YaST stands for Yet another Setup Tool.

Advances in languages, compilers, and tools open the possibility of significantly improving software. For example, Singularity uses type-safe languages and an abstract instruction set to enable what we call Software Isolated Processes (SIPs). SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernel’s address space.

Singularity uses these advances to build more reliable systems and applications. For example, because SIPs are so cheap to create and enforce, Singularity runs each program, device driver, or system extension in its own SIP. SIPs are not allowed to share memory or modify their own code. As a result, we can make strong reliability guarantees about the code running in a SIP. We can verify much broader properties about a SIP at compile or install time than can be done for code running in traditional OS processes. Broader application of static verification is critical to predicting system behavior and providing users with strong guarantees about reliability.

The most unique attribute of BrowserPlus is its ability to update and add new services on the fly without a browser restart or even reloading the page! As a user, this means no more installers to run or losing your place on the web. For developers, you can check for and activate new services with a single function call, pending user approval - we handle the complexity of software distribution and updates for you.

Another smiliar technology is Google Gears.

Tellurium Automated Testing Framework (Tellurium), formally known as AOST, is a testing framework built on top of the Selenium testing framework and it abstracts UI components to Java objects and does object to locator mapping (OLM) automatically at run time so that you can define UI objects simply by their attributes and write your selenium tests just like writing JUnit tests. Since the framework constructs the actual locator automatically at run-time and it uses the Group Locating Concept (GLC) to exploit information inside a collection of UI components to help finding their locators, Tellurium is more robust, flexible, modularized, easier to maintain and refactor compared with the locator-based Selenium testing framework.

The Tellurium framework defines a new Domain Specific Language (DSL) for object-oriented Selenium test. You can even write your selenium tests in pure DSL format.

Data Driven Test is another feature of Tellurium. You can define data format in an expressive way. In you data file, you can specify which test you want to run, the input parameters, and expected results. Tellurium automatically binds the input data to variables defined in your test script and run the tests you specified in the input file. The test results will be recorded by a test listener and output in different formats, for example, an XML file.

The Tellurium framework is written in Groovy and Java. The test cases can be written in Java, Groovy, or pure DSL. You do not need to know Groovy before you use it. Detailed Introduction, Frequent Asked Questions, and illustrative examples are provided.

December is a long holiday. Any recommendations for good books for year 2008 which worth reading, irregardless of programming languages?

Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch

Java Power Tools by John Ferguson Smart

Clean Code by Robert C Martin

The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford

Pragmatic Thinking Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt

The ThoughtWorks Anthology by ThoughtWorks Inc

Practical API Design: Confessions of a Java Framework Architect by Jaroslav Tulach

Elisa Media Center has many advanced features that will make your media center experience unique. It features an intuitive interface with a professional look and feel which can be easily used with a standard TV remote control.

• Movies - Watch your own movies and video clips as well as those found online.
• Pictures - Watch your pictures with previews and nicely animated slideshows.
• Music - Manage your music collection by artists or album covers.
• Fully Networked - Elisa automatically finds media from other computers on your local network.
• Peripheral Devices - Automatically detects iPods, cameras, hard drives, etc…
• Internet - Everything from Flickr to Youtube and other popular internet services.

MythTV

MythTV is a GPL licensed suite of programs that allow you to build the mythical home media convergence box on your own using Open Source software and operating systems. MythTV is known to work on Linux and Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel). It does not run on Windows.

MythTV has a number of capabilities. The television portion allows you to do the following:

• You may pause, fast-forward and rewind live Television.
• You may install multiple video capture cards to record more than one program at a time.
• You can have multiple servers (called “backends”), each with multiple capture cards in them. All scheduling is performed by the Master backend, which arbitrates which recording will be performed by each device. All recording requests are managed by the Master backend, so you can schedule a recording from any client.
• You can have multiple clients (called “frontends” in MythTV parlance), each with a common view of all available programs. Any client can watch any program that was recorded by any of the servers, assuming that they have the hardware capabilities to view the content; a low-powered frontend will not be able to watch HDTV, for example. Clients can be diskless and controlled entirely by a remote control.
• You may use any combination of standard analog capture card, MPEG-2, MJPEG, DVB, HDTV, USB and firewire capture devices. With appropriate hardware, MythTV can control set top boxes, often found in digital cable and satellite TV systems.
• Program Guide Data in North America is downloaded from schedulesdirect.org, a non-profit organization which has licensed data from Tribune Media Services. This service provides almost two weeks of scheduling information. Program Guide Data in other countries is obtained using XMLTV. MythTV uses this information to create a schedule that maximizes the number of programs that can be recorded if you don’t have enough tuners.
• MythTV implements a UPNP server, so a UPNP client should automatically see content from your MythTV system.

Other modules in MythTV include:

• MythArchive, a tool to create DVDs
• MythBrowser, a web browser
• MythControls, an application to configure your remote control
• MythFlix, a Netflix module
• MythGallery, a picture-viewing application
• MythGame
• MythMusic, a music playing / ripping application which supports MP3 and FLAC
• MythNews, a RSS news grabber
• MythPhone, phone and videophone using SIP.
• MythVideo, DVD ripper and a media-viewer for content not created within MythTV
• MythWeather
• MythWeb, which allows you to control your MythTV system using a web browser. With MythWeb, you can schedule and delete recordings, change keybindings and more. With proper security, you may even schedule a program over the Internet and have it immediately acted on by the Master backend.

jUDDI (pronounced “Judy”) is an open source Java implementation of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specification for Web Services.

• Open Source
• Platform Independent
• Supports for JDK 1.3.1 upto JDK 1.5
• UDDI version 2.0 compliant implementation
• Use with any relational database that supports ANSI standard SQL (MySQL, DB2, Sybase, JDataStore, HSQLDB, etc.)
• Deployable on any Java application server that supports the Servlet 2.3 specification (Jakarta Tomcat, JOnAS, WebSphere, WebLogic, Borland Enterprise Server, JRun, etc.)
• jUDDI registry supports a clustered deployment configuration.
• Easy integration with existing authentication systems

Ruddi

Ruddi is UDDI client library

UDDI client library implemented by Ruddi™ currently has the following characteristics:

• Ruddi™ provides access to UDDI registries using an expressive pure Java API. No specific knowledge of XML, SOAP or UDDI messaging is required.
• Ruddi™ fully implements the publishing and inquiry UDDI APIs of UDDI V3, V2 and V1.
• Ruddi™ has a tested interoperability with the public Microsoft, SAP and IBM UDDI Business Registries (UDDI V2 and V1 only, as far as V3 is not currently implemented by the public nodes).
• Ruddi™ transparently manages UDDI V3, V2 and V1 messaging. The runtime uses either UDDI V3, V2 or V1 messaging to communicate with a UDDI registry depending on a user-defined profile. As a result, it is possible to write applications that can alternatively interrogate UDDI V3, V2 or V1 registries with no code change.
• Ruddi™ has UDDI-specific collections library allowing writing expressive, strongly typed UDDI applications.
• Ruddi™ has a validation library allowing validating all UDDI data structures according to either the UDDI V2 or V1 specification (V3 under development). For example, a business entity name of 150 characters will be detected as “too long” if the library is configured for validation again the UDDI V1 specification but will be considered valid if the library is configured for validation against the V2 specification.
• Ruddi™ internally automates low-level UDDI interactions. For example, an authentication token will automatically be fetched using the appropriate information defined in a profile whenever a method of the publishing API is invoked.
• Ruddi™ has an extended query API providing a level of interaction equivalent to what JAXR proposes.
• Ruddi™ allows accessing UDDI registry replies as streams that can be used for example as an input to an XSLT processor (for XML => HTML scenarios, for example).
• Ruddi™’s message transport can be managed internally or be delegated to the Apache Axis V1 SOAP engine.
• Ruddi™ has a logging facility allowing monitoring the XML conversation between the UDDI client and the UDDI registry. System.out logging, as well as a Log4J-based and an experimental XML-based logging are supported.
• Ruddi™ is easy to install. Get up to speed in less than 5 minutes. Learn by example with the about 20 examples provided with the library.
• Ruddi™ has extensive documentation.

OpenUDDI

The OpenUDDI project is focused on creating a high performance, easy to use UDDI v3 compliant server and client library. The server and client is built using Java, version 5 for the server and version 1.4 for the client. The server uses Hibernate, and supports a wide variety of SQL databases, as well as LDAP for data storage.

The project is built on the Novell UDDI server but with many new features and optimizations.

SoapUDDI

SoapUDDI is an implementation of UDDI 2.0 compliant registry.

• Ready for deployment in private intranet environments.
• Conforms to UDDI 2.0 specifications.
• Written completely in JAVA.
• Persistence at the back-end using relational databases. Current release supports MS-Access, MS-SQL Server, Postgres and Sybase.

UDDI Browser

UDDI Browser is an open-source project that provides a friendly user interface allowing users to browse and manipulate content in UDDI registries.   It is written in Java using the Swing libraries.  Currently the browser supports version 2.0 UDDI registries.  

The UDDI Browser supports the entire UDDI API for managing registries, including the whole query API set, and create/update/delete support for all entities in UDDI. It also has a host of features to make the UDDI users and administrators life easier, including query persistence, My UDDI support, and administrator utilities to aid in registry maintenance.

Apache Scout

Apache Scout is an implementation of the JSR 93 - JavaTM API for XML Registries 1.0 (JAXR). Apache Scout has support for UDDI registries only and is heavily biased and tested with Apache jUDDI.

UDDI4J

UDDI4J is a Java class library that provides an API to interact with a UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) registry. The UDDI Project is a comprehensive, open industry initiative enabling businesses to (I) discover each other, and (II) define how they interact over the internet and share information in a global registry architecture. UDDI is the building block which will enable businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and transact with one another via their preferred applications.

UDDI:Lite

UDDI::Lite is a library for UDDI clients in Perl.

Uddi4r

Uddi4r is an open-source pure Ruby implementation of UDDI inquiry services. The project aims at providing Sevice-Oriented Architecture (SOA) support for Ruby and Rails applications. UDDI stands for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration; an OASIS standard commonly used for “yellow pages”-style querying and dynamic lookup of web services.

Jupiter is a code review plug-in tool for the Eclipse IDE. It is currently under active development, and still in an experimental state. The design of Jupiter involves the following:

• Open Source: Jupiter carries an open source license.
• Free: Jupiter is distributed free of charge.
• IDE integration: Jupiter is based upon the Eclipse plug-in architecture.
• Cross-platform: Jupiter is available for all platforms supported by Eclipse.
• XML data storage: Jupiter stores data in XML format to simplify use and re-use.
• Sorting and searching: Jupiter provides filters and sorting to facilitate issue review.
• File integration: Jupiter supports jumping back and forth between reviews and source code.

Review Board

Review Board is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process. 

ReitVeld

Rietveld is a tool for those interested in doing web-based code reviews. It was inspired by an internal Google tool, written by Python creator and Google employee Guido van Rossum, called Mondrian. That tool in turn spawned Rietveld.

Groogle

Groogle is a web based peer code review tool providing a range of features aimed at easing the code review process.

Features include:

• Subversion integration, working against live repositories.
• Syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages.
• Comparisons of entire repository trees to find added, removed and modified files and directories.
• Diffing of individual files and a graphical representation of modifications.
• E-mail notifications to notify review participants when a reviews status changes.
• Optional integration against a wide range of existing authentication mechanisms.

Groogle is released in both RPM and tarball format and can be easily deployed on any Linux system.

Trac Distributed Peer Review Plugin

Peer Review Plugin uses Trac’s newly implemented plugin system allowing an integrated distributed peer review system for software developers. With Trac’s current set of features, a peer review plugin fits nicely into its lineup. This plugin’s goal is to eliminate the need for time consuming code review meetings by giving developers the ability to review code in a user-friendly web-based environment during their own time. This program is written primarily in python using many of Trac’s plugin components. The interface integrates seemlessly with Subversion allowing users to browse the repository for reviewable files. Clearsilver is used as the server-side web-based scripting language with Javascript and AJAX to modernize the user interface. This program uses Trac’s SQLite database and requires no changes to the user’s original Trac installation.

CodeStriker

Codestriker is a web application supporting online code reviewing, typically diffs generated by a Source Code Management system or plain unidiff patches. There are integration points with CVS, Subversion, Clearcase, Perforce and Visual SourceSafe. 

JCR

JCR is a web-based tool for performing and managing code reviews. It can be used for code in any language, but provides some extra features for Java.

JCR is intended to assist:

• Reviewers. All changes to code are highlighted, and syntax highlighting works for most languages. Code extracts are shown for context when adding comments. If reviewing Java code, references to other classes within the file are clickable, so that you can drill into the detail if required. After review comments have been made, those comments can themselves be reviewed, and the required actions decided on and tracked
• Project owners. Review projects are easy to create and configure, and don’t require any integration with your source code management (SCM) system
• Process bigots. Details of all comments are held in the database, along with any actions required, and whether they’ve been completed. Status reports can be viewed at any time, and also show how much review activity took place on each file (to make sure they were all reviewed)
• Architects and developers. As well as viewing the comments made for a project, it’s possible to see details of all review projects and comments for a specified file - good for finding code that would benefit from refactoring.

Good excerpt from the book

• Invest regularly.  Just as in financial investing, you must invest in your knowledge portfolio regularly. Even if it’s just a small amount, the habit itself is as important as the sums. A few sample goals are listed in the next section.

• Diversify.  The more different things you know, the more valuable you are. As a baseline, you need to know the ins and outs of the particular technology you are working with currently. But don’t stop there. The face of computing changes rapidly—hot technology today may well be close to useless (or at least not in demand) tomorrow. The more technologies you are comfortable with, the better you will be able to adjust to change.

• Manage risk.  Technology exists along a spectrum from risky, potentially high-reward to low-risk, low-reward standards. It’s not a good idea to invest all of your money in high-risk stocks that might collapse suddenly, nor should you invest all of it conservatively and miss out on possible opportunities. Don’t put all your technical eggs in one basket.

• Buy low, sell high.  Learning an emerging technology before it becomes popular can be just as hard as finding an undervalued stock, but the payoff can be just as rewarding. Learning Java when it first came out may have been risky, but it paid off handsomely for the early adopters who are now at the top of that field.

• Review and rebalance.  This is a very dynamic industry. That hot technology you started investigating last month might be stone cold by now. Maybe you need to brush up on that database technology that you haven’t used in a while. Or perhaps you could be better positioned for that new job opening if you tried out that other language….

Of all these guidelines, the most important one is the simplest to do:

Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio

Now that you have some guidelines on what and when to add to your knowledge portfolio, what’s the best way to go about acquiring intellectual capital with which to fund your portfolio? Here are a few suggestions.

• Learn at least one new language every year.  Different languages solve the same problems in different ways. By learning several different approaches, you can help broaden your thinking and avoid getting stuck in a rut. Additionally, learning many languages is far easier now, thanks to the wealth of freely available software on the Internet (see page 267).

• Read a technical book each quarter.  Bookstores are full of technical books on interesting topics related to your current project. Once you’re in the habit, read a book a month. After you’ve mastered the technologies you’re currently using, branch out and study some that don’t relate to your project.

• Read nontechnical books, too.  It is important to remember that computers are used by people—people whose needs you are trying to satisfy. Don’t forget the human side of the equation.

• Take classes.  Look for interesting courses at your local community college or university, or perhaps at the next trade show that comes to town.

• Participate in local user groups.  Don’t just go and listen, but actively participate. Isolation can be deadly to your career; find out what people are working on outside of your company.

• Experiment with different environments.  If you’ve worked only in Windows, play with Unix at home (the freely available Linux is perfect for this). If you’ve used only makefiles and an editor, try an IDE, and vice versa.

• Stay current.  Subscribe to trade magazines and other journals (see page 262 for recommendations). Choose some that cover technology different from that of your current project.

• Get wired.  Want to know the ins and outs of a new language or other technology? Newsgroups are a great way to find out what experiences other people are having with it, the particular jargon they use, and so on. Surf the Web for papers, commercial sites, and any other sources of information you can find.

On a practical side, TerraLib enables quick development of custom-built geographical applications using spatial databases. As a research tool, TerraLib  is aimed at providing a rich and powerful environment for the development of GIScience research, enabling the development of GIS prototypes that include new concepts such as spatio-temporal data models, geographical ontologies and advanced spatial analysis techniques. TerraLib defines a geographical data model and provides support for this model over a range of different DBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, ORACLE e ACCESS), and is implemented as a library of C++ classes and functions, written in ANSI-C++ (INCITS / ISO/ IEC 14882:1998).

TerraLib is being developed by DPI (Image Processing Division) at INPE (National Institute for Space Research), Tecgraf , the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio (the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil) and FUNCATE (Foundation for the Space Science, Applied Research and Technology).

In JDK 6 - java.util.ServiceLoader

Prior to JDK 6 - Refer to the document at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/jar/jar.html

A service is a well-known set of interfaces and (usually abstract) classes. A service provider is a specific implementation of a service. The classes in a provider typically implement the interfaces and subclass the classes defined in the service itself. Service providers can be installed in an implementation of the Java platform in the form of extensions, that is, jar files placed into any of the usual extension directories. Providers can also be made available by adding them to the application’s class path or by some other platform-specific means.

Alternative for ServiceLoader, among other, are Commons Discovery, Google Guice, etc.

A good introduction to ServiceLoader can be found at http://www.javaspecialists.co.za/archive/newsletter.do?issue=139

Its often a common problem when a new file is added into source repository, one may miss out to add the copyright header. Also Often one may need to update the copyright headers with a different one due to change in licensing terms or change just years portion of the copyright. Some times you need to apply these rules on conditions(ex: different files use different license headers, incase of Open JDK, all source files use GPL V2 with Classpath Exception, whereas files related to documentaion use plain GPL V2). Although this can be done using some simple scripts, this is often error prone.

Would n’t it be convenient, if it lets you do some intelligent analysis of the copyright headers in all your sources as well. That’s what this License tool attempts to do.

Tool Features:

• Check if all the sources adhere to common licensing terms
• Ability to correct the incorrect usage of license headers.
• Handle copyright headers in various file formats. (ex: Java , properties, html files, xml files etc.)
• Pluggable rules to do intelligent  processing of the license headers(ex: to find out if there is some third party licensed code in your sources)
• Ability to check multiple occurences of the license headers.

The tool uses port-forwarding to capture the traffic. In simple language, when the tool is started it listens on listenPort port on localhost and brings up a display window. A sender originally sending request to http://targetHost:targetPort/somepath now sends the request to http://localhost:listenPort/somepath. The wsmonitor then forwards the request received atlocalhost:listenPort to targetHost:targetPort., without any alteration of the message. In between, it captures all the inbound and outbound SOAP and HTTP traffic and displays in a nicely formatted way in the wsmonitor window.

The openInstaller project is a part of the GlassFish community of projects.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

Any visual computing application requiring maximum performance-from 3D animation to CAD to visual simulation-can exploit high-quality, high-performance OpenGL capabilities. These capabilities allow developers in diverse markets such as broadcasting, CAD/CAM/CAE, entertainment, medical imaging, and virtual reality to produce and display incredibly compelling 2D and 3D graphics.

Supported on all UNIX® workstations, and shipped standard with every Windows 95/98/2000/NT and MacOS PC, no other graphics API operates on a wider range of hardware platforms and software environments. OpenGL runs on every major operating system including Mac OS, OS/2, UNIX, Windows 95/98, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Linux, OPENStep, and BeOS; it also works with every major windowing system, including Win32, MacOS, Presentation Manager, and X-Window System. OpenGL is callable from Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Python, Perl and Java and offers complete independence from network protocols and topologies.

It allows customers to create unique dispensing work flows for Electronic Scripts, Retail, Chain Retail, Long Term Care, High Volumne Mail-Order and Central Fill business models. Available under the GNU General Public License, anyone can download, install and use ePostRx™ without any software license or prescription transaction fees!