Future Smackdown

I am not pretty sure behind the motive of the launch however. It might have got something to do with the browser wars in particular. You see, when the giants are busy fighting a dwarf can easily run away with the bounty. If the saying is anywhere close to truth then Google Chrome just might be the next big thing we have to wait and watch. What makes me say this you might wonder. Well, Internet Explorer is busy getting decked up for its version 8 release which Microsoft must be really pushing in with its best efforts. On the other hand Firefox has had a majestic release of its version 3.0. So where does Google Chrome fit in here? Remember, they say its in beta! Gmail was too!

Google Chrome has already been stated to possess best features of Firefox and other browsers. Bloggers have been ranting about this, the most. That is true since Google Chrome may not support plugins and themes feature as of now, on which Firefox has found its enormous success. But the first question to put up front is, is Google Chrome really just another browser or a desktop application which connects to the internet. Well both say the same thing but the mention of a different memory processing model for Chrome is something which you have to consider. Google won’t be silly to reinvent the wheel. It just might be a futuristic vision of Google which we are currently witnessing on a miniature scale. Google Suggest, Maps or GMail must ring the bells as I mention this.

People may crib and rant about Google Chrome but it hasn’t hampered the success of launch down even by a pint. In fact Google has made a smart move to get as many feedbacks as possible since it has made Chrome right from scratch. Now its motive would definitely be to do a write up once again and make a surprise launch with power packed features in the next version. I can see people waiting with baited breath keeping a hawks eye on every single move Google does.

In For a Tough Competition?

Google Chrome has been launched amidst Adobe Flex going mainstream with its enterprise presence and while Silverlight is being pushed into your face. You must have some or the other time come across Flex and Silverlight applications which left your mouth wide open to see the magic they do. Can a browser reduce these giant’s market share? Why do I ask?

If you carefully notice Chrome has heavily emphasized that it is going to support the standards of web technologies like CSS, Javascript, HTML5. This means that Google Chrome would be a perfect foundation for web developers who always have been frustrated with browser dependencies when working with these web technologies. By using Chrome you might really enjoy developing a web application. This translates to more web developers being happy, more usage of standard features of Javascript, CSS and HTML, more usage of open technologies viz. Ajax, XML, JSON, leading to more usage of free tools & less use of propreitary products.

All this means, more market share for open source and Google already has set its base up front with a plethora of tools. You name it, Google Gears, GWT, Google App Engine, Google Analytics, Google Maps etc for the web developers. More standards attribute to better web applications and all which is supported by Chrome inherently. The survival of Flex or Silverlight will be a debatable issue henceforth if Google Chrome manages to captilize on its intentions.

This sounds a huge success to Google Chrome. If this falls in line, then Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera will be competing with Chrome rather than with themselves. Google will rise to the top and rule the universe. All of this is a distant dream for me and I don’t want to sound preachy now. You do the analysis as I will wait for a surprise in the next version of Google Chrome. It might just be the next big thing, you may never know!

The things I admire in the current release of Google Chrome :

1. Full screen interface
2. Draggable tabs to windows and back into tabs
3. Neater display of history links and thumbnails of recent visits

Testing Google Chrome

The thing you might be wondering at the moment is how to distinguish Chrome from the rest of the browsers. As Google mentions, Chrome sports a different memory management model which implements each tab as a whole new process instead of a thread. On opening a tab you would notice that the task manager would have a new process listed. In order to try out Chrome’s ability with this regards you should try opening a Javascript heavy page first in browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Heavy Javascript attributes to browser hanging which is considered often as a painful process since all the tabs hang and the browser itself has to be killed to stop the loading. As far as Chrome goes, this nature would be handled in a completely different manner since you can now directly kill a tab process from the task manager without affecting the other open tabs.

While the above concept is not much useful for the casual surfer, it will be a must for web application users in times to come, since the advent of Web 2.0 has in fact spruced up the usage of Ajax which in turn has made the web application heavy for processing. Such a model would have been required any time in near future, but with Chrome stepping the right foot at the right time you can relax down a bit now. If you are a staunch Ajax developer then Chrome surely would come to your rescue.

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I am thoroughly satisfied with Google Reader for reading my RSS feeds but I felt its been a long time I have spent on it and it has now started to bore me a bit. So I started some search for good desktop applications which would give some eye candy and also improve my productivity while learning from the feeds.

I have found one nice solution which has relieved me to some extent and which is certainly an impressive effort in the direction of web desktop integration. Its called ReadAir. It is a really nice application for feed reading and I am impressed by its potential.  The reason I liked it was because it is built on Adobe AIR. I had become a fan of Adobe AIR when I had read about it for the first time.

Seeing a live usable application built on it was something I had waited for and ReadAir has confirmed my belief that sometime later in the future we are going to see amazing applications built for the desktops but running on the web. Mozilla Prism is a yet another effort in this field.

Okay, coming back to the ReadAir. ReadAir is a desktop feed reader for reading your Google Reader feeds. The features that I can place my votes on are:

• Easy setup and login straight into Google Reader
• Direct synchronization of read posts with Google Reader
• You can star any post directly inside it which is also visible later in your Google Reader
• Add/Remove tags or feeds from within it
• It has got a very minimalistic Interface yet its pretty neat looking
• The feed post colors and fonts are soothing to the eye
• It is quick in loading.
• Clicking on the post title marks the post as read (This is better than scrolling the entire length of the post as in Google Reader)

I was satisfied by the above basic features and also expect them to improve them in the future. Since the application is in its early days, some features can be cranky at times. For example, I found the auto update feature somewhat unnecessary. It updated the application with some new features which later started to show some errors. Also, the search is not fully functional and currently ReadAir does not support keyboard shortcuts.

Leaving apart the shortcomings, the synchronization was the best part of ReadAir. At least I have got a different reader for my taste and also due to the synchronization with Google Reader, I do not have to worry about re-reading the same posts if I happen to access Google Reader from a different location. I appreciate the commendable effort put up by Adam Mcgrath for bringing this idea to life and am looking forward for addition of more features.

Try it, its nice to have a change sometimes and I would always root for web desktop applications like these. For installing ReadAir you need to have Adobe Air installed on your system. Download Adobe Air from here.

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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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Enter Web 2.0, and you do not have to ponder much over lost time for waiting to get hold of a tool. In this era, whatever you think of is already available online. So without fretting just google up your requirement and you would be amazed by what kind of power the internet can provide you. Coming back to the question, I responded him coolly, to use an online photo editor! He was totally baffled at the thought. If you are too, then I might as well introduce to you the best tools for photo editing online.

Online Photo Editors

The most important thing for a photo editor is to provide the features such as, cropping, editing brightness and contrast, sharpening and blurring, resize, effects and saving in multiple file formats. In a standalone editor you are most likely to find these features. But in an online environment the features will be severely limited with regards to flexibility of usage, since they are entirely web based which make them complicated to implement. I will suggest you some nifty tools which would actually make your work easier and lot more fun. Browsing across several editors I would recommend you 3 of the most liked online photo editors.

1. Phixr

Phixr is an interesting tool which does not use Flash. It is completely Ajax based and has got the potential to give the user a complete satisfaction. The most likable feature I found in this was the ability to convert your photograph into an artistic polaroid snapshot, comment bubbles and effects. It gives you the facility of direct upload of the edited photo to numerous photo sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, Picasaweb and so on. Moreover, its free to use.

Its not a compulsion for registering for using the tool. You can try out the demo from the photo shown on the front page itself and check the features for yourselfs. Look what I could come up in a few minutes of playing with this tool.

2. SplashUp

If you are a Photoshop addict and cannot think of any other tool besides it, then you are in for a real surprise. SplashUp, earlier called Fauxto is a very well designed application which closely resembles Photoshop. It has the same look and feel and is completely made in Flash. The bonus of using SplashUp is that you can actually save your work in its own file format so that you can continue working on it later. It is the first online tool, to give a layered editing environment and work on multiple images at the same time without your browser getting hanged up. Doesn’t that sound exciting enough?

3. Picnik

Picnik one is one of my favorites and one of the most used tools while editing photos online. This is because, Flick has recently bought it, and it has been directly integrated into flickr. This makes editing your online flickr photos even more simpler. Just go to a flickr photo and choose the Edit Photo button, which opens up in a picnik editor mode. Check out for the humorous load messages it shows. The only thing I dislike about it is it takes a lot of time to load the photo which is not the case in SplashUp.

Picnik has a lot of amazing features to offer but they all do not come for free. Yet you are free to use some commonly used features with ease. Check out for fancy text effects and custom shapes. They are surely fantastic. With a tool like Picnik you wouldn’t need Photoshop around for common usages.

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So today without any procrastination, I intend to put down the simplest of the steps to configure and run MySQL on Windows XP in the quickest of the time. First and foremost, as I always tend to follow a course is, break down the task into 3 steps. They are:

Step 1: Getting the software

Download the latest version of MySQL from the community site. Unpack it into your desired folder. It is always a good practice to download the zipped archive of MySQL binary distribution since using the one click installer, you might sometimes lose the power of configuration manually.

Its also a better way to understand configuring manually since if you switch to a Unix based environment later on, you will have to carry out a similar procedure and there is usually no one click installer in such environments.

I unpacked MySQL in C:\Program Files\mysql-5.0.45-win32

Step 2 : Configuring the environment

While configuring in the Windows environment you have to do two things. One, putting a file having a name my.ini in the Windows folder of the operating system. Two, setting the path in your system environment variable. Here’s what you have to do:

Creating Option File (my.ini)

Go to your installation path of MySQL (In my case it is: C:\Program Files\mysql-5.0.45-win32) and rename the file my-medium.ini to my.ini. Open the renamed file in notepad and add the following lines, just beneath the line which says, # The MySQL server and above the line port = 3306:

[mysqld]
# set basedir to your installation path
basedir=C:/Program Files/mysql-5.0.45-win32
# set datadir to the location of your data directory
datadir=D:/workspace/data

The second line as shown above is, configuring your database directory. This means, the path which you assign to datadir will be the path where your databases will be created. You have to make sure that the path exists before you assign it. There will a data directory in the MySQL installed path. If you provide a different path to the data directory than this default one, you must copy the entire contents of the data directory in that path.

Finally, drop the my.ini file into your Windows directory. In my case, I copied the file into the path C:/Windows

Setting the environment variable

After completing the above step, goto

My Computer > Properties > Advanced >Environment Variables > System variables > Path > Edit

In the Value box, goto the end of the line and put a semi colon and the path of the MySQL bin folder. In my case I have put it as:

;C:\Program Files\mysql-5.0.45-win32\bin

Click OK 3 times and thats it with the configuration of MySQL. You are all set to test the installation.

Step 3: Final Configurations and Running MySQL

You are actually good to go for running mysql. For this, open up your command prompt and type in the command mysqld –console. This will start the mysql database server. Whenever you run this command henceforth you will see these lines at the end:

[Note] mysqld: ready for connections.
Version: ‘5.0.45-community-nt-log’ socket: ” port: 3306 MySQL Community Edit
ion (GPL)

When you see these lines, it means that mysql has started successfully. Its time to party!

Leave the command prompt open and start up another command prompt. For the first time you should do this:

C:\>mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

When it will ask for a password, just hit Enter. It will allow access to you without a password and will show up a prompt as:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 12
Server version: 5.0.45-community-nt-log MySQL Community Edition (GPL)

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the buffer.

mysql>

Note that your database has anonymous access. It is not a secure thing to let it like that. You should always access the database with a password. So for setting up the password you will have to do the below steps. Put in the commands which are highlighted as shown:

mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD(”admin”) where User=’root’;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 3 Changed: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit
Bye

Once you have done this, try logging into the server again without a password. It must show the below error:

C:\Documents and Settings\xpuser>mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: NO)

This means, now your database is secure.You should be relieved that your mysql setup has got completed. Now every time you want to start in your database start the server in one command prompt and in the second command prompt login to the database server by doing:

C:\>mysql -u root -p
Enter password: admin

Thats it. Phew! I hope I remember the steps myself and now for my cup of cappuccino.

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Whatever the reason may be, editing a photograph is no layman’s job. Sometime people give up half way through when they do not find the required results. I recently found a something which might make your spirit rise higher when you will notice the results you get out of it. The name of the tool is Picasa. Its a tool from Google. I am sure you must have used it many time to upload your photos to the online Picasaweb. But did you ever try making collages from it. Picasa can generate some really amazing collages out of your precious photos and make them really gift worthy or send it amongst friends as a memoir.

So here’s how you can make collages out of your photos:

• Download and install Picasa if you don’t have it already from here
• When you open it Picasa will start indexing all your image folders
• Choose a folder of which you want to make a collage from
• Now carefully select the photos which are your favorite and which you want inside the collage
• Click the Collage button in the bottom bar
• Your collage will be loaded in the dialog mode
• You might not be satisfied with the collage at first so you can try one of the 2 tricks
• Press Shift and drag your mouse pointer on the collage window. You will see a change in the layout
• Keep trying till you are satisfied with a layout
• Sometimes, you might like a layout but not how the pictures are placed
• In this case press Ctrl and drag the mouse pointer. The layout will be same but the pictures will start to randomize in their placement.
• Once you are done, hit the Create Button and specify location as the “current folder”
• The collage gets created and gives you a chance to edit the collage
• Here you can try out interesting presets which include making the collage black and white or giving it a sepia tone or soft focusing it. You can have real fun over here.
• After finishing with the effect choose file > save. A backup of the original will automatically be made
• So here you are with a amazing memorabilia of your treasured photos. Sounds simple isn’t it?
  

You can do different types of collages in Picassa. The one above is called the “Picture Pile“. The other types include:

Picture Grid

Contact Sheet

You can always edit the collage features after saving it. But however there is no provision to change the photos of it later. You would have to again do the above steps for making a new collage.

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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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But I am not going to discuss the production environment over here. The topic under scrutiny is how would you deploy your web application virtually to Tomcat. For that we have to know what is virtual deployment and learn about its advantages.

What is virtual deployment?

Virtual deployment in simple terms means deploying a web application from a different physical location. In this case, you are not required to put the web application in its exploded war structure to the webapps directory. Most of the beginners, tend to develop their web applications directly in the webapps directory itself. This technique might prove the most simplest and the quickest but it is the most hazardous. This is because the moment you Undeploy the web application from Tomcat’s manager the web application gets erased off completely from the webapps directory.

I had tried the same, for the very first time since I had not much information, and it proved fatal. All my work had vanished in an instant. From that day onwards I stuck to using a technique of using development structures and deployment structures and used with Ant. But I found this, too cumbersome, if I had to learn a framework or try out a small sample code. I was not willing to write an Ant build file each time I had to try a web application nor I wanted to develop the web application straightaway in the webapps directory which had earlier destroyed my work. IDE’s might be of great help but I don’t usually have them when needed. For example at a friend’s place.

Coming back to the topic which I have to discuss, I recently found a good workaround for the above problem. Although I believe it might be used quite commonly to deploy web applications I am writing this for people who are facing the same problem as mine. The solution lies in deploying the web application virtually.

How to virtually deploy a web application in Tomcat?

When you virtually deploy a web application you are just saying to Tomcat that you have developed a web application which is lying in some other location and that the server should run it from that location itself. This is done by using a configuring element called Context. In Tomcat lingo Context is nothing but the web application itself.

So here is the technique of virtual deployment done in Tomcat. I am using Tomcat 6 for this example.

• Let’s assume that Tomcat is configured at the location C:/Tomcat6
• Place the Web application at some other location. For example D:/workspace/WebApp
• Start Tomcat. This is to test the hot deployment of our Context
• Now go to the path C:/Tomcat6/conf/
• Check if you have the directory Catalina and a subdirectory localhost within it
• If you don’t have them then you must make the directories Catalina/localhost within C:/Tomcat6/conf/
• Make a Context file and name it with any name, myapp.xml and place it within localhost
• You have to put a single element within the myapp.xml as follows
  

  <Context
  docBase=”D:/workspace/WebApp”
  reloadable=”true”/>

• The “reloadable” attribute is optional. The “docBase” attribute is required. It is used to specify the physical location of the web app.
• That’s it. Now you can do any kind of tests with your web application and happily see the changes with just a browser refresh.
• Try undeploying your web app now. The moment you undeploy, myapp.xml gets deleted from Catalina/localhost but your application will be intact. Isn’t that wonderful?
• For redeploying you would just have to make myapp.xml once again.

If you want to learn more about configuring Contexts and look at its different attributes then go through the tomcat reference. But before that, you would want to know what are the advantages of this technique.

Advantages of Virtual Deployment

When a context is configured, Tomcat runs it from the location directly where the web application is placed and not by making a copy in its webapps directory. In this case if you try to Undeploy the web application, Tomcat simply removes the context file from its directory and does not touch the physical web application. This is most convenient and easy way to deploy a web application to Tomcat without the fear of losing your work.

The second advantage of virtual deployment is that you don’t have to change anything in the server.xml. Whenever any change is made in server.xml the server has to be restarted for the changes to be applied. In case of using contexts the server automatically deploys your application when it finds any context newly configured with it.

The third advantage is that contexts can be even used to make your web applications classes hot deployable too. It is done as above using the “reloadable” attribute. Tomcat picks up any changes done even to the classes if “reloadable” is set to “true“. This can be very helpful and a time savior if you don’t want to waste time in restarting Tomcat again and again. It is however heavy on resources but might be useful in simple tests.

The fourth advantage is that you can dynamically change the name of your application itself. For example change the name of “myapp.xml” to “BankApp.xml”. Go to Tomcat Manager URL and refresh it. You will see the application name as “BankApp” which earlier was “myapp”. It doesn’t matter what the folder name is where the actual application lies. In our case it was “WebApp”.

The fifth advantage is something I found it to be the best of all. Your application would run even if it actually present on a remote machine. What you need to do is to just share the application from one machine, set the docBase path as the network URI and then access it. It would run like a locally hosted application.

The last but not the least advantage is to test a sample code on multiple tomcat’s. Let’s assume you want to test a feature of servlets to find whether it is backward compatible or not. So you can have a new Tomcat and an old Tomcat running on different ports. Put the context in both Tomcat’s and simultaneously test it out. You would have to refer to the Tomcat documentation for configuring Context in the older versions.

Now that you know how the technique of virtual deployment try it out on different servers like Glassfish or JBoss and let me know how you went about it. Cheers!

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public class LocalInnerClassTest {
	public void defineInnerClass() {
		class MyLocalInnerClass {
			public void doSomething() {				
			}
		}
 
	}
}

Now lets suppose we want to pass a variable in the defineInnerClass() and pass it to the doSomething() for some computation, then according to the specifications on local inner classes methods we must declare the variables as final or else it will result in a compile time error. So the resulting code must be something as follows:

public class LocalInnerClassTest {
	public void defineInnerClass(final int var) {
		class MyLocalInnerClass {
			public void doSomething() {
				System.out.println(var);
			}
		}
	}
}

where var is the variable that must be declared as final to be passed into the doSomething() method of MyLocalInnerClass. Now the mysterious question which I faced was why exactly such a specification has been outlined. Why can’t the inner class simply take the variable as it is and process further.

In order to understand this reason as to why local inner classes can access only final variables, we have to learn how exactly inner classes get translated to the byte code. The moment you come to know this, you can easily see the logic behind making the variables final.

How Are Inner Classes Translated to the Byte Code

Here is the secret. Inner classes as you must have known them from a long time are still mysterious to the JVM. Yes its true. Inner classes have been implemented only to the compiler level. When the classes are compiled which contain inner classes, the byte code which gets generated does not actually implement inner classes as a class within a class. The book on Core Java from makes this statement:

“Inner classes are translated into regular class files with $ (dollar signs) delimiting outer and inner class names and the virtual machine does not have any special knowledge about them”

That means when the above class file from the example is compiled it will generate two class files such as:

1. LocalInnerClassTest.class
2. LocalInnerClassTest$MyLocalInnerClass.class

Unfurling the mystery of final variables

If you apply logic to the above theory of inner class at the byte code level, you have the answer to the mystery of having final variables. For explanation purpose, lets take the same example.

First lets say we make a call to the defineInnerClass() by creating an instance of LocalInnerClassTest. At this point, the instance of MyLocalInnerClass is still not present because the JVM treats it as a separate class at the byte code level. So when the call to defineInnerClass() is made the JVM tries to instantiate an object of MyLocalInnerClass.

But here we run into a problem. The function doSomething() accesses the var variable which is passed down from the outer class method. If you can simply apply logic over here, you can see the problem. How should the JVM pass the variable which has been declared in one class file to the method in another class file?

In order to solve this big problem, the JVM acts smart. It makes a requirement for the developer to make the variable passed from the method of an outer class to be declared as final. How would this solve the problem, you may ask? When you declare the variable var as final the compiler does a trick. The trick being, it quietly places a hidden variable with the name val$var inside the 2nd compiled class file.

The variable val$var is assigned the same value which has been assigned to var since now the compiler knows that the value cannot be changed as it has been declared final. This is very clever, since final variable must always be assigned before compilation.

So there you go. Now, when you run the program from within an application the inner class already has the value which has been assigned to var through its inner hidden variable val$var and thus the mystery gets solved. Therefore you have the concept that local inner class methods can have access to only the final variables of the outer class.

Hey, Local Inner Classes can even access Outer Class member variables directly. How?

Ok, now that we have tackled the above mystery, this is more simpler. The below code gets perfectly compiled

public class LocalInnerClassTest {
     private int var2;
     public void defineInnerClass(final int var){
 	  class MyLocalInnerClass{
 		public void doSomething(){
 			System.out.println(var+var2);
 		}
     	  }
     }
}

You can notice that the local inner class has direct access to even the private variable var2 of its outer class. The reason behind the accessibility of outer member variables directly inside the local inner classes is that, once again the compiler cleverly places one more hidden variable named as this$0 which is a final instance variable of the outer class type. When the inner class object is instantiated the variable this$0 is given a reference to the outer variable with direct access privileges. Hence you can access the outer class member variables directly from within the inner class. Smart isn’t it?

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