Without letting any of my excitement down, I am going to tell you the amazing things that I found in Firefox 3. First of all the startup time of Firefox 3 is much quicker than Firefox 2. The next things which strikes as it starts is its appearance. I have fallen in love with the two little glowy buttons for back and forward browsing.

Now We Have The Awesomebar!

The show stealer of the entire futuristic parade of Firefox 3 is its address bar or awesomebar. Its awesome in its true sense. You wouldn’t even have imagined that the lame old address bar can sometimes mean so much than just typing in URL’s. With this revolutionary address bar in Firefox 3 you would soon forget having to remember URL’s.

Yes, you don’t have to remember those lengthy creepy URL’s once you have Firefox 3 in your control. The address bar is so smart it can detect  the correct URL when you just type in the actual keywords which had made you open that page. For example, if you had opened a page which contained some information on “Firefox” and later on forgot which URL you had opened, just type in “Firefox” and the page URL would prompt up the list with “Firefox” highlighted. Incredible I must say.

You may be guessing already what makes it so smart?  Well, from the past, Firefox has been keeping a store of the web page titles by caching in the URL’s you were opening up. But until the launch of Firefox 3, it was never used to good effect. Now in the new version, it makes a really good use of these title’s. Its a high probability that you would remember something in the page titles if you want to get back to the page you had visited earlier. So, its likely that instead of putting in the actual URL you would be putting the right keywords, and the right keywords are always present in? You guessed it right, in the page title of the page. This trick, has really transformed the address bar into Awesomebar.

The Amazing Download Manager

It was a lenghty wait and now the wait has been sweetly fulfilled by the Firefox 3 team. The much needed pause and resume feature of the download bar actually works in Firefox 3. Earlier, even though this feature was present, it lacked proper functioning and so you couldn’t rely on your resuming the downloads. But this time works. Yeehaa! With the amazing Download Manager you can again visit the page from where you had downloaded the file and also if you haven’t cleared the list you can search for the downloads.

I would expect the next version to have multiple simultaneous connections so that I would not have to use Flashget.

The Amazing Addon Manager

This is another show stealer after the Awesomebar. Remember those good old times when you wanted to add you favorite addons, you first searched Google or the addon’s page of Mozilla. Then you used to go to the page to read about the addon, see the ratings and then actually download the addon. Zip forward to Firefox 3, the good old days will become more better with the new addon manager. It’s got an inbuilt search engine which displays not only the relevant addon’s based on the search criteria but also the description which you would have seen on the actual addon page and it also shows you the rating! It was unbelievable for me when I saw this in action.

To be true the when I said that my behavior has changed from the instance I downloaded Firefox 3, the feature which made it happen, was the Addon Manager. I have stopped being lazy in searching addons, and since I have an embedded search option, I have started to download addons like crazy. Its driving me mad. In just a day I have found so many amazing addon’s that had made my web browsing experience much much richer. I would put up a post soon for telling you about the addons which are my favorites.

Firefox 3 is a browser that you must not wait for downloading. The record of 8 million Firefox 3 downloads in just 24 hours is enough to prove this. The world is waiting for more. So without wasting much time, grab it here fast!

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Firefox has released the full feature release candidate which is said to be quite stable, but its not yet the final release. From what the bloggers have been publishing about this release candidate it seems quite evident that the features are simply eye popping. The major surprise comes in the form of a fast browser loaded with features. One thing the Mozilla guys have stuck to their mission, is improving the browser speed and load capabilities. From the reports on comparisons of the performance of various browsers Firefox 3 has passed out with flying colors. Also the new version sports a more native look and feel of the underlying OS. This means, but obviously, that, you must switch over to Firefox 3 once it releases.

If you are thinking that a speedier browser owes to compromises on its feature set, then Firefox 3 is all set to prove you wrong. The earlier much wanted features are already there. In fact, they have been upgraded to a marvelous level. If you loved the last update in the clubbing of add-on and themes manager, this time they have put in a search right within it! Believe it or not, Firefox 3 will allow searching for plugins and themes right through your add-on/ theme manager.

If you are indeed a hard core surfer then you must be having loads of bookmarks stacked up in your folders of the Firefox bookmark manager. But if you always thought that tagging was a feature required to quickly access the bookmarks then you thought it right. Firefox 3 has upgraded its bookmark manager and made it “places organizer“. With the new organizer, you can now tag your bookmarks along with some nifty smart searches and time line ordering of bookmarks.

One of the most difficult things to work within Firefox 2 is the download manager. When I download a particular thing I always save it to a different location. But later on, I always tend to forget the location where I had downloaded it from because of my frequent downloading habits. Firefox 3 is going to be a major upgrade for me in this aspect, since it includes a download manager which shows the link where the download came from. It also would be supporting resume states in event of a system crash. I am not sure if this, because till now my resumes have never worked, especially in Firefox 2. But I am being confident this time around.

Besides the above major upgrades, they also have made many other tweaks, which include, their password remembering prompt. It is not obtrusive any longer with the popup every time you try to log in. This time, it allows remembering only those passwords when you actually log in, which means, no storing of wrong passwords.

Firefox 3 is about to arrive. I am excited and absolutely thrilled about it. Its gonna be a wild ride yet again. Gear up!

Images Courtesy: Lifehacker

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The Sessions

The session was primarily held for the developers community and less for the corporate. This provided a relief as there weren’t much marketing gimmicks being played and the speakers were purely techie guys which proved to be an onus. BEA has upgraded their Weblogic Server to version 10.2 and their Workshop too. I had worked on the BEA workshop studio and Aqualogic platform for ESB earlier. So my main interests lied in what new features these upgraded products had in their offerings. After having attending this session I am now all the more excited to work in the BEA platform.

Although many people were awestruck with the features and some felt jealous for continuing to work on the older versions at their workplace, one thing was going through the minds of many including mine. The question was as to what was the road map for these BEA products since now the acquisition by Oracle has got completed. There was a slight wave of concern over this merger on the current developers as well as for those who wanted to adopt to the BEA environment in future. Would Oracle continue to support active upgradation to these wonderful products or take away the key features from them to promote its own products? The concerns were raised higher during the session when the BEA guys told us that were not too sure of the road map either. We will have to keep fingers crossed for that.

There were 3 speakers for the entire session out of which 2 were from BEA, now christened Oracle BEA and one evangelist from Adobe. You may wonder where does Adobe form a part of the BEA endeavor? I was curious too. The curiosity was cleared by one of the BEA speakers on mentioning that Adobe had integrated its Flex platform for the BEA environment. Piggybacking for publicity you may call. But it is actually awesome.

BEA Java2SOA Revolution

The session started with the first speaker Sandeep Sonkusale who is a certified SOA Solution Architect for BEA speaking on the aspects of why an organization has to choose to the SOA infrastructure and the underlying benefits that SOA would provide. The briefing was accompanied with several high profile diagrams of how the world would be revolutionized if SOA would be adopted. I could see many people yawning to glory for this completely hypothetical preachy stuff. All were waiting for the meaty part i.e how to go about doing it. After waiting for almost 45 minutes for the briefing to get over, we felt a wave of relief when the second speaker took over with his laptop and workshop running on the presentation screen.

The second speaker was a young and smart looking Anil Sharma from the BEA product development team. His ascent was really professional. Right from the start to the end of a 2 hour long demo he had his cool even though people bombarded him with several technical queries. The demo given was on the entire new version of the BEA Workshop Studio. It is now entirely eclipse based and has all the earlier separate workshops integrated into one. This means that having workshop installed on your system you can build all the components of J2EE architecture, create web services, build beehive controls for exposing the J2EE components as services, convert these controls to web services, perform BPM process flows and later expose them too as services, connect all controls or services to Aqualogic Service Bus, convert the services to presentation portals and much much more. Phew! This entire demo was a roller coaster for me but it was real fun.

The key points which I found to be useful were the ones which the speaker was emphasizing on and on. It is not necessary that you need to create web services for making your architecture SOA enabled. You can have services like EJB services, custom control services as well web services to make an SOA. Controls are used to expose EJB’s or POJO’s as services and these are not Weblogic specific. In fact they are Apache Beehive controls which are a part of JSR 175, hence vendor lock-in can be avoided. I am not too sure if any other J2EE provider has beehive controls implementation apart from Weblogic 10.2. The interfaces and implementations of web services are done using the JSR-181 constructs.

I got to understand the use of BPM through this session. Before this, I was really hazy as to which use cases BPM really favors. Anil, through his demo explained this in a peculiar scenario. When there is a need to have an entire stateful process as a service it can be implemented as a BPM workflow through the Workshop itself. This can be further exposed as a service. Services can be further integrated into the Aqualogic Service Bus (ALSB) for implementing a transactional service workflow. It is important to note that the services integrated into the service bus must support transaction to have transactional behavior.

The major surprise to me was the merger of DSP into the Workshop. In between the workflow wherever you need a transformation of data you can easily use Data Services transformation either through XQuery or Java right within the workflow. This was something amazing.

Finally shown, were the presentation services based on Weblogic Portal platform. In order to create presentation services BEA workshop comes built in with NetUI which is the pageflow modeller for the Struts framework. Using NetUI you can create Struts JSP views directly from exposed services which further can be converted to WSRP portlets and integrated into the application portal. The most surprising aspect of the WSRP portlets is that you can access the portlet remotely too. This means that your view would be actually rendered from a remote server!

Adobe – Getting More and More Flexy

From 9:30 am to 12:15 pm the BEA guys took the center stage. The Adobe guy was nowhere to be seen. Right at 12:15 pm he popped from somewhere with his laptop and took charge. His session may have been just a 45 minute one but the impact was majestic. He transformed the crowd of almost 200 odd people to the edge of their seats and eyes wide gaping to the screen with his magical Flex demo. It was showtime for Raghu Rao, evangelist for the Flex platform for Adobe. His charisma was attention capturing and the way he breezed through the Flex demo, he left the geek’s including me, craving for more.

The presentation involved the showcase of Flex as a presentation level service for the BEA platform. He presented how Flex can be used for accessing the services exposed from the BEA environment into the presentation tier. This included the use of the commercial Adobe product LCDS which is an enterprise level Flex platform for services. If you do not want to go the paid way, you can use BlazeDS which is a open source freeware, but with limited capabilities, suitable for small applications. Using these you can make callouts to the hosted services using the Action Message Format (AMF) for remote calls.

The major source attraction proved to be the Flex demo’s, which included the Nokia Shop and a sample consumer application. The Flex charts components and 3rd party flex UI components such as coverflow component and the Flex Book component snatched away everyone’s breath.

Final Notes

Such sessions really help in accessing the direction of where technology is heading to. I am thankful to Anil and Raghu who personally cleared my confusions over some aspects offline. I felt bad to keep Raghu away from his food since I kept him bugging with my questions. He had to catch a flight to Bangalore a little while later. If you would like to evaluate the all new BEA Weblogic 10.2 platform head straight towards their eval guide for getting started and also win a 32 GB Ipod by taking this survey.

Check out the day’s captures on my picassa web album.

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What is the difference between Yahoo Live and Youtube?

Yahoo Live can be seen as a video conferencing portal. Get your webcam and broadcast into Yahoo Live by creating channels. The difference Yahoo Live offers from Youtube is direct broadcast from your webcam and not recorded uploads. I slightly doubt such a service getting popular when Youtube has become a brand name of sorts. It would take Google only a matter of days to offer a similar service. Where the business of Yahoo goes with the launch of live is the thing to watch out for.

Does it offer anything new?

In my opinion it does not seem to be an innovative concept. The live webcam has been around ages right from the inception of online porn webcam portals. Yahoo Live should avoid becoming one, because spammers are always on the prowl to attack new emerging systems. Something worth of interest in Yahoo Live is that, it has featured channels which includes some famed personalities performing live for free. This may be just for popularising the service. On the flip side you cannot archive the live broadcast.

What to expect from Yahoo Live?

Yahoo Live says that it is an experimental release. I am not so sure what this means but if there is something innovative to be seen in its future then Yahoo just might be able to revive its business after the downstream trend it is facing currently. Apart from the webcam streaming, Yahoo Live offers live chat, a developer’s API. The API might be of interest since it would offer features for embedding live video chat from your blog or site which has become popular these days.

Guess what, its even got a twitter feed!

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BEA is known for its well diversified technology stack of Weblogic Java Application Servers, SOA products and the Aqualogic suite of ESB and BPM products. Also to mention that BEA holds a strong integration of all the above suites into its Weblogic Workshop which has been built around the Eclipse platform.

Oracle on the other hand too has an array of similar products including Appservers, ESB, SOA and BPM. Then the question arises as to why Oracle is acquiring BEA? Some insights to the things apart from the product suites clash should be taken in consideration here to understand Oracle’s point of view.

Oracle entered into an acquisition with BEA Systems after it offered $19.375/share which is nearly a 40% premium over the October 2007 price when Oracle had done its first bid. This can be seen as a state of urgency on the part of Oracle to acquire BEA. Some speculation can be allotted on to the latest SOA offerings of BEA which could have made Oracle think for a big upgradation in their services.

Thinking other ways, Oracle might just be preparing for a tussle with the other giants such as IBM and SAP for gaining the market share in providing SOA infrastructure. With the BEA acquisition, Oracle will be in ready position to flash a list of clientele from BEA’s portfolio to match with the competitors. With the future plans of BEA for SOA, Oracle’s merger plans must have been really thought out.

It might be also a case of killing the competition. Big players often tend to downsize the smaller fish by making them surrender. This can be a case with Oracle too. Having a chance to get the customer base from BEA, it can simply kill off the competition by either junking off all BEA products off the line or by carefully integrating BEA products with its middleware and offering separate flagship services, just as it has done after acquiring PeopleSoft and JDEdwards.

Organizations today are keen to have a single suite of products to manage their businesses and middleware competition is on the rise. This probably makes Oracle’s target to claim for a one vendor many solutions more justified. But for the developers its more than a platform choice because now it would be choosing between their career paths too. I also have worked on Weblogic App server with Oracle database as the backend. With this acquisition, developers like me will have to decide on which path to opt for.

If Oracle junks off BEA products for killing the competition it might give rise for fear within the Weblogic community. Hopefully, if Oracle makes a decision of providing a flagship line of BEA products, the developer community will be more than happy to flash the name of Oracle on their resumes. This will be clear only in the mid of 2008 when the acquisition will be completed. The major question now lies as to what would a Java EE developer do in such a situation?

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• Magazine styled Hompage
• SEO friendly theme
• Sports a featured article on the home page
• Pagination over the categorical articles and on the Home page Latest Articles.
• Popular articles on the footer of all the page divided into categories.
• Wordpress 2.3 compatible.

Have a look around and please mention any flaws you notice in this theme. Only a few hours are remaining for this wonderful year to pass by. Wish you have a very happy and prosperous new year of 2008!

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I have decided to keep Techtracer 2.0 strictly adhered to the field of web technology and it would be one of my new year resolutions too! The site would be dedicated to articles on Ajax, Java, News of Google and Web 2.0, utilities and websites of interest and finally tips on using Wordpress. I hope to expand the reader base and double it in the coming new year. I aim to write much more quality articles and probably get some guest authors to contribute to this technical portal. The new theme in my opinion is going to serve purpose to all the above expectations. You can view a mock demo of the new theme in Techtracer development zone. Sleeko 1.0 is here to stay!

I would like to hear from you how do you find the new theme. Criticism is gladly welcome. I would like to make sure that the theme is liked by one and all before I unveil it here. If you find anything wrong with the theme please leave a comment in this post.

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The Accordian, the tree based navigation, calender and the Ajax polls are something which you might have come across on different Ajax sites already. But the image gallery is something unique to see. It has all the images managed into sets which are displayed on the bottom. On clicking a set, the images lying within are shown in a manner similar to a deck of cards.

When you hover your mouse on above each partially visible card it becomes visible. You can click it to view to view the larger image. A full screen mode switch and a Thumbnail viewer has also been provided. Information relevant to the hovered image is shown in the right.

Overall, I liked the Ajax features implemented in the site. The navigation is user friendly. However owing to my slow connection, the site proved heavy to load. If you are curious to know how the old NASA website looked like, then have a look at this image of the old layout. From where I got the image, remains a secret.

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A software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android SDK. Applications are written using the Java programming language and run on Dalvik, a custom virtual machine designed for embedded use which runs on top of a Linux kernel.

Apart from the platform, the UI looks promising. It can be even slated to compete with the UI of Apple iPhone. The features are worth drooling over. Check this video presentation made by Sergey Brin and his associate, Steve Horowitz.

I found the Chat feature pretty interesting. It would be a great feature if the conversation sent in the form of SMS could be converted into a chat. It would be simple and fun to use. Some features shown in the video are breath taking. Check out for the Globe Spinner designed with OpenGL and the 3D panorama view. Sergey has mentioned about the Android SDK developer challenge which is currently gaining up on popularity.

Google has set a massive amount of 10 million dollars to present the creator of the best mobile application on the Android platform. Sounds like we would have more crazy stuff coming to our phones soon. Move over to the Android Information Base to find out more.

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1. Ease of use
2. Full use of manual as well as automatic features
3. LCD Live Preview
4. Gives the best image quality
5. Has set a standard amongst fellow photographers
6. Has good warranty
7. Last but not the least has given a value for the money spent

So, folks the race has stopped and the winner has been chosen. Yesterday I bought my second expensive gizmo at a price I originally had no intention of spending. Yet, money is a second priority over passion to me. So without keeping you into further dilemma, I unveil my second prized possession, The Canon Powershot S5 IS prosumer having 8MP, 12X optical zoom and a whopping 23K bucks and a 2 year warranty. The first prized possession if you are baffled, till date, remains my, Sony Ericsson W810i.

I would continue my blogging course once I get a hold over my photography skills. Till then, say cheeeeeeez!

Psst…. btw, did you notice the new category added to this blog called “Photography”. Probably that would help me keep interested into posting more often now. Don’t you think so?

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