the help of open source advocates and evangelists.

Geronimo; Will he lead J2EE App server tribe?.

2005-01-12T01:08:00.000-08:00

A true The Geronimo Effect will be felt soon. It makes me believe that it is highly possible, when Geronimo finally matures to the level of full blown J2EE deployment, probably it will be the first open source J2EE application server, which will be loved by the community. Apart from JBoss beating big player like IBM, Oracle and BEA in Enterprise market, which establishes the recognition and liking for strong open source reliable product. Reasons are numerous on why this happens, simplicity and $$ are key factors.
Geronimo has already started making waves back in late 2004 and already eating Web sphere/Weblogic's breakfast.

Why Geronimo ?

ASF 's (Apache Software Foundation) License is more lenient as compared LGPL (JBoss) or GPL.
Solid stack of previously popular enterprise products, e.g.Tomcat, the best Servlet container ever written. The tiniest few Kilobytes kernel, JBoss's service driven kernel architecture.
Full blown J2EE application server for enterprise wide service on open source platform.
Huge community supporting Apache software Foundation products.
Possible commercial support on service basis like JBoss.

More Power to Open source developers From IBM; Patents and IP becomes Primary attributes of Open source game!

2005-01-11T23:30:00.000-08:00

After IBM gave away 100's of patents to open source development community, suddenly patents and Intellectual Property becomes one of the key attributes for open source licensing domain.
A great move from IBM, after sitting on top of tons of open source projects, what a smart way to utilize one of the largest patent list under their umbrella.
It is true shared open source innovation, makes true senses when IP is respected and followed in a right direction.
That's why FSF(Free Software Foundation)/Richard Stallman working on GPL next version, one of the most prominent and popular license in whole open source community. This rewrite is focused more for Patent and IP.

How to Blog; Good Blog to follow.. When will we get Categories in Blogger.

2005-01-08T22:46:00.000-08:00

This one is a real nice blog about How to Blog and details about other blog leaders, comparisons
By the way, why blogger team can not push this basic and useful "Categories" feature?. There are some hacks/workarounds at OldCola. But I would love a true feature than doing all playing around with the code. I will wait and see.

When Government goes Open-Source on technology; Brasil, aquele é a maneira ir.

2005-01-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

This is the future of open source, when it gets to government arena, it have to have a potential to stir the vendor dominated nation.
Brazil government is going open source, They want to start right from the bottom of the stack. Javali is one of the initiative in this direction. They want to get java language itself under open source umbrella, and probably go from there.
Is this going to be the future trend, with government organizations, in selecting IT / Business infrastructure components ?. Is this how big enterprises are going to follow thru.
These enterprises and organizations do not mind paying for the services at all. As long as there is good value for money, they will be overwhelmed with the idea of free software(I mean it!), paid services.

BlogWar between Six Apart , Google and MSN Spaces. Is MSN spaces making it more interesting ?

2005-01-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

After Six Apart's acquisition LiveJournal (Six Apart to Buy LiveJournal), Typepad and MoveableType under their belt, it will become one of the biggest Blog Hosting providers. . Is this the game between SixApart , Google 's Blogspot/Blogger and New MSN Spaces

Looks like MSN has given its own twist to msn spaces, by collaborating traditional blogging with photos, that makes them close to Blogging + Flickr. Even though they are not as good as flickr today, in terms of innovation in photo blogging and cool derivation of fundamental blogging with its technical elements like tags, community etc. I guess one advantage MSN will have on all these blog hosting sites, that it will let you blog from your MSN Instant Messenger, which makes it blogging on your desktop while you are chatting with your friends, may be you can convert you useful chat conversations into blog content with intelligent filters.

Its definitely worth testdriving msn spaces and see how far they go with this. Race is on...

.NET not on IIS and On Apache ?. Yes : Cassini or Mono.

2005-01-04T16:03:00.000-08:00

People who wants to run .NET framework or webservices part of it on a standalone, self-contained environment, without going thru the hassle of getting whole Microsoft IIS server setup. There are couple of viable solutions

Use Cassini : Cassini, Microsoft's own lightweight webserver (Old day Personal webserver for ASP applications), which is light in footprint. Also check for CassiniEx

Use Mono: Mono's 's XSP or mod_mono, Best part is You can envision running Microsoft .NET on Apache, using mod_mono module plugin for Apache HTTP Server.(Neat!!..:). Irony is this plugin is suppose to be working only for Unix/Linux I guess, not for Windows.

Use Cassini On Apache: Drop Cassini on top of Apache. This is one of the wonderful ideas, because Apache can serve your Java and .NET Both. There is a true collaboration or whatever you call it as.
That makes Apache a true winner across the Architecture/Frameworks.

Google and Sarbanes Oxley one of the top 2 things to watch in 2005; Now you know the reason...

2005-01-01T02:37:00.000-08:00

This partially explains why Google and Sarbanes Oxley are going to be one of the Top two things to watch in 2005. Sarbanes Oxley Policy Forbids GDS article says, corporate IT needs to make an strong decision about Google Desktop Search, either supporting security factor for outcome of GDS install on all the computers or strictly banning the usage of GDS inside organization.
Sarbanes Oxley will keep going deep inside big organizations making every business unit Compliance Orinented, and Google will keep doing cool things which appeal to the masses. But when these two collide in the matter like personal intrusion subject, because GDS and Policy compatibility.

Java-JNI-COM-ActiveX Bridge.; Lots of jumps-n- hoops

2004-12-30T16:44:00.000-08:00

I'm assuming reader will have basic idea of what and how Java-JNI works, if not refer to Sun's JNI Tutorial section . For Advanced Java-JNI Programming look at this site.

Now this article is not to teach JNI, this one is about my discoveries in regards to mystery of JNI communication with Microsoft native COM/ActiveX components. It is not as straight forward it as it looks like. JNI says I CAN talk to Microsoft DLL component, but it does not say that DLL has to be written in certain way. That way is again guided and defined by JNI standards. This article will explain how to go about building a compatible bridge between any form of DLL and Java application.

Requirement: (Requirements are always simple, seems easy as grabbing a beer from the refrigerator)

My requirement is to communicate with Visual Basic ActiveX component (DLL file) using Java.

Speculation: (We always speculate with lots of options and think one thing or other will get us there easily)

There are millions of way achieving this, Use commercial/Open source products (As mentioned on the right hand side of the article table 1)

Write your JNI bridge to communicate.

Facts: (When you actual fact bites you, its not pleasant)

You have to go thru many of the open source products, test them, make sure it do exactly same, as you expect.( Ah!!! lot of patience)

Some of the product you finally pick saying "Yes" this works , then you realize there is a Licensing nightmare, you can not use it freely for production deployment. Sometimes you can use it but it
will come with good amount of per user/per machine/per processor/ (infinite loop of per thingy). So your clients or customer will decide not to buy because it needs a money to deploy ready made solution. e.g. Look at IBM's license fee for Bridge2java.

If you decide to write your own JNI code, well "flip this". Java does not understand Visual Basic way of defining methods/functions. So it will not understand Visual Basic Active-X DLL component. Bottom line you simply can not talk to Visual Basic DLL directly using Java.

Solution: (Sooner you figure out the solution, better it is for you)

So you are left with, either use existing open source/commercial product or write your own. In my case after trying few of the products out there decide to go with my own.

Solution Detail

As i mentioned, There is no on the earth you can make Java directly talk to Visual Basic DLL, idea is to write a COM Wrapper in C++ (VC++), which will act as bridge between Java and Visual basic. Basically Java can communicate with C++ Wrapper and C++ Wrapper knows all about Visual basic code.

Java(JNI)--> C ++ wrapper -->VB DLL

How Java Talks to VC++

Java JNI will talk to VC++ wrapper using JNI way of defining and communicating. Refer to this tutorial site about how to communicate with DLL files. Key is to follow the pattern of

Java_<Java Class Name>_<Method Name to Invoke> on your .h and .cpp files. typical
method on .h and .cpp will look like this

JNIEXPORT jobjectArray JNICALL Java_CallService_GetEarthCoOrdinates (JNIEnv *env, jobject object)

How VC++ talks to VB

I will not write in detail about this because ,there are good resources out there and one of them is
codeproject site, about how to get VC++ talking to VB.

That should give you a good idea about how to achieve, two different worlds (Java and Visual Basic) talking with each other.

What next ?; The difficult part.

Once the basic communication done, then comes the most difficult parts where you need pass parameters back and forth. If parameters are complex, then its more painful. I have listed down few points on how to get things across using different data types.

Situation : Lets look at the complex situation. Java is passing String arrays (String[ ][ ]) and Visual Basic is expecting (Variant array Dim earthParams(10, 10) As Variant).

Java	VC++	VB
String[][]	SAFEARRAY/VARIANT	Variant array

You have to pass String Array as jobjectArray to VC++

Convert them to SAFEARRAY

Convert SAFEARRAY to VARIANT

Pass VARIANT to VB via call.

Same thing Other way round when data comes back from VB.

Convert jobjectArray (Java String[ ][ ] array) to VC++ SAFEARRAY/VARAINT (C++ Code)

VARIANT loadJavaArrayToCPPSafeArray(jobjectArray stringArray, JNIEnv * env)

{

//Define SAFEARRAY

SAFEARRAY *psa;

VARIANT var1;

SAFEARRAYBOUND rgsabound[2]; //This means 2 Dimensional
SAFEARRAY

rgsabound[0].cElements = 10; // 10 rows

rgsabound[0].lLbound = 0;

rgsabound[1].cElements = 10; //10 columns

rgsabound[1].lLbound = 0;

psa=SafeArrayCreate(VT_VARIANT, 2, rgsabound); //Finally Create
2D SAFEARRAY

//Now get First Dimension Array Length for String [][] array
passed

jint length1Dim = (env)->GetArrayLength(stringArray);

long aiIndex[2];

for (aiIndex[0] = 0; aiIndex[0] < length1Dim; aiIndex[0]++)

{

jobjectArray oneDimArray= (jobjectArray)env->GetObjectArrayElement(stringArray, aiIndex[0]);

//Get Second Dimension
of the String[][] array passed.

jint length2dim = (env)->GetArrayLength(oneDimArray);

jstring oneDim;

const char* szStr;

for(aiIndex[1]=0;aiIndex[1]<length2dim;aiIndex[1]++)

{

oneDim= (jstring)env->GetObjectArrayElement(oneDimArray,
aiIndex[1]);

szStr = env->GetStringUTFChars( oneDim, 0 );

VARIANT var;

_bstr_t str2 = szStr; //Get Sting value from array to BSTR of
C++

var.vt = VT_BSTR;

var.bstrVal = str2;

//Now Populate SAFEARRAY with Data.

HRESULT hrs = SafeArrayPutElement(psa,aiIndex,&var);

//Following is to Check
whether SafeArrayPutElement is successful or not. just for
Debug

if(hrs == S_OK)

cout<< "S_OK";

else if(hrs == DISP_E_BADINDEX)

cout<< "DISP_E_BADINDEX";

else if(hrs == E_INVALIDARG)

cout<< "E_INVALIDARG";

else if(hrs == E_OUTOFMEMORY)

cout<< "E_OUTOFMEMORY";

//Have to release
Created String.

env->ReleaseStringUTFChars( oneDim, szStr );

}

}

//Finally Create Variant
from SAFEARRAY.

VariantInit(&var1);

var1.vt=VT_ARRAY VT_VARIANT;

var1.parray = psa;

//Return Variant
Representing Two-Dimensional Java 's String Array String[][]

return var1;

}

Printing 2D BSTR SAFEARRAY Contents

void printSafeArrayContents(SAFEARRAY psa*)

{

long arrayIndex[2];

cout<< "=============Printing Out..==========="<<endl;

for(arrayIndex[0] = 0; arrayIndex[0] < 6; arrayIndex[0]++)

{

for(arrayIndex[1] = 0; arrayIndex[1] < 2; arrayIndex[1]++)

{

VARIANT result;

SafeArrayGetElement(psa, arrayIndex, &result);

cout<<result.bstrVal <<endl;

}

cout<< "========================="<<endl;

}

Generate 2D String array (jobjectArray) from 2D SAFEARRAY, to pass back to Java (Borrowed from
JNISnippets Site and enhanced for SAFEAARRY)

jarray Get2DArrayFromSafeArray(JNIEnv* env, SAFEARRAY *psa)

{

char s[200];

jarray aref;

jobject job;

jclass class1;

jarray row[1];

int rows = 10;

int cols = 10;

int i;

int j;

long biIndex[2];

// Got to build each row
seperately.

for(biIndex[0]=0;biIndex[0]<rows;biIndex[0]++)

{

// get an String object

job = (env)->NewStringUTF("");

// get String class

class1 = (env)->GetObjectClass(job);

// get the row of String array objects

row[biIndex[0]] = (env)->NewObjectArray(cols,class1,job);

// initialize the elements

for(biIndex[1]=0;biIndex[1]<cols;biIndex[1]++)

{

VARIANT result;

SafeArrayGetElement(psa, biIndex, &result); //Get Variant out of
SAFEARRAY

sprintf(s,"%S",result.bstrVal); //Get BSTR value from
VARIANTand assign to char c*

job = (env)->NewStringUTF(s);
//Create New string from the value recieved

(env)->SetObjectArrayElement((jobjectArray)row[biIndex[0]],biIndex[1],job);

}

}

//Now once the rows are
constructed with columns in it , now attach it to Master index
row (This is little twisted)

class1 = (env)->GetObjectClass(row[0]);

// get the base array object

aref = (env)->NewObjectArray(rows,class1,0);

// fill in the array

for(i=0;i<rows;i++)

{

(env)->SetObjectArrayElement((jobjectArray)aref,i,row[i]);

}

// return the array

return aref;

}

Conclusion

Its lots of jumps-n-hoops to get this puppy working. I thought i was long done with my VC++/VB and it came back haunting me after 8 years. No complains; its like going back memory lane, opening Visual
Studio for VC++ and VB and sitting coding. Its fun afterall.

Resources

http://msdn.microsoft.com	Microsoft Developer Network
http://www.codeproject.com	Code Project
http://java.sun.com	Sun's Java initiative
http://www.codeguru.com/	Cod Guru
http://www.relevancellc.com/halloway/JavaWin32.html	Java/COM, Java/Win32 Integration resources
http://jguru.com/faq/view.jsp?EID=448045	JNI FAQ
http://www.geocities.com/Jeff_Louie/safearray.html	Good details about SAFEARRAY
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jni/html/jniTOC.html	Online JNI Book

Real FUD on Open source usage, Solution is out there. Do not be misguided by skepticism

2004-12-22T23:51:00.000-08:00

I agree with general notion of the subject, Where Open Source software should not be treated as "pick up and go, later forget about it". There got to be real appreciation in terms of following any Licensing issue, Make sure the licensing terms and conditions and all Attributes are well understood and there is no violation. That is where companies like Apptility LLC (their .com and .net area) helps in, where they are opening up a world for Open Source Governance.
Here is one panicky article, basically says "Every software in the world is dangerous except Microsoft products". Probably only Didio will agree to it or may be few people more.
Solutions are out there, it is just a matter of adopting it intelligently, Bottom line you save hell lot of money with few right steps initially by embracing Open source platform.

Social Computing: Getting Ahead of the Blog - TechUpdate - ZDNet

2004-12-20T23:07:00.000-08:00

A very good old article by
Social Computing: Getting Ahead of the Blog - TechUpdate - ZDNet: "Mike Gotta" about Social computing and its multi-face capability. Its true it goes beyond Blogging/Wiki concept and reaches from all directions to the community, wherever there is a room for social communication. One of my old blogs on this Welcome to longtime; Social movement of this era mentions about Online social network like Linked In.
We have much more to go!!..

HiveMind: Apache’s Service-Configuration Microkernel; Answer to JBoss ’s ?

2004-12-07T23:13:00.000-08:00

Well its a chase, Slow but steadily Apache is catching up tp JBoss , on its architecture , and new kid is on the block now. Check Introduction to HiveMind
Very intresting concept, whole Service orchestration/Message Brokering capability can be extended via this framework.
Look at hivemind as replacement for service-message middleware, derive its components and service configuration aspect to create run time/dynamic service, which can integrate legacy-thru-today web service.
Going back to comparison; May it is too early. but

JBoss J2EE Engine + Hibernate = Apache Geronimo + HiveMind + Torque

I'm certainly excited to explore HiveMind and Gerinimo as it matures.

error: can't create transaction lock [Fedora rpm installation]

2004-11-07T22:26:00.000-08:00

A Small tip regarding rpm installtion of Fedora, whenever you are running rpm command to install any of the plug-ins or packages , you might run into transaction lock issue,

# rpm -ihv RealPlayer10GOLD.rpm
# error: can't create transaction lock

Above is nothing but Super User access problem, All you have to login as Super user (su), like following.

# su
# password:[XXXXXXXX] <------------This will be invisible
# rpm -ihv RealPlayer10GOLD.rpm
# Installation....

A Small tip, but helps a lot for beginers

SOA Meets Compliance: Shift from age old to COA

2004-10-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

Its a old say , no matter how raw your data is, How you architect your solution, eventually you have to obey the rules of BIG. Saying that what I mean is till a little while ago, we were all putting our head on SOA, and its beautification, Now making SOA look good is not enough, MAKING SOA SECURE IS MORE IMPORTANT,
Are we following rules provided by Governance, to make SOA bullet-proof?
Good article about SOA Meeting Compliance Compliance and Integration - SOA Meets Compliance: Compliance Oriented Architectures - ebizQ
We have seen this shift for ages
Raw Text -> XML->Web Services->SOA-COA
Every organization, who implement SOA in their indiviual business units they can not leave their services loose, it needs to meet whole nine yards of compliance, SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley),
Message to them is "do it slow but do it right",

More to come on this soon...stay tuned..

SOA; Open source Push

2004-10-05T22:56:00.000-07:00

Indeed Simplicity is good to understand , whether it is in life or field where we work,
Basically the way I'm trying to take SOA as a example for Open source representation, and use Michael Curry's Blog as justification for my words.
SOA started with simplistic idea, as concept and stanard around XML based communication from different systems and went ten fold from basic Web service invocation framework (WSIF) to Web service Modeling Language/Web Service Management Layer, well it will go much further to moon..
Michael Curry's words about stanards like CORBA; why it didnt fly as much as SOA/Web Service, justifies Open source widespread and its fundamental adoption in the developer community for any technology/concept/standard faster than anything that happened decades ago.
As community grows, reach becomes easy, more power to open source.

Backing up and restoring MySQL databases

2004-09-29T21:06:00.000-07:00

Backing up and restoring MySQL databases: "Backing up and restoring MySQL databases"
Helps a lot in migration process. This is a good article where you can start doing things quick and clean.

Joe Walnes, Blog

2004-09-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

Good resources for day to day work..Joe Walnes, Blog

Yahoo! News - Next Phase For Web Services Pioneer : Web Services in a Box

2004-09-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

Good article with Toufic Boubez's interview.Yahoo! News - Next Phase For Web Services Pioneer: "Layer 7 Technologies"

Everyone is moving towards packaging their solution in a Hardware box and selling it as appliance, then why not web service management/security software.
Its like "Take it to Go" model for Software makers with blend of hardware appliance.
one more important point on this article was "Services orientation is an architectural principle that you can use to build anything, no matter what kind of application or architecture you do", Indeed its how people see SOA and making that useful to business derivatives like Business Process Management.

LinuxWorld | How will companies ever make money off Open Source?: Governance explained in few lines

2004-09-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

LinuxWorld How will companies ever make money off Open Source?: "How will companies ever make money off Open Source?"
One way to present Open source and revenue model from open source, making sure creator of the Open source software and subscriber/modifier obey the rule.

sodaplay: amazing machine intelligence

2004-09-08T01:18:00.000-07:00

A nice website; well nice is an understatement, i would say amazing website sodaplay. where you can go construct your own models based on fundamental mathematical co-ordinates
Its a 360 degree spin on How human visualize Maths. check out the constructor

More on this coming soon..

What is REST ? : REST By example?: Collabrate with Web Services

2004-09-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

Very good primer for REST.
This website defines REST in a beautiful way, absolutely must read for novice users.

REST: An Architectural Style, Not a Standard: Good definition, clears 1000 questions at the first instance itself

REST uses standards to build architecture, a very fundamental concept of any framework. Together REST with Popular web standards (HTTP, XML, SOAP) will form a Framework for innovative business solution.
Knowledge is contagious!...

Service Orchestration with WSML : SOA gets more power.

2004-08-31T14:23:00.000-07:00

SOA gets more power with service orchestration via WSML.Web Services Management Layer (WSML)
WSML is Web Service Management Layer , or Web Service Model, In depth its all about Service orchestration for smooth and sweet SOA.
Enterprise Service BUS gets a a new face in the form of WSML.

Tune in for more....

Oracle Sequecnes and Cache Value "20" mystery: Sequences with "cache" option can skip numbers

2004-08-31T13:16:00.000-07:00

Sequences with "cache" option can skip numbers Good article written here.

The default CACHE value for a sequence is 20, which means that after every 20 callsfor nextval Oracle has to update seq$ and refresh its cache.

Small tip over here about how to write sequences with or witout cache .

Uninstall Oracle 9i

2004-08-30T14:50:00.000-07:00

Very helpful article Uninstall Oracle 9i
Saves your time, believe me without this you will waste whole day.

Welcome to longtime; Social movement of this era

2004-08-25T00:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to LinkedIn
Amazingly simple and easy to see how people can be linked to you thru your profile.
You can say what our ancestors (fathers, grand parents, way before that...) used to spend years in finding a contact linking with their friends and missing family, Linked In will do it in seconds. Its amazing to see what this age of intelligence can do and cut years of hard work into ease.
Whole social movement is driving into mass meeting time, where millions of people meet on the X * Y resolution computer screen and greet each other. Its truly a "Meet and Greet" board for people.
Are you linked in??!! , I'm.....Keep watching for new social movements like Blogging and Wiki phenomena. First Glance its "Write and Publish" but in depth its humangous in potential, to revolutionize today's social context. Stay in tune.. For more!!..

Practical Adoption of Design Patterns: Hybrid Implementation Pattern

2004-08-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

This article Practical Adoption of Design Patterns explains about Design patterns and Antipatterns adoption.
Applying all together creates fundamental building block for architecure and framework. It also gives birth to Anti-Pattern (different from AntiPattern) thinking .
1) Where developer/Architect has the knowledge of what design patterns he/she wants to adopt or shortlist.
2) With This knowledge come up with raw design thinking, more radical is much better
3) Apply raw design thinking into trusted design patterns. What you get is Hybrid Implementation pattern (Anti-Pattern + Design Pattern(AntiPattern))
Eventually implementattion should be reused, thats a true out come of design patterns and its study.

How to Convert and Sort Dates in XSL : Small Tip..

2004-08-09T19:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes small things comes pretty handy. Like this one;

Scenario : Pick the biggest date from the list of dates.

Solution:

Converting a Date from one format to another
Sort them in ascending order.
Pick the first Date from the list ( thats the one you looking for ;) )

Assume your input XML is something like this (Date format is YYYYMMDDTHH:MM:SS)

<DateList>
<Date>20040931T18:31:04</Date> <Date>20040831T18:31:04</Date> <Date>20040715T18:31:04</Date> <Date>20041223T18:31:04</Date>
</DateList>

XSL file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform;
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:for-each select="DateList/Date">
<xsl:sort order="ascending" select="translate(.,'T::', ',')"/>
<xsl:if test="position() = last()">
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This will print output as
20041223T18:31:04

This is biggest date. you can also print the date in a different format.

translate() : does the same job as search and replace
".,'T::', ',' " : "." means Date node value, "T: : ',' " means search for T and : and replace with ' ' (blank space)
position() = last()" : means if current index == last index (position(): returns current index)

Happy XSLTingggg!!..

OpenSource OverWhelming OverPowering : 3 O's: Free Software, Pay For Services.

2004-07-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

Day by day open source is becoming overwhelming, why is that ??. 'cauz indeed it is.
Everytime you have some need for small utility, which you are quite sure exists out there on the web, you "google" and land up in some open source repository. initially you were intended to spend 5 mins in grabbing your utility and get the hell out of there, but now by the time you are out of this website you must spend hours in it, reason, its too "Overwhelming", there is tons of information out there, too hard to resist.
Traditional product based companies in a pre-Open source era (early to mid 90's ) wrote the dazzling products and sold it for millions. Today you go and look for similar products you will find atleast 3-5 products on an average all for "FREE" (Sounds so good!!). So what is the conclusion.

"Did all those customers wasted millions of $$ ??", probably not for their time, but todays time, yes its what "Software" should be open source and free, and what customers should pay is for "Services". So Open source is "OverPowering" over traditional/commercial sofware products.

Its all about justification of Customer's "Artha" (Money in Sanskrit) and making them happy for what they pay.

more to come soon.. on this subject. its endless.!!

MySQL / Windows XP dilemma ; Check your version

2004-07-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

Problem

Windows XP / MySQL 4.1 (beta release) / Connection problem via MySQL Connector/J
Error like : java.sql.SQLException: Server connection failure during transaction...Attempted reconnect 3 times...

My Blah! Blah!

I learned this hard way (real hard way!!) , I wish someone would have told me this, so much for not reading product documentation. I'm not even sure whether its documentated somewhere. Well "Googling" works all the times. I'm doing something with Apache Torque and MySQL under struts/tomcat. recently moved to Windows XP from NT for some secret business reasons (;)) . So on NT my whole setup is works like charm, as soon as i started setting up everything on XP machine, I downloaded (unstable small little beast!!) and what i see the behavior which is very frustrating and painfull search for the problem, but no clue at all what could be the problem.

Downloaded & Installed MySQL 4.1 (beta release) , running Torque with this version what i see is no error, all Torque says "Connection is null...." doesnt make sense when all the parameters are right
Went down to much lower level, wrote my jdbc calls, connection, statement whole nine yard, what i get is following java.sql.SQLException: Server connection failure during transaction...Attempted reconnect 3 times... absolutely ridiculous, MySQL works fine with Control center, all permissions seems to be fine, With GRANTS/ACCESS on the user.

Guessed this could be nasty version issue, uninstalled MySQL 4.1 and installed MySQL 4.0. Daeeeeeemmmnnn! it worked like a charm again.

Solution

Roll back on Old version MySQL 4.0 still rocks. They Say for new developement use MySQL 4.1 ; Think twice before wasting 4-5 days on this and later discovering that its a version issue. MySQL 5.0 ; Hell No!! , Dont even go there yet!. till things stabalize.!!..

Quick and Dirty Apache 2.0.48 –SSL-mod_ssl

2004-07-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

• Download compile mod_ssl source distribution from http://rab.members.easyspace.com/apache-ssl/apache-ssl-2.0.48-(openssl-0.9.7d).zip• Unzip it and place file in following manner
o openssl.exe, libeay32.dll, ssleay32.dll in /bin directory
o mod_ssl.so in /modules directory
o ssl.conf in /conf directory
o openssl.cnf in /bin directory (this one is only needed if you want to create test site certificate; if you are buying certificate from CA then you will not need this. )
• Open /conf httpd.conf file and add following
o LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so
(Sometimes it’s already present in httpd.conf, in that case just uncomment the line)
• Make sure following block is present in httpd.conf
o
o Include conf/ssl.conf
o
(This will load ssl.conf when mod_ssl module is loaded, above block is usually present in default httpd.conf)
• Open ssl.conf and make sure server paths are correct in the file, especially
o DocumentRoot
o Server name
o Server admin
• Go to /bin and execute following to create self-signed server certificate. Answer questions accordingly, “Common name” will be the site name e.g. www.myworld.com
o openssl.exe req -config openssl.cnf -new -nodes -out server.csr -keyout server.key
o openssl.exe x509 -in server.csr -out server.crt -req -signkey server.key -days 365 -set_serial 1
(Increment the serial number each time you create a certificate.)
• Move files "server.key" and "server.crt" to your apache2\conf folder. Delete files ".rnd" and "server.csr".
• Start Apache. Assuming it starts ok; test it with your preferred web browser.
• Point to https://localhost/myworld
• Now you are SSL enabled.

Quick and Dirty Apache 2.0.48 –Jk2-Tomcat 4.1.29X

2004-07-26T20:57:00.000-07:00

• Install Tomcat, do not start tomcat
• Download compiled Jk2 Connector from Apache site which has jk2 dll/shm files also.
• Before installing Apache make sure system is not running any Web server on Port 80, like Microsoft IIS, if yes stop the web server and then Install Apache. Once Apache is installed it starts the web server on port 80
• Go and Stop Apache web server
• Go to /conf/jk2.properties
• Add following ; text in < shouldn’t be added>
o handler.list=channelSocket,request
o channelSocket.port=8009
o channelSocket.address=127.0.0.1
• Go to /conf
• Open httpd.conf and add following
o LoadModule jk2_module tomcat-connector/mod_jk2-2.0.43.dll
(We will create tomcat-connector directory in next step)
• Create file called workers2.properties in /conf and following should be the content
o [shm:]
o file=C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\logs\jk2.shm
o size=1000000
o [channel.socket:localhost:8009]
o [uri:/examples/*]
o [uri:/myworld/*]
o [uri:/tomcat-docs/*]
• Copy jk2.shm to /logs directory
• Create tomcat-connector directory under and copy mod_jk2-2.0.43.dll file in there
• Start Tomcat first and then Apache
• Go to http://localhost/myworld , you should be able to get into your application without Application server port now.
• You are all set.

Jakarta Ant and Reflection Conflict: Power of FORK!!

2004-07-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

Problem

Have you ever seen java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: sun.reflect.SerializationConstructorAccessorImpl while running from your application via Ant target.???. ever wondered how come this error when you run an application, but never conflicted while compiling with current set of jar files??..
You must have speculated reasons like

Java version might be a problem , Hey jdk_14XX is not right lets switch to jdk_13..
May be my ant version is not rite or conflicting with jdk version.

The main reason is Ant and its Virtual machine. whenever we write (Compile task) or (Excecution task) we give control to Ant to determine and look for java in its own way, Java is stringent in Non-Fork mode on classpaths. So in non-fork mode confusion raises for specific reflection classes above.

Solution

All you have to add fork="true" (some ppl do it "yes" option too..feel free to experiment:)), to your Ant and tasks,

From above tweak we say use another VM . which means it kicks in class execution in another VM.

tasks will look something like this

><javac srcdir="${src_dir}" fork="true" destdir="${deploy_dir}"><classpath refid="class.path"></javac><java classname="" fork="true"><classpath refid="class.path"></java>