Archive for October, 2007

TOra – An Toad Alternative for Oracle »

I bet that everyone will know Toad if they use Oracle. Sometimes I think it is Oracle strategy not to have a user friendly tool so that we will need to pay for its support or hire a DBA Anyway, I found that most people working on Oracle, whether they are developers or DBAs, rely [...]

Cain & Abel – A useful hacking tool »

This is the tool I used sometimes to recover passwords that I have forgotten. I do not encourage hacking. This tool is actually considered a backdoor sometimes by some of the security software in the market. Personally I think it is useful, but people tend to abuse it. Cain & Abel is a password recovery [...]

Use JPedal and JBoss Drools for Flexible PDF Extraction »

Download Source Code In one of my previous projects. I need to extract information from some PDF files in a very flexible way. I need to extract certain regions from some of the PDF pages based on the page header. The region can be single-line/multiple-line text or multiple column tables. Also, I need to parse [...]

Hack Your Windows Executables Resources »

These are interesting tools that you may already know. It is useful for me to extract information from Windows executables. Resource Hacker is a freeware utility to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources in 32bit Windows executables and resource files (*.res). It incorporates an internal resource script compiler and decompiler and works on [...]

Java – Back to Basic, Understand Servlet Behavior »

I am not against the use of frameworks in developing your Java web application. There are a lot of Java web application frameworks like Spring, Struts, JSF, Tapestry, etc which actually make life easier for developers. In fact, I do use Spring framework for most of my web application development. What I perceived is that [...]

GATE – A General Architecture for Text Engineering »

In my previous article, Combine Crunch and Lucene for Efficient Web Page Indexing, I mentioned that I used Crunch and Lucene in one of my projects. The project actually aims to build a semantic knowledge framework. As part of the project, I need to do content/knowledge extraction, semantic tagging, knowledge storage and knowledge representation. I [...]

Combine Crunch and Lucene for Efficient Web Page Indexing »

Developers should be familiar with Lucene. Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform. In one of my previous projects, I need to consolidate and index web pages from several websites for searching purpose. [...]

Java Checked Exception and RuntimeException – throw Exception from static block ? »

Recently I was asked how to catch an exception in a static block and throw it to the calling class. E.g. see the class below public class MyException extends Exception{ } public class Sample { static { try { method1(); } catch (InterruptedException e) { throw new MyException(); } } protected static void method1() throws [...]

14 Windows Registry Commonly used by Malicious Adware »

Download Sample Most of us have the experience of after visiting certain websites, our IE settings like the main page, title or some of the Windows settings are changed. This happened specially in the early age of Internet usage. Now there are lots of tools that can help to prevent this, but it is important [...]

NextTel Open Source J2ME Toolkits »

This is another useful J2ME library that I used before. However, it is not being updated for quite awhile. What I did is that I integrate the source code into my existing project and modify from there. Nextel’s Open Source J2ME Toolkits contain libraries for user interface and RMS development on J2ME handsets. The windowing [...]

J2ME Polish – A J2ME Development Framework »

Sometimes ago I needs to develop a J2ME application. I found J2ME Polish. J2ME Polish is a collection of tools for developing J2ME applications. It consists of Build tools that takes care for the common tasks of preprocessing, compilation, obfuscation, preverification, packaging and JAD-creation. Device database with over 150 J2ME devices. This database delivers the [...]

Compiled GeoIP Database »

Download Several years back I was programming a network utility that needs an index relating IP network numbers to network names and identities, for class A, B and C networks, I found this list compiled from the Internet. I know that you can always use whois, or some online website to achieve the same thing. [...]

Open Source BPEL Engine »

These are the open source BPEL engines that I have either used or have tried, and I am quite happy with the features, performance, and usability. Few things here, I have also tried out some commercial BPEL engines (I would not mentione the name here). Personally I felt that the open source BPEL engines are [...]

Develop a Java Plugin Framework – Search for Plugin Dynamically »

Download Source Code This is part II of my previous article, Develop a Java Plugin Framework. In the previous article, I showed you the design pattern to develop a simple Java plugin framework. Now I am going to show you how to search for your plugin in jar files dynamically. Let’s said now I develop [...]

Develop a Java Plugin Framework »

Download Source Code Recently I have to develop a plugin based application in one of my project. I was trying to see if there is any open source plugin framework that I can used. I found Java Plugin Framwork (JPF) which is a good plugin framework. However, after awhile I found that it is too [...]

Java – Auto Reloading of Configuration File »

Download Source Code This is a follow up to my previous article, XML Configuration for Java Program. In the article I uses Apache Commons Configuration for my application configuration, and I also provided a singleton wrapper class for it. Now come the question, what if the configuration file is changed and the application needs to [...]

Encode and Decode QRCode on Windows Mobile »

Download Code In my previous post, Open Source .NET QRCode Library, I mentioned that the library can be used in Windows Mobile. Here I am going to show you the way it works. The above screenshot shows the sample program that uses the library. Here I am not going to elaborate on what QRCode is. [...]

JavaBlackBelt – What is your Java Belt ? »

It has been ages since I last took my Java exam. Recently I was looking at JavaBlackBelt. JavaBlackBelt is a community for Java and related technologies certifications. It seems that a lot of people have contributed to the exam question pool. I took the beta exam, and it really test your in-depth knowledge of Java. [...]

Java – Dynamic loading of class and jar file »

Download Source Code Additional Download I was asked this question recently to load class or jar file dynamically in Java application. There are few things to take note here Dynamic Class Loading To load a class dynamically is straightforward. Just make sure the classpath is defined when your program starts up. E.g., if you define [...]

Avoid Connection Pool Error after Database Restart for Java Application »

This is one of the common configuration that I noticed most developers either do not configure or not configured properly. I normally use Hibernate or iBatis as the persistence layer and Apache DBCP for the connection pool. There are times that database are restarted without bouncing the application. When this happens, all the database connections [...]