What does synchronization mean We are talking about the process-related synchronization here. Synchronization is the the application of particular mechanisms to ensure that two concurrently-executing processes do not execute specific portions of a program at the same time [Wikipedia]. More in general, the specific portions are the ones that access data structures shared between different processes, and that should not be available to a process while another one is halfway through modifying them, thus keeping the invariants (which processes rely on in their logic) of such data satisfied. For example, different processes can get the value of a common variable, increment it, and save this new value in the original location. If a moderately high number of processes is executed in time-sharing, two or more of them can obtain the value of the variable at the same time, resulting in only one increment for two executions. It is said that this kind of operations on data should be atomic: specific blocks of code should be allowed to run in their entirety before any other portion that touches the same data structure (essentially that modifies the same state) is executed. In PHP A PHP script is inherently immune from internal synchronization issues, unlike other languages, because of its simple architecture. There is no native support for creating multiple threads that share the same PHP variables and that run concurrently in the same PHP script. You can use exec() to run an external program in background or another PHP scripts, but it does not share the scope of the original script (like an include()d file would do) nor this is generally a good idea if not for specific use cases that involve complex integration of external systems. PHP scripts have a short life, and there is usually no need for multiple processes inside of them. Concurrent processes are commonly employed to perform tasks that wait for external resources or computations, so that if one process blocks while expecting a function's return value, other processes can use the cpu time for their own sake. But beware that in PHP, the client waits for the completion of a generated page until the PHP script ends and the control is returned to the HTTP server; if you have business logic that is waiting for external events or resources and you want to return the control to the user in the meantime, you don't need a new thread (which in the current architecture you had to wait, too): you need to outsource this work. Zend Server Job Queue and, more simply, cron let you set up tasks for asynchronous execution. For example you can schedule a PHP script that performs heavy computation and that has to be executed once an hour. In my opinion, this is multithreading as intended in PHP. Outside PHP Even if PHP is shared-nothing by nature and does not present classical race conditions on variables due to its limitations, every kind of shared resource is a candidate for synchronization issues. Since PHP scripts are short-lived and stateless, the resources that maintain state in behalf of PHP scripts are the target of this analysis: different scripts or even the very same script can be executed more than one time, concurrently. Thus, PHP code can interfere with itself as much as Java code does. Sessions are not usually a source of race conditions. Every session is confined to a single client via a cookie used as a key, so you have to consider only the pages and the actions undertaken by a single user at the same time for an analysis of what can go wrong. The biggest issue, though, is the stale of data represented in different views while it is updated in the model, but you have to look in the Ajax world for a workaround due to the nature of the HTTP protocol. Databases, at least the relational ones, guarantee atomicity of operations to a certain extent with the definition of transactions. Databases are the quintessence of application state, and you can take advantage of their ACID properties in a transaction. For example, if you really have to calculate a new key for a table by looking at the already existent ones: SELECT MAX(id) + 1 FROM mytable; INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (4242, 'The name', ...); -- 4242 is the new id UPDATE mytable SET field = ... WHERE id = 4242; at least wrap in a transaction this changeset so that you do not end up updating some other 4242th row which has been inserted by another instance of the PHP script after your SELECT. PDO throws exceptions (unlike mysql_*() functions which often fail silenty), so this example should work anyway when the INSERT fails. But why fail when there is nothing that prevent the row from being inserted with a valid id? This is not the user's fault. You can see the potential for race conditions when doing data-intensive queries in PHP scripts. The file system is not immune from concurrency problems as well; in this case the rows are substituted by files and the primary keys by file names. The best solutions involve using a natural key for the filename, or generating an hash: $filename = uniqid('prefix', true); // second parameter is 'more cool?' Unless two filenames for uploaded files are generated at the same microsecond, the resulting ids should be different. Or, if you're paranoid: mt_srand(); $filename = uniqid(mt_rand(), true); In sum, when you're expecting your applications to run many scripts every second, take your time to check the possibility that race conditions arise.

unused variables and methods should alway be unwelcome. removing them keeps the code cleaner and easier to read. now, by default eclipse warns you about unused private variables and methods, but it doesn’t warn you (by default) about unused method arguments. but there is a compiler setting in eclipse that can warn you when you don’t use an argument in a method. you can even handle arguments on inherited methods, especially useful when using 3rd party libraries. setup the compiler preferences to get warnings of unused arguments: go to window > preferences > java > compiler > errors/warnings . open up the section unnecessary code . change the setting for parameter is never read from ignore to warning. (recommended, but optional) deselect ignore overriding and implementing methods . i recommend deselecting this option. you can leave it selected if you want to, but the feature loses a bit of its usefulness. i discuss this option a bit more in the next section. here’s what the preference should look like: and here’s an example of such a warning. in the example, the argument capacity isn’t used so is annotated as a warning. what’s the easiest way to get rid of the warning? well, just remove the argument using the eclipse change method signature refactoring . this will remove the argument from the method declaration and any method callers in one go. however, if you can’t remove the argument from the method then read the next section. on an old codebase you may get lots of warnings initially. i’d normally handle these on a class-by-class basis only for the classes i’m currently working on, unless the team has a specific cleanup project/task. just something to bear in mind, especially if you share workspace settings across the team via svn or similar. what about method signatures that can’t be changed? when you deselected ignore overriding and implementing methods, you told eclipse to warn you about unused arguments in implemented/overridden methods. it’s a good indicator that your superclass/interface method is passing in more than it needs to (ie. remove the argument from the method signature) or that you’re ignoring something important about the interface contract (ie. use it somewhere in your method). but sometimes you can’t remove the argument because you don’t have control over inherited methods, especially if you implement/override a 3rd party library’s method or if the method is part of a bigger framework that’s difficult to change. other times you won’t have any need for the argument in very isolated cases. so you don’t want a warning to appear for these. that’s why you can use the @suppresswarning compiler annotation to stop eclipse from reporting the warning. here’s an example: public string process(@suppresswarnings("unused") int capacity, int max) {...} you can apply suppresswarning to an individual argument or the whole method. i’d recommend annotating only the argument that you want to ignore. eclipse makes it easy to add the compiler annotation. just navigate to the warning , press ctrl+1 and choose add @suppresswarning ‘unused’ to ‘variable’ (quick fix does its job again). from http://eclipseone.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/get-warnings-about-unused-method-arguments-from-eclipse/

Learn the Mediator Design Pattern with easy Java source code examples as James Sugrue continues his design patterns tutorial series, Design Patterns Uncovered

if you’ve been hanging onto one eclipse workspace for the last couple of years, you’ll probably have dozens of projects cluttering up your workspace. if you’re an eclipse rcp developer, you may be sitting with around 50+ projects easily. the thing is that you’ll often only work with 1 or 2 at a time, not the whole lot. and sometimes you want a convenient way of only browsing projects belonging to a specific product/feature/layer/any-other-grouping-that-makes-sense. having all projects in a long list makes it difficult to manage and more difficult to browse. that’s why the package explorer and project explorer have a nice feature that reduces the clutter and allows you to organise your project into categories that make sense. so instead of the package explorer looking unwieldy and flat like this, it could look like this: how to categorise projects this feature works closely with another eclipse feature called working sets. a working set is just a grouping of resources (ie. files, folders and projects). each category is just a working set. to categorise projects, we’ll first create some working sets and then enable the feature in the package explorer. to create a working set do the following: open the package explorer (or project explorer) and in the view menu (triangle in the upper, right corner), click select working set… click new… in the select working set dialog. select resource working set type and click next. on the next page select all the projects you want to include in the working set and pick a descriptive name for your working set. repeat the process for any other working sets you want. click finish. here’s an example of what the working set dialog should look like: now to enable the grouping feature. open the package explorer’s view menu again and enable top level elements > working sets . if it’s the first time you do this, eclipse will prompt you to configure working sets – a way to ask you which working sets to display in the package explorer. select all the working sets you created and click ok. you should now see your working sets in the package explorer and if you expand it, all the projects you selected will be shown. here’s a quick video to give you an example of how this works and looks. in the example, there are 8 projects, 3 belonging to the ui and 3 to the model. the working sets will group them according to ui and model. there are also 2 projects that are scratchpad projects, so for now they won’t be categorised. notes: a project can belong to as many working sets as you want , so it can appear in a number of categories. you can choose which working sets display in the package explorer by choosing configure working sets … from the view menu and then selecting/deselecting the relevant working sets. nb! this menu item is not available if you’re not in the working set layout. to get back to the normal view, select top level elements > projects from the view menu. any project not assigned to a working set goes to a category called other projects . this isn’t really a working set, but a default category that eclipse assigns to group unassigned projects. you can reorder working sets by dragging and dropping them anywhere. new projects can quickly be assigned to working sets by either dragging and dropping them onto the working set or right-clicking on the project and selecting assign working sets . limitations: although working sets help you organise resources, any new resources won’t automatically be added to a working set, even if their parent already belongs to that working set . in our case, this means that any new project needs to be explicitly added to a working set, otherwise it will appear in the other projects category. normally you can do this on new project wizards, so watch out for these. some good reasons why you should categorise your projects now that you know how to group projects, you might be wondering why you should. well, apart from just looking a lot cleaner and less cluttered, it also means that you can act on a group of projects at a time. for example, you can right-click on a working set in package explorer and open, close or refresh all projects in that working set. the same applies to team commands (nice for selective updates). another reason is that you can now selectively search only those projects by telling eclipse to only search certain working sets. now you don’t have to pick up occurrences in test or scratchpad projects if you don’t want to. there are a host of other eclipse commands that act only on individual working sets (eg. build, problems, etc). and the last reason is that now it’s a lot easier to navigate the package explorer with the keyboard. another reason to start learning eclipse keyboard shortcuts and also impress your colleagues.

In a well-organized build process, you want lightning-fast unit tests to run first, and provide whatever feedback they can very quickly. A nice way to do this is to be able to class your tests into different categories. For example, this can make it easier to distinguish between faster running unit tests, and slower tests such as integration, performance, load or acceptance tests. This feature exists in TestNG, but, until recently, not in JUnit. Indeed, this has been missing from the JUnit world for a long time. Using JUnit, I typically use test names (integration tests end in 'IntegrationTest', for example) or packages to identify different types of test. It is easy to configure a build script using Maven or Ant to run different types of test at different points in the build lifecycle. However it would be nice to be able to do this in a more elegant manner. JUnit 4.8 introduced a new feature along these lines, called Categories. However, like most new JUnit features, it is almost entirely undocumented. In this article we'll see how it works and what it can do for you. In JUnit 4.8, you can define your own categories for your tests. Categories are implemented as classes or interfaces. Since they simply act as markers, I prefer to use interfaces. One such category interface might look like this: public interface IntegrationTests {} You can also use inheritance to organize your test categories: public interface SlowTests {} public interface IntegrationTests extends SlowTests {} public interface PerformanceTests extends SlowTests {} So far so good. Now you can use these categories in your tests. In this example we flag a particular test class as containing integration tests: @Category(IntegrationTests.class) public class AccountIntegrationTest { @Test public void thisTestWillTakeSomeTime() { ... } @Test public void thisTestWillTakeEvenLonger() { .... } } You can also flag individual test methods if you prefer: public class AccountTest { @Test @Category(IntegrationTests.class) public void thisTestWillTakeSomeTime() { ... } @Test @Category(IntegrationTests.class) public void thisTestWillTakeEvenLonger() { ... } @Test public void thisOneIsRealFast() { ... } } To run tests in a particular category, you need to set up a test suite. In JUnit 4, a test suite is essentially an empty annotated class. To run only tests in a particular category, you use the @Runwith(Categories.class) annotation, and specify what category you want to run using the @IncludeCategory annotation @RunWith(Categories.class) @IncludeCategory(SlowTests.class) @SuiteClasses( { AccountTest.class, ClientTest.class }) public class LongRunningTestSuite {} You can also ask JUnit not to run tests in a particular category using the @ExcludeCategory annotation @RunWith(Categories.class) @ExcludeCategory(SlowTests.class) @SuiteClasses( { AccountTest.class, ClientTest.class }) public class UnitTestSuite {} Test categories are great if you use JUnit test suites. I haven't used test suites for years: Maven can find all my tests by itself, thank you very much, so I don't have to remember to add my test classes to the right test suite each time a create a new one. However, test suites do give you finer control over what order your tests are executed in, so you might still find them useful in that regard. Once you've done this, it is then easy to run tests in a particular category from within your IDE simply by running the test suite. On the tooling and build automation side of things, JUnit categories are not supported as well as TestNG groups. For example, the Maven surefire plugin lets you specify the TestNG groups you want to run in a particular phase, but no such support exists as yet for JUnit categories. You can of course configure the Surefire plugin to run a particular test suite (or test suites) in a particular phase, but it doesn't dispense you with the need to write and maintain a test suite. So test categories are great, but having to run them via a test suite (and to remember to add new test classes to the test suite) seems a bit clunky in these days of annotations and reflection. From http://weblogs.java.net/blog/johnsmart/archive/2010/04/25/grouping-tests-using-junit-categories-0

The architectural pattern I'd like to talk about in this article is the overly famous Domain Model. An application's Domain Model is simply defined as an object graph created from domain-specific classes; when present, a Domain Model is the core of the application, where all the business logic resides. This object graph is employed by upper layers of an application which present it to the user. The metaphor for this methodology In software development, the term domain (or business domain) is an umbrella for the area the application is built in, and that it will serve. The new domains we encounter as we move to new projects are one of the most interesting points of software development, where we are constantly embracing new fields and gaining knowledge. Given a domain such as a particular industry (chemical, electronics) or business (air travelling, e-commerce), the point of connection of an application with these activities is its model. A model is an abstract representation of the reality of the domain, which captures its interesting and relevant aspects. The practice of modelling is not a specific trait of software development (in particular model-driven development), but it is a more general scientifical process. For example, everyone who works in the field of information technology knows the voltage/current relationships for simple components such as resistors and capacitors (Ohm's law and current derivative of the voltage). The specific domain here is electronics, and this model is named lumped component model, essentially because it lets a designer connect isolated one-port (two terminals) components to build his desired circuit. This model is a simplification of much more complex models of reality: the Maxwell equations and the propagation of electromagnetic fields; the lumped component model is valid whenever the frequency of the voltage/current signals in the circuit is low, so that the wavelengths of these signals are far greater than the dimensions of the circuit (if that goes over your head, don't worry, it's the field of electrical engineers.) When designers consider larger circuits, such as a transmission line, this model ceases to give correct results and more general ones must be employed. The domain is almost the same, but the model serves a different purpose and has to be necessarily different from the one used in small scale circuits. This complex example is here only to show that given a domain, there is no single model for it, but there are many possible ones which may adapt more or less reliably to the goals of an application. Starting from a modelling phase and deep understanding of the domain are key points of Domain-Driven Design, one of the ascending methodologies for developing complex enterprise software. Software models While there are standard mathematical models for many domains in the scientific world, software developers usually build a tailored one in every different application, performing an analysis of the domain (or at least they should.) The result of the modelling can comprehend document or diagrams, but the most powerful artifact is an executable model. Object-oriented programming is a almost perfect paradigm when it comes to modelling the real world, and lets the developers construct a Domain Model in the form of a set of classes. In a correct implementation of a Domain Model, these classes should be behaviorally complete: they must encapsulate their data as much as possible and expose a set of methods, while avoiding their usage as dumb data containers. The bread and butter of a Domain Model are the classical example of User, Post, Forum, Group, PrivateMessage classes, which are usually in a one to one relationship with database tables. But the Domain Model is not limited to these Entity classes: it also "comprehends" ValueObjects (modelization of domain-specific data types) and various kinds of Services. Every class that encapsulates business logic is welcome, so that this logic is not duplicated in upper layers, which are the primary clients of the Domain Model. Dependencies and purity Another key trait of the classes included in the Domain Model is the absence of external dependencies, like a library to store in the data contained in the objects in a database. The code artifact in a Domain Model are either interfaces, or Plain Old Php Objects (classes which do not extend any external abstract superclass.) Active Record approaches should be avoided because not only a relational database is an infrastructure detail not included in the Domain Model itself, but the very concept of persistence is abstracted away. As far as the clients of the Domain Model are concerned, the state and behavior of the application are represented by an in-memory object graph, whose methods expose functionalities and which client code can play with. There are no dependencies from a Domain Model towards infrastructure classes, because these dependencies must be inverted. The resulting system is an instance of the hexagonal architecture, where the Domain Model defines ports (interfaces) and infrastructure can be chosen to provide adapters for these ports (implementations in the form of classes extraneous to the model). The implementaton of non-invasive persistence is the subject of the Data Mapper pattern, which will be treated later in this series, but every kind of service implementation which communicate with the outside of the core object graph (databases, network, filesystem) is only defined as a contract in the Domain Model. Persistence is almost always dealt with a library in other object-oriented languages, now also in PHP with a non-invasive ORM such as Doctrine 2. Nothing obstructs the developers from implementing a specific Data Mapper by hand, but it's a very repetitive and prone to errors task. While in origin simpler, invasive patterns such as Active Record could be used in a Domain Model, nowadays with Data Mapper availables it is considered an hack. Sample Returning to the subject of the Domain Model as the core of an application, the diffused opinion is that the more complex the business logic and the data involved, the more the application benefits from a rich Domain Model. Thus, this pattern should not be used in small-sized applications where there is no much more logic than CRUD screens for data containers, which unfortunately were a target for PHP in the last ten years. I hope PHP keeps evolving to finally break in the enterprise segment, where this pattern is most valuable. Due to the size and scope of this article, I am forced to keep the sample code short. Forgive me if you think that you can achieve the same functionality with fewer lines of code, but this pattern is about architecture and should highlight the separation of concerns between classes more than the KISS principle. Another problem with code samples in modelling is that you have to actually know the domain well to follow the discussion. For this reason I chose a webmail system for this example. _sender; } /** * Do we need setters and getters? Every field should be * analyzed. If we can keep it private and inaccessible, * it's usually better. */ public function setSender($sender) { $this->_sender = $sender; } /** * @return string */ public function getRecipient() { return $this->_recipient; } public function setRecipient($recipient) { $this->_recipient = $recipient; } /** * @return string */ public function getSubject() { return $this->_subject; } public function setSubject($subject) { $this->_subject = $subject; } /** * @return string */ public function getText() { return $this->_text; } public function setText($text) { $this->_text = $text; } public function __toString() { return $this->_subject . ' > ' . substr($this->_text, 0, 20) . '...'; } public function reply() { $reply = new Email(); $reply->setRecipient($this->_sender); $reply->setSender($this->_recipient); $reply->setSubject('Re: ' . $this->_subject); $reply->setText($this->_sender . " wrote:\n" . $this->_text); return $reply; } } /** * Interface for a service. This is part of the Domain Model, * implementations will be plugged in depending on the environment. */ interface EmailRepository { /** * @return array * @TypeOf(Email) */ public function getEmailsFor($recipient); } // client code $mail = new Email(); $mail->setSender("[email protected]"); $mail->setRecipient("[email protected]"); $mail->setSubject('Hello'); $mail->setText('This is a test of an Email object, which is part of our Domain Model.'); echo $mail, "\n"; $reply = $mail->reply(); echo $reply, "\n";

while recently fiddling with some more runtime generic type extraction for deployit , i was caught out by some unexpected behaviour by the reflection api. a check of the javadocs quickly revealed that i had once again been too hasty in relying on "common sense". still, the case seems sufficiently unintuitive to merit discussion. in this case, the issue centres on the interplay between class.gettypeparameters and parameterizedtype . the gist of the code looks something like: interface spying {} // small class hierarchy class person {} class professional extends person {} class agent extends professional {} class assassin extends professional {} class bystander extends person {} ... person jbond = new agent(); system.out.println("generic superclass type argument: " + trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(jbond)); person joepublic = new bystander(); system.out.println("generic superclass type argument: " + trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(joepublic)); person oddjob = new assassin(); system.out.println("generic superclass type argument: " + trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(oddjob)); ... type trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(object obj) { class clazz = obj.getclass(); class superclass = clazz.getsuperclass(); // elvis would be preferred, but for the sake of clarity... if (superclass.gettypeparameters().length > 0) { return ((parameterizedtype) clazz.getgenericsuperclass()).getactualtypearguments()[0]; } else { return null; } } so...what happens? trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam is where the action happens. it seems fairly straightforward: see if the object's superclass is generic (i.e. takes type parameters) and, if so, cast its type representation to parameterizedtype to extract the actual value for the type parameter. if the superclass is not generic, simply return null. when this code is run, the first two invocations of trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam result in the expected: generic superclass type argument: interface spying generic superclass type argument: null what about the third one? well, given the fact that we've omitted to specify a generic type parameter for professional we might assume 1 that we'd also get null. the actual output, however, is: exception in thread "main" java.lang.classcastexception: java.lang.class cannot be cast to java.lang.reflect.parameterizedtype at trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(...) huh? in order to figure out what's going on here, let's have a look at the javadoc for class.gettypeparameters: returns an array of typevariable objects that represent the type variables declared by the generic declaration represented by this genericdeclaration object, in declaration order. returns an array of length 0 if the underlying generic declaration declares no type variables. in other words, this is returning class-level information about the declaration of, in our case, the professional class, which of course does have a type parameter. however, if we look at class.getgenericsuperclass 2 , which we invoke next, we find that it: returns the type representing the direct superclass of the entity [...] represented by this class. if the superclass is a parameterized type, the type object returned must accurately reflect the actual type parameters used in the source code. here, the information returned is specific to the actual declaration of the class, which may (or may not, as in our case) specify type paramaters for its superclass. and therein lies the problem: professional.class.gettypearguments looks at the declaration of the professional class, discovering a type argument, whereas assassin.class.getgenericsuperclass looks at the occurrence of professional in the declaration of assassin and discovers no type parameters. hence, it returns a class rather than a parameterizedtype and blows up our code. ergo to cut a long story short: if an object's superclass has type arguments as determined by class.gettypearguments that does not mean that object.getclass().getgenericsuperclass() will be a parameterizedtype. footnotes read "i assumed" it's a pity that class.getgenericsignature , which determines the "generic or not" behaviour of class.getgenericsuperclass, is private, native and undocumented. from http://blog.xebia.com/2010/04/22/when-a-class-with-type-parameters-is-not-a-parameterized-class-a-java-generics-puzzler/

Learn the Memento Design Pattern with easy Java source code examples as James Sugrue continues his design patterns tutorial series, Design Patterns Uncovered

Redis (the version on the trunk) offers publish/subscribe based messaging. This is quite a big feature compared to the typical data structure oriented services that it had been offering so far. This also opens up lots of possibilities to use Redis as a messaging engine of a different kind. The sender and the receiver of the messages are absolutely decoupled from each other in the sense that senders do not send messages to specific receivers. Publishers publish messages on specific channels. Subscribers who subscribe to those channels get them and can take specific actions on them. As Salvatore notes in his weekly updates on Redis, this specific feature has evolved from lots of user requests who had been asking for a general notification mechanism to trap changes in the key space. Redis already offers BLPOP (Blocking list pop operation) for similar use cases. But still it's not sufficient to satisfy the needs of a general notification scheme. Salvatore explains it in more details in his blog post. I have been working on a Scala client, which I forked from Alejandro Crosa's repository. I implemented pubsub very recently and also have integrated it with Akka actors. The full implementation of the pubsub client in Scala is in my github repository. And if you like to play around with the Akka actor based implementation, have a look at the Akka repository. You define your publishers and subscribers as actors and exchange messages over channels. You can define your own callbacks as to what you would like to do when you receive a particular message. Let's have a look at a sample implementation at the client level .. I will assume that you want to implement your own pub/sub application on top of the Akka actor based pubsub substrate that uses the redis service underneath. Implementing the publisher interface is easy .. here is how you can bootstrap your own publishing service .. object Pub { println("starting publishing service ..") val p = new Publisher(new RedisClient("localhost", 6379)) p.start def publish(channel: String, message: String) = { p ! Publish(channel, message) } } The publish method just sends a Publish message to the Publisher. Publisher is an actor defined in Akka as follows: class Publisher(client: RedisClient) extends Actor { def receive = { case Publish(channel, message) => client.publish(channel, message) reply(true) } } The subscriber implementation is a bit more complex since you need to register your callback as to what you would like to do when you receive a specific type of message. This depends on your use case and it's your responsibility to provide a proper callback function downstream. Here is a sample implementation for the subscriber. We need two methods to subscribe and unsubscribe from channels. Remember in Redis the subscriber cannot publish - hence our Sub cannot do a Pub. object Sub { println("starting subscription service ..") val s = new Subscriber(new RedisClient("localhost", 6379)) s.start s ! Register(callback) def sub(channels: String*) = { s ! Subscribe(channels.toArray) } def unsub(channels: String*) = { s ! Unsubscribe(channels.toArray) } def callback(pubsub: PubSubMessage) = pubsub match { //.. } } I have not yet specified the implementation of the callback. How should it look like ? The callback will be invoked when the subscriber receives a specific type of message. According to Redis specification, the types of messages which a subscriber can receive are: a. subscribe b. unsubscribe c. message Refer to the Redis documentation for details of these message formats. In our case, we model them as case classes as part of the core Redis client implementation .. sealed trait PubSubMessage case class S(channel: String, noSubscribed: Int) extends PubSubMessage case class U(channel: String, noSubscribed: Int) extends PubSubMessage case class M(origChannel: String, message: String) extends PubSubMessage Our callback needs to take appropriate custom action on receipt of any of these types of messages. The following can be one such implementation .. It is customized for a specific application which treats various formats of messages and gives appropriate application dependent semantics .. def callback(pubsub: PubSubMessage) = pubsub match { case S(channel, no) => println("subscribed to " + channel + " and count = " + no) case U(channel, no) => println("unsubscribed from " + channel + " and count = " + no) case M(channel, msg) => msg match { // exit will unsubscribe from all channels and stop subscription service case "exit" => println("unsubscribe all ..") r.unsubscribe // message "+x" will subscribe to channel x case x if x startsWith "+" => val s: Seq[Char] = x s match { case Seq('+', rest @ _*) => r.subscribe(rest.toString){ m => } } // message "-x" will unsubscribe from channel x case x if x startsWith "-" => val s: Seq[Char] = x s match { case Seq('-', rest @ _*) => r.unsubscribe(rest.toString) } // other message receive case x => println("received message on channel " + channel + " as : " + x) } } Note in the above implementation we specialize some of the messages to give additional semantics. e.g. if I receive a message as "+t", I will interpret it as subscribing to the channel "t". Similarly "exit" will unsubscribe me from all channels. How to run this application ? I will assume that you have the Akka master with you. Also you need to have a version of Redis running that implements pubsub. You can start the subscription service using the above implementation and then use any other Redis client to publish messages. Here's a sample recipe for a run .. Prerequisite: Need Redis Server running (the version that supports pubsub) 1. Download redis from http://github.com/antirez/redis 2. build using "make" 3. Run server as ./redis-server For running this sample application :- Starting the Subscription service 1. Open up another shell similarly as the above and set AKKA_HOME 2. cd $AKKA_HOME 3. sbt console 4. scala> import sample.pubsub._ 5. scala> Pub.publish("a", "hello") // the first shell should get the message 6. scala> Pub.publish("c", "hi") // the first shell should NOT get this message Another publishing client using redis-cli Open up a redis-client from where you installed redis and issue a publish command ./redis-cli publish a "hi there" ## the first shell should get the message Have fun with the message formats 1. Go back to the first shell 2. Sub.unsub("a") // should unsubscribe the first shell from channel "a" 3. Study the callback function defined below. It supports many other message formats. 4. In the second shell window do the following: scala> Pub.publish("b", "+c") // will subscribe the first window to channel "c" scala> Pub.publish("b", "+d") // will subscribe the first window to channel "d" scala> Pub.publish("b", "-c") // will unsubscribe the first window from channel "c" scala> Pub.publish("b", "exit") // will unsubscribe the first window from all channels The full implementation of the above is there as a sample project in Akka master. And in case you are not using Akka, I also have a version of the above implemented using Scala actors in the scala-redis distribution. Have fun!

For readability’s sake, it’s almost always a good idea to replace magic numbers and string literals with constants. That’s all good, but it can take a bit of time to refactor these to constants, especially strings or parts of strings. For example, in the code below we want to refactor “shovel and spade” to a private static final String called TOOLS. To do that manually would take some time. It goes even slower if we only want to extract “spade” to a constant because we first have to convert the string to a concatenation. String tools = "shovel and spade"; ... String otherTools = "shovel and spade"; Luckily, Eclipse has a couple of ways to instantly convert literals to constants. Coupled with tools to speed up string selection and to pick out part of a string, you have the ability to create a constant in about 2 seconds flat. I’ll discuss all these features below. Extract a constant from a string/number There are 2 ways to extract a constant, the one uses a quick fix and the other a refactoring. I’ll show the quick fix method first and then the refactoring and discuss the (small) differences between the two. The example uses a string, but everything is true for numbers as well. Follow these steps to use the quick fix: First select the string. The fastest way is to place the cursor on the string and press Alt+Shift+Up (Select Enclosing Element; a nifty shortcut that I discuss in Select strings and methods with a single keystroke). After selecting the string, press Ctr+1 (Quick Fix) and then select Extract to constant. Eclipse will do the following: (a) Create a private final static variable of type String with a default name, (b) replace all occurrences of that string with the constant and (c) place the cursor on the constant’s declaration to give you a chance to change the name, type and visibility of the variable using placeholders that you can Tab through. Once you’re happy with the constant details, press Enter to go back to the line on which you initiated the quick fix. Here’s a short video with an example of using quick fix. We’ll extract a constant (called TOOLS) from a string literal (“shovel and spade”) that’s used in two places. Note: You can use Tab to move from one placeholder to another and pressing Enter will get you back to your original line. The other way to extract a constant is by using the Extract Constant refactoring. Again, select the string, then select Refactor > Extract Constant… (Alt+T, A) from the application menu. A dialog appears prompting you for the constant’s name, its visibility and whether to replace all occurrences of the string with the constant. After you’ve entered the details, press Enter and you’ll have your constant defined. Here’s a short video with an example using refactoring. We’ll use the same example as above. The differences between the two? Not much, the biggest difference being when you enter the details of the constant (ie. before the change is made or after). The refactoring dialog also provides an option to add the qualifying type name before the constant’s usage, but most of time this is redundant. I’d recommend using the quick fix, unless you’re more comfortable with dialogs. BTW, you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts to either command by mapping either Quick Assist – Extract Constant or the command Extract Constant. Pick out part of a string Sometimes you’ll want to break up a string into multiple parts and convert one of those parts into a constant. Eclipse can do this automatically. Select the part of the string you want to pick out (don’t worry about quotes), press Ctrl+1 and choose Pick out selected part of String. Eclipse will convert that part into a string with quotes, concatenate it to the rest of the string and select it. You can then use any of the Extract Constant tools above. Here’s an example of how to use this feature. Notice how the string’s already selected so we can use the Extract Constant quick fix immediately. Related Tips Select entire strings and methods in Eclipse with a single keystroke Convert string concatenations into StringBuilder or MessageFormat calls with Eclipse’s Quick Fix How to manage keyboard shortcuts in Eclipse and why you should Join/split if statements and rearrange expressions using Eclipse Quick Fix More tips on using quick fixes and making editing faster.

While PHP is capable of performing HTTP requests towards external servers with any method, either via the HTTP extension or by opening streams directly, the support of the various GET, POST, PUT and other verbs on the receiving side of HTTP requests is a bit more complicated. Background The HTTP 1.0 specification (RFC 1945) officially defined only the GET, HEAD and POST methods, leaving open the possibility of adding extension methods: Method = "GET" ; Section 8.1 | "HEAD" ; Section 8.2 | "POST" ; Section 8.3 | extension-method The specification of HTTP 1.1 (as its last 1999 incarnation RFC 2616) defines explicitly other methods: Method = "OPTIONS" ; Section 9.2 | "GET" ; Section 9.3 | "HEAD" ; Section 9.4 | "POST" ; Section 9.5 | "PUT" ; Section 9.6 | "DELETE" ; Section 9.7 | "TRACE" ; Section 9.8 | "CONNECT" ; Section 9.9 | extension-method Of these methods, the more interesting ones due to their usage in RESTful applications are GET, POST, PUT and DELETE: GET is a safe, idempotent method and it is used to retrieve a resource. POST is considered a catch-all method nowadays, but its intent is defining a subordinate resource to the current one. For instance, posting to a blog resource may create a new post. PUT is the analogue of GET used to send a resource to the HTTP server. DELETE is the analogue of GET used to, of course, delete a particular resource. Client support GET and POST are the bread and butter of requests sent towards PHP applications. They are commonly generated directly by the browser. A GET request is generated by a link or a form with the specified method attribute set as get. A POST request instead is usually obtainable in native HTML 4 only with a form, which may contain also an enctype attribute to set the Content-Type header of the request (usually employed for the upload of files via POST method.) Browsers often limit their support for HTTP request to these two, as the HTML specification does not define a standard mean to generate other type of requests on the client-side. We have a programmatical way of making asynchronous HTTP requests, Javascript, but it does not help either as it's limited by the implementor's capabilities. Javascript libraries do not force particular restrictions of the allowed methods: we may send GET, POST, PUT or DELETE requests to an endpoint on the server, but via an XMLHttpRequest object (which is their standard back-end) the unsupported methods will be emulated via overloaded POST. This means a POST request will be produced with an additional parameter (which may be named _method or _requestType, depending on the particular library) that describes the actual method used in the client. You get to maintain the semantic of the request in the client code, though, and maybe in the future native support for PUT and DELETE request will be available. There are ways to make a real PUT or DELETE request, and they usually require more complex infrastructure on the client, like Java applets or non-standard Javascript (which is not supported in the majority of browsers), or even not using a browser as the client, for instance using a web service acting as a client of another one. Server support But how can we detect the HTTP request method in a PHP script? For the common methods, such as GET and POST, the superglobal arrays $_GET and $_POST are always available and contain the request parameters. You may want to wrap them with an object-oriented interface, and note that in the case of files upload via POST you should also look at the $_FILES superglobal array. For the other methods, the first thing to do is setting up your webserver with a directive that routes all the PUT requests to a single, dynamic entry point. In the case of Apache, this is described in the PHP manual as: Script PUT /put.php The pointed script simply has to read from the standard input the PUT request: $putdata = fopen("php://input", "r"); file_get_contents() won't work here; welcome back to the world of CGI! :) The manual and the user comments are also a valuable resource for common pitfalls in implementing this type of endpoints. With regard to the DELETE requests, the same configuration is valid to route the requests to a single entry point. Then, it's a matter of identifying the right environment variables, which may vary depending on your HTTP server. Fortunately, PHP frameworks do most of the work, and you are free to programmatically implement different behaviors depending on the type of the request.

The purpose of this article is to give you the details of our 100 node cluster demo. This demo is recorded and you can watch the 5 minute screencast Hazelcast is an open source clustering and highly scalable data distribution platform for Java. JVMs that are running Hazelcast will dynamically cluster and allow you to easily share and partition your application data across the cluster. Hazelcast is a peer-to-peer solution (there is no master node, every node is a peer) so there is no single point of failure. Communication among cluster members is always TCP/IP with Java NIO beauty. The default configuration comes with 1 backup so if a node fails, no data will be lost (you can specify the backup count). It is as simple as using java.util.{Map, Queue, Set, List}. Just add the hazelcast.jar into your classpath and start coding. When you download the Hazelcast, you will find a test.sh under bin directory. The test.sh runs an application which randomly makes 40% get, 40% put and 20% remove on a distributed map. In this demo the same test application will be used to see how it performs on 100 node cluster. Amazon EC2 and S3 An easy to use and scalable cloud environment was needed for demo so we decided to use Amazon EC2 for server instances (nodes) and S3 service to store demo application zip and configuration files. With its newly announced Java SDK, it is very simple to start/stop server instances and upload files to S3 programatically. Hazelcast AMI & Launcher The challenge here is that we are running an application on 100 nodes and dealing with each and every server in the cluster is a huge task. We don't want to ssh into every server and manually start the application. This part is automated by creating a special server image (AMI). The AMI contains Java Runtime and a launcher application we developed, which will download the demo application from Amazon S3, unzip it, and run the hazelcast/bin/test.sh in it. The Launcher is actually so generic that it can run any application; it doesn't care/know what test.sh contains. Deployer Deployment of the demo application is also automated so that we don't need to login into AWS Management Console and manually start instances. Deployer instantiates any number of Amazon EC2 servers with any AMI and also uploads the demo application zip file to S3. So the idea here is that, the Deployer will store the application into S3 and launch 100 EC2 instances with our image. The Launcher on each instance will download the application from S3 and run it. Demo Details. The smallest EC2 instances (m1.small) are used to run the demo. These are the virtual instances with CPU about 1.0 GHz. Also keep in mind that EC2 platform suffers from considerable amount of network latency. That's why we increased the thread count to 250 in our application. The following steps performed during the demo Download hazelcast-1.8.3.zip from www.hazelcast.com. Unzip the file and move the monitoring war file into tomcat6/webapps directory. Edit the test.sh under the bin directory: Add -Xmx1G -Xms1G Add -Dhazelcast.initial.wait.seconds=100 to make the cluster evenly partition on start so that migration can be avoided for better performance. Add t250 as an argument to the application to set thread count to 250. Remember the latency issue. Run the Deployer from IDE. Check from EC2 Management Console if 100 servers started. Start tomcat. Copy the public DNS name of one of the servers to connect to from monitoring tool. Go to http://localhost:8080/hazelcast-monitor-1.8.3/ (Hazelcast Monitoring Tool). Paste the address and connect to the cluster. Enjoy! Results You should always look for programatic ways of launching applications on the cloud. With these tools we were able to deploy and run the demo application on 100 servers in minutes. The entire Hazelcast cluster was making over 400,000 operations per second on the smallest EC2 instances. In our next demo we will experiment Hazelcast on large data set and even bigger cluster. Watch the screencast

Recently I had to choose a validation framework or write one by myself. First I thought, no big deal, validation is not a complicated issue. But the more you think about it, the more you come to the conclusion that it is not as shallow as you think – you need to validate different types, you have different groups and many more issues… In short, writing a validation framework by yourself demands a lot of work. Luckily, JSR 303 solves this and the Hibernate implementation of the JSR does a pretty good job. Hibernate Validator is a JSR 303 implementation for bean validation. The way to work with this framework is first, to define constraints for java bean fields, and then, validating the bean. JSR 303 JSR 303 – defines a metadata model and API for entity validation. The default metadata source is annotations, with the ability to override and extend the meta-data through the use of XML. The API is not tied to a specific application tier or programming model. It is specifically not tied to either the web tier or the persistence tier, and is available for both server-side application programming, as well as for rich client Swing application developers. Hibernate Validator features Defining validation data using annotation and/or XML. Full object validation (including inner objects using recursion) Create customized constraints and validators. Customized error messages. Define groups(profiles). Create a Traversable Resolver. Using constraints Using XML Here is a simple example of a constraint using xml: com.mytest 2 In this example the field x can not be null. The field y can not be less than 2. Notice that the “Min” constraint has inner element – “value”. Notice the tag “”. It indicates the root path of all the beans. See also directions on how to load the XML file while using the validator. Using annotations Here is a simple code example: public class MyBean{@NotNullString x;@Min(2)int y;} This example is the equivalent to the previous xml example. Using both Using both annotations and XML constraints is possible. By default if you are using both only the XML is taken, unless you are using the attribute ‘ignore-annotations’ in the XML. Example: com.mytest.beans 2 2 Notice that the attribute ignore-annotations appears twice – for a bean and for a field. The default for a bean is ignore-annotations=”true” – this means that if you have an XML constraint for a bean, it will cancel the attribute constraint, Unless you will indicate that by ignore-annotations=”false” (look at the example). The default for a field is ignore-annotations=”false”. This means that by default annotations for a field are stronger (this is of course after you indicated that that the bean itself wont ignore annotations). If you wont that the XML will be stronger than you have to indicate that by ignore-annotations=”true” (look at the example in the “x2″ constraint). Existing constraints These constraints are a part of the hibernate validation framework: Constraint path Parameters javax.validation.constraints.AssertTrue (none) javax.validation.constraints.AssertFalse (none) javax.validation.constraints.NotNull (none) javax.validation.constraints.Null (none) javax.validation.constraints.Max value(mandatory) javax.validation.constraints.Min value(mandatory) javax.validation.constraints.DecimalMax value(mandatory) javax.validation.constraints.DecimalMin value(mandatory) javax.validation.constraints.Pattern regexp(mandatory) flags(optional) javax.validation.constraints.Past (none) javax.validation.constraints.Future (none) javax.validation.constraints.Size min(optional) max(optional) javax.validation.constraints.Digits integer(mandatory) fraction(mandatory) org.hibernate.constraints.Email (none) org.hibernate.constraints.Length min(optional) max(optional) org.hibernate.constraints.NotEmpty (none) org.hibernate.constraints.Range min(optional) max(optional) Inner objects constraints If you have nested beans (beans which contain other beans) you can easily let the system validate also the inner objects by using the constraint ‘valid’. XML example: com.mytest.beans Annotation example: public class MyBean{@Valid //inner bean to be validated separatelyprivate InnerBean innerBean; public InnerBean getInnerBean() {return innerBean;}public void setInnerBean(InnerBean innerBean) {this.innerBean = innerBean;}public class InnerBean { @NotNullString xx; public String getXx() {return xx;}public void setXx(String xx) {this.xx = xx;} Validating Example of a simple validation: ValidatorFactory factory = Validation.buildDefaultValidatorFactory();Validator validator = factory.getValidator();Set> constraintViolations = validator.validate(bean); Loading a constraints XML file As mentioned, you don’t have to use an XML file for defining constraints, you can just use annotations. But if you do want an XML file, you will have to load the file. Example: Configuration config = Validation.byDefaultProvider().configure();FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream( new File("resources/demo-constraints.xml"));config.addMapping(in);// Building the customized factory// (along with the changed configuration)ValidatorFactory factory = config.buildValidatorFactory();Validator validator = factory.getValidator(); The result The result(as you can see in the example above) is a collection of ConstraintViolation. Each ConstraintViolation holds the problematic field, it’s value and the error message itself. Example of reading the result: Set> constraintViolations = validator.validate(bean);//printing the resultsfor (ConstraintViolation constraintViolation : constraintViolations) {System.out.println(constraintViolation.getPropertyPath() + " -> " +constraintViolation.getMessage());} This object can be easily transformed to a more generic object like ValidationException or CyotaSoapException and so on. Customized constraints and validators If you want to create a new constraint you will have to create the constraint annotation interface and the validator class. Creating the constraint interface Here is a simple constraint example @Target( { METHOD, FIELD, ANNOTATION_TYPE })@Retention(RUNTIME)@Constraint(validatedBy = MyValidator.class)@Documentedpublic @interface MyConstraint{// These next parameters exist in every constraintString message() default "{com.mytest.MyConstraint.message}";Class[] groups() default {};Class[] payload() default {};// These next parameters are added// They are the constraint's attributesString myOptionalValue() default ""; //this parameter has a default valueString myMustValue(); //this parameters need to get input from the user} Notice the @Constraint annotation. It signifies the class that suppose to validates this constraint. Notice the message class member. It holds an error message or, like in this case, an error code. It will later be interpreted as a literal error message. The payload member holds payload objects. These objects carry additional data attached to the constraints that can be fetched when validating. Nested constraints You can also overload constraints very easily. For example, let’s say I want to create a new constraint which also checks that the value is not null. In this case, all I have to do is this: @Target( { METHOD, FIELD, ANNOTATION_TYPE })@Retention(RUNTIME)@Constraint(validatedBy = MyValidator.class)@Documented@NotNullpublic @interface MyConstraint{String message() default "{com.mytest.MyConstraint.message}";Class[] groups() default {};Class[] payload() default {};} In the example, notice the @NotNull annotation. Creating the validator class Here is an example of a simple validator: public class MyValidatorimplements ConstraintValidator {MyConstraint MyConstraint;/** * This function recives the constraint instance * (along with the user values) */public void initialize(MyConstraint MyConstraint) {this.MyConstraint=MyConstraint;}/** * The value is the actual object instance. * */public boolean isValid(String value, ConstraintValidatorContext arg1) { //using input from the userreturn value!=null && value.startsWith(MyConstraint.myMustValue());} The above code shows an example of a validator which validates that the value of the given string starts with a given character. The validator implements the ConstraintValidator interface. Notice that the constraint is given as input to the initialize() function. The value itself is input to the isValid() function Customizing error messages Each error has an error template. The error template is defined in the constraint annotation interface. This error template is later translated into an error message. The actual error message may be defined in 2 places: 1. Inside the constraint deceleration. The error message be defined when defining the constraint, whether it you are using XML or annotations. XML example: x is too small 2 Java example: public class MyBean{@Min(value = 2, message="x is too small")private String x;public String getX() {return x;}public void setX(String x) {this.x = x;} 2. Using a separate properties message. You may want to load a separate properties file containing the error messages according to the error template. loading the messages properties file is done using the validation factory configuration: Configuration config = Validation.byDefaultProvider().configure();// Using a properties file for customized error messagesFileInputStream in = new FileInputStream(new File("resources/messages.properties"));ResourceBundleMessageInterpolator messageInterpolator =new ResourceBundleMessageInterpolator( new PropertyResourceBundle(in));// Setting a messages properties fileconfig.messageInterpolator(messageInterpolator);in = new FileInputStream(new File("resources/demo-constraints.xml"));config.addMapping(in);// Building the customized factory (along with the changed configuration)ValidatorFactory factory = config.buildValidatorFactory();Validator validator = factory.getValidator(); Using groups There may be occasions when you will want to create a single constraint but with different values for different situations. For example, let’s say you want to create a username field and let him a minimum constraint. But, one time it will have minimum of 5 characters and another time it will have minimum of 6 characters. For cases like this you will want to use groups. To do so, you will have to create a group, create constraints for that group and last, validate objects by attaching the group. Please follow the steps below Create a group To create a group you simply create a new interface. example: public interface MyBeanGroup{} Create a constraint for the group XML example: com.mytest.groups.MyBeanGroup Annotations example: public class MyBean{@NotNull(groups = MyBeanGroup.class)private String x; public String getX() {return x;}public void setX(String x) {this.x = x;} Validate an object using the group Set> constraintViolations = validator.validate(bean, MyBeanGroup.class); The default group The default group is javax.validation.groups.Default. If you don’t assign a constraint any group it applies to the default group. If you are validating an object without using any group, it is validated as a part of the default group. Groups inheritance You can also create an group inheritance tree. In this way, if you validate an object using a group it will prefer constraints that are defined to it. But if there are no such constraints, then it will also take the constraints of it’s parents. Example, this is a group which inherits the default group: public interface MyBeanGroupextends javax.validation.groups.Default{} All the constraints that are defined for that group will apply to it. But also all the constraints which do not apply to any group(and by which apply to the default group), will also apply to it, since it exteds the default group. Jar dependency validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar hibernate-validator-4.0.2.GA slf4j-api-1.4.2.jar slf4j-simple-1.4.2.jar log4j-1.2.15.jar Only for java5 jaxb-xjc-2.1.6.jar jaxb-impl-2.1.6.jar jaxb-api-2.1.jar activation-1.1.jar geronimo-stax-api_1.0_spec-1.0.1.jar References JSR 303 specification- Bean validation Product main page Hibernate Validator documentation Download demo project from http://www.aviyehuda.com/

In this article, I will explain how to debug Hibernate’s generated SQL so that unexpected query results be traced faster either to a faulty dataset or a bug in the query. There’s no need to present Hibernate anymore. Yet, for those who lived in a cave for the past years, let’s say that Hibernate is one of the two main ORM frameworks (the second one being TopLink) that dramatically ease database access in Java. One of Hibernate’s main goal is to lessen the amount of SQL you write, to the point that in many cases, you won’t even write one line. However, chances are that one day, Hibernate’s fetching mechanism won’t get you the result you expected and the problems will begin in earnest. From that point and before further investigation, you should determine which is true: either the initial dataset is wrong or the generated query is or both if you’re really unlucky Being able to quickly diagnose the real cause will gain you much time. In order to do this, the greatest step will be viewing the generated SQL: if you can execute it in the right query tool, you could then compare pure SQL results to Hibernate’s results and assert the true cause. There are two solutions for viewing the SQL. Show SQL The first solution is the simplest one. It is part of Hibernate’s configuration and is heavily documented. Just add the following line to your hibernate.cfg.xml file: ... true The previous snippet will likely show something like this in the log: select this_.PER_N_ID as PER1_0_0_, this_.PER_D_BIRTH_DATE as PER2_0_0_, this_.PER_T_FIRST_NAME as PER3_0_0_, this_.PER_T_LAST_NAME as PER4_0_0_ from T_PERSON this_ Not very readable but enough to copy/paste in your favourite query tool. The main drawback of this is that if the query has parameters, they will display as ? and won’t show their values, like in the following output: select this_.PER_N_ID as PER1_0_0_, this_.PER_D_BIRTH_DATE as PER2_0_0_, this_.PER_T_FIRST_NAME as PER3_0_0_, this_.PER_T_LAST_NAME as PER4_0_0_ from T_PERSON this_ where (this_.PER_D_BIRTH_DATE=? and this_.PER_T_FIRST_NAME=? and this_.PER_T_LAST_NAME=?) If they’re are too many parameters, you’re in for a world of pain and replacing each parameter with its value will take too much time. Yet, IMHO, this simple configuration should be enabled in all environments (save production), since it can easily be turned off. Proxy driver The second solution is more intrusive and involves a third party product but is way more powerful. It consists of putting a proxy driver between JDBC and the real driver so that all generated SQL will be logged. It is compatible with all ORM solutions that rely on the JDBC/driver architecture. P6Spy is a driver that does just that. Despite its age (the last release dates from 2003), it is not obsolete and server our purpose just fine. It consists of the proxy driver itself and a properties configuration file (spy.properties), that both should be present on the classpath. In order to leverage P6Spy feature, the only thing you have to do is to tell Hibernate to use a specific driver: com.p6spy.engine.spy.P6SpyDriver ... This is a minimal spy.properties: module.log=com.p6spy.engine.logging.P6LogFactory realdriver=org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver autoflush=true excludecategories=debug,info,batch,result appender=com.p6spy.engine.logging.appender.StdoutLogger Notice the realdriver parameter so that P6Spy knows where to redirect the calls. With just these, the above output becomes: 1270906515233|3|0|statement|select this_.PER_N_ID as PER1_0_0_, this_.PER_D_BIRTH_DATE as PER2_0_0_, this_.PER_T_FIRST_NAME as PER3_0_0_, this_.PER_T_LAST_NAME as PER4_0_0_ from T_PERSON this_ where (this_.PER_D_BIRTH_DATE=? and this_.PER_T_FIRST_NAME=? and this_.PER_T_LAST_NAME=?)|select this_.PER_N_ID as PER1_0_0_, this_.PER_D_BIRTH_DATE as PER2_0_0_, this_.PER_T_FIRST_NAME as PER3_0_0_, this_.PER_T_LAST_NAME as PER4_0_0_ from T_PERSON this_ where (this_.PER_D_BIRTH_DATE=’2010-04-10′ and this_.PER_T_FIRST_NAME=’Johnny’ and this_.PER_T_LAST_NAME=’Be Good’) Of course, the configuration can go further. For example, P6Spy knows how to redirect the logs to a file, or to Log4J (it currently misses a SLF4J adapter but anyone could code one easily). If you need to use P6Spy in an application server, the configuration should be done on the application server itself, at the datasource level. In that case, every single use of this datasource will be traced, be it from Hibernate, TopLink, iBatis or plain old JDBC. In Tomcat, for example, put spy.properties in common/classes and update the datasource configuration to use P6Spy driver. The source code for this article can be found here. To go further: P6Spy official site Log4jdbc, a Google Code contender that aims to offer the same features From http://blog.frankel.ch/debugging-hibernate-generated-sql

Today marks a critical turning point for Microsoft as they announce the final releases of Visual Studio 2010, the .Net Framework 4.0, and Silverlight 4 (available later this week). With .Net 4, Microsoft is simplifying parallel programming and adding a broader range of language choices. Visual Studio 2010 is a major improvement over the 2008 version. VS 2010 includes support for Windows 7, Windows Azure, and tools for building applications on top of Microsoft Sharepoint. Here are some of the new features for VS 2010 and the .Net 4 platform: Visual Studio 2010 VS 2010 has something for just about everybody. Mobile developers who want to get a head start on developing applications for the Windows Phone 7 OS can use the integrated phone design surfaces available in Microsoft's IDE. Developers can also deliver expressive user experiences through the Windows 7 multitouch and “ribbon” interfaces. This release of Visual Studio is also the first to give developers integrated access to SharePoint functionality. The first thing that developers will notice is a new editor, shell, and Managed Extensibility Framework in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Developers with multiple monitors will be able to "float" windows from one display to another. The Premium and Ultimate editions also include standard UML diagramming. New WPF Interface Floating Windows VS 2010's IDE for editing C++ (Visual C++ 2010) now supports functionality and library components from the C++0z standard. These features include compile-time assertions, lambda expressions, rvalue references, and the auto keyword for type inference. Visual C++ also has much improved (and simplified) support for parallel programming with a new Concurrency Runtime that schedules and manages parallel loads. The Dotfuscator is a third-party tool bundled with Visual Studio 2010 that was originally designed to obscure .Net code. The obfuscation of .Net code is necessary to prevent decompilation by other parties. Along with this feature, the new Dotfuscator also includes Runtime Intelligence Support, which adds analytics support for your desktop application code. This lets developers log data (on a hosted portal or your own server) on how the application is being used. Along with tamper detection, developers can also use the Dotfuscator to set expiration dates for free application trials and subscriptions. Dotfuscator Instrumentation Options Modern testing and code review are seeing a rise in 'replay' tools that make it easier to reproduce bugs that are hard to find. VS 2010 includes a new tool called IntelliTrace, which allows developers to record video of an application at the time when a defect manifests. Tools like these will be essential for improving QA efficiency. Visual Studio 2010 also comes with a vast array of web development tools. It ships with ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and the older Web Forms framework. VS 2010's built-in test framework for ASP.NET reminds developers when they should create tests as they're working. Another aspect of VS 2010's web development is RIA Services, which is a part of WCF that simplifies authentication and read-write data access in Silverlight or ASP.NET applications. With the recent launch of Windows Azure, VS 2010 is the first IDE to come with Azure project types. Developers will need to download the Azure SDK and tools separately. Currently, these tools have not reached their final versions. Here is a snapshot of the three VS 2010 editions available: Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN, featuring the full suite of tools including ALM products. Testing and architecture tools also are featured. It carries a price tag of $11,924 for a new customer and $3,841 for a current customer renewing with Microsoft. Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN, featuring the Visual Studio toolset but lacking some architecture capabilities of the Ultimate edition. Some of Microsoft's ALM suite is included. Premium costs $5,469 for new users and $2,299 for customers seeking renewals. Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN, for basic development tasks. It includes the core version of Visual Studio. It costs $1,199 for a new user and $799 for a renewal. Users also can purchase Visual Studio 2010 Professional minus a MSDN subscription for $799. .Net 4 The .Net Framework 4.0 includes new programming models, languages, and various features that have prepared the platform for modern development. The Dynamic Language Runtime is a major step for .Net that adds a set of dynamic language services to the CLR (Common Language Runtime). This makes it easier to develop dynamic languages for .Net and add dynamic features to statically typed languages. .Net 4 introduces a new programming model that simplifies multithreaded and asynchronous programming in application and library development. Developers can write scalable parallel code using a natural idiom without having to work directly with threads or the thread pool. There is also a parallel implementation of LINQ to Objects (PLINQ). An important feature for backward compatibility is side-by side hosting, which allows developers to run applications based on older .Net frameworks in the same process as .Net 4 applications. The .Net 4 Framework also provides garbage collection in the background. .Net 4 features a revamp of Windows Workflow and some new language features. Along with C#, VB.Net, IronRuby, and IronPython, there is also a new language in .Net 4 called F#. F# is a multi-paradigm language that is aimed at bringing functional programming into mainstream enterprise development. One of the biggest enhancements of the .Net Framework 4 is the reduction in client footprint by more than 80 percent. • To download, purchase or get more information on Visual Studio 2010: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio • To download or get more information on the .NET Framework: http://www.microsoft.com/net

Learn the Prototype Design Pattern with easy Java source code examples as James Sugrue continues his design patterns tutorial series, Design Patterns Uncovered

I am fascinated with how much you can do with so little using CSS3. Many user interface elements that require images in order to have appropriate visual appearance now can be styled only with CSS3. In order to prove that I assigned myself a task to create Windows 7 start menu only with CSS3 (and some icons). If we decompose the menu we'll get one div, two unordered lists with a couple of links each and a few icons. Let's see how each one of those is styled. Demo - Source Container The container named startmenu holds two unordered lists that act as menus. It has linear gradient with three color stops: light blue at the top, dark blue in the middle, and another shade of light blue at the bottom. Transparency is achieved using rgba() which has four parameters. The first three represent red, green and blue color values and the last one is opacity. Two borders are created with border and box-shadow properties. #startmenu { border:solid 1px #102a3e; overflow:visible; display:inline-block; margin:60px 0 0 20px; -moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px; position:relative; box-shadow: inset 0 0 1px #fff; -moz-box-shadow: inset 0 0 1px #fff; -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 1px #fff; background-color:#619bb9; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(50, 123, 165, 0.75), rgba(46, 75, 90, 0.75) 50%, rgba(92, 176, 220, 0.75)); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, center top, center bottom, from(#327aa4),color-stop(45%, #2e4b5a), to(#5cb0dc)); } Programs menu This unordered list has white background and two borders created with border and box-shadow properties. Its links, which contain icons and program names, uses gradients and box shadows in hover state. #programs, #links {float:left; display:block; padding:0; list-style:none;} #programs { background:#fff; border:solid 1px #365167; margin:7px 0 7px 7px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px #fff; -moz-box-shadow: 0 0 1px #fff; -webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 1px #fff; -moz-border-radius:3px;-webkit-border-radius:3px;} #programs a { border:solid 1px transparent; display:block; padding:3px; margin:3px; color:#4b4b4b; text-decoration:none; min-width:220px;} #programs a:hover {border:solid 1px #7da2ce; -moz-border-radius:3px; -webkit-border-radius:3px; box-shadow: inset 0 0 1px #fff; -moz-box-shadow: inset 0 0 1px #fff; -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 1px #fff; background-color:#cfe3fd; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #dcebfd, #c2dcfd); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, center top, center bottom, from(#dcebfd), to(#c2dcfd));} #programs a img {border:0; vertical-align:middle; margin:0 5px 0 0;} Links menu As in the previous case, links menu is quite simple. But the interesting part comes in hover state. Each link has horizontal gradient with three stops: dark blue on the left and right side, and a bit lighter blue in the middle. Now, unlike programs menu links, here, every links has inner element which contains text. This span element has one more gradient - vertical linear gradient. It is transparent in the upper half and the lower part goes from very dark blue to almost transparent light blue. The combination of two transparent gradients gives exactly the same look as buttons in Windows 7 link menu. #links {margin:7px; margin-top:-30px;} #links li.icon {text-align:center;} #links a {border:solid 1px transparent; display:block; margin:5px 0; position:relative; color:#fff; text-decoration:none; min-width:120px;} #links a:hover {border:solid 1px #000; -moz-border-radius:3px; -webkit-border-radius:3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px #fff; -moz-box-shadow: inset 0 0 1px #fff; -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 1px #fff; background-color:#658da0; background: -moz-linear-gradient(center left, rgba(81,115,132,0.55), rgba(121,163,184,0.55) 50%, rgba(81,115,132,0.55)); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 100%, 100% 100%, from(#517384), color-stop(50%, #79a3b8), to(#517384)); } #links a span { padding:5px; display:block; } #links a:hover span { background: -moz-linear-gradient(center top, transparent, transparent 49%, rgba(2,37,58,0.5) 50%, rgba(63,111,135,0.5)); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, center top, center bottom, from(transparent), color-stop(49%, transparent), color-stop(50%, rgba(2,37,58,0.5)), to(rgba(63,111,135,0.5))); } Here is the preview, but I suggest you to check out the demo. You can play with backgrounds and see how transparency works. The code works fine in Firefox 3.6+, Safari and Chrome. It degrades gracefully in Opera and IE. I guess I could optimize it a bit so if you have any suggestions please let me know.

Over the past few days, while working on another project, I needed to covert PDF documents into HTML. I did the usual searches for tools, but as I'm sure you'll have noticed, the tools available don't get great results. But then, seeing as I'm a software developer, I decided to see if I could program it myself. My requirements were quite simple: get the text out of the document, with the aim of HTML output, and extract the images at the same time. My first port of call was iText, as it was a library that I was already familiar with. iText is great for creating documents, and I was able to get some text out, but the image extraction wasn't really working out for me. The following is a code snippet that I was using to get the images from the PDFs in iText, based on a post on the iText mailing list. But when I used it, none of the images I generated were right - mostly just the box outlines/borders of the images in the PDF. I presume I was doing something wrong. PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(new FileInputStream(new File("C:\\test.pdf"))); for(int i =0; i < reader.getXrefSize(); i++) { PdfObject pdfobj = reader.getPdfObject(i); if(pdfobj != null) { if (!pdfobj.isStream()) { //throw new Exception("Not a stream"); } else { PdfStream stream = (PdfStream) pdfobj; PdfObject pdfsubtype = stream.get(PdfName.SUBTYPE); if (pdfsubtype == null) { // throw new Exception("Not an image stream"); } else { if (!pdfsubtype.toString().equals(PdfName.IMAGE.toString())) { //throw new Exception("Not an image stream"); } else { // now you have a PDF stream object with an image byte[] img = PdfReader.getStreamBytesRaw((PRStream) stream); // but you don't know anything about the image format. // you'll have to get info from the stream dictionary System.out.println("----img ------"); System.out.println("height:" + stream.get(PdfName.HEIGHT)); System.out.println("width:" + stream.get(PdfName.WIDTH)); int height = new Integer(stream.get(PdfName.HEIGHT).toString()).intValue(); int width = new Integer(stream.get(PdfName.WIDTH).toString()).intValue(); System.out.println("bitspercomponent:" + stream.get(PdfName.BITSPERCOMPONENT)); java.awt.Image image = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage(img); BufferedImage bi = new BufferedImage(width, height, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB); Graphics2D g2 = bi.createGraphics(); ImageIO.write(bi, "PNG",new File("C:\\images\\"+ i + ".png")); } } } // ... // // or you could try making a java.awt.Image from the array: // j } } } catch (FileNotFoundException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } catch (IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } catch(Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } As I was low on time, I moved onto PDFBox which looked like it had already considered my use cases. I got the latest source code from SVN and tried the org.apache.pdfbox.ExtractText class straight away. This allows you to specify a -html flag instead of using the default text output. I ran into an exception straight away. After some debugging I found that what I had downloaded was missing the resources/glyphlist.txt file. I found a copy on the Adobe site and was able to run the utility then. One other thing to note while using these utilities is that you'll need to have ICU4J, iText and the Apache Commons Logging libraries on your build path. The good news was that the utility got all the text out and put it into a HTML format. But the generated HTML wasn't that pretty. Each line that it read got terminated with a , admittedly, an easy thing to change around. Moving onto image extraction, I tried out org.apache.pdfbox.ExtractImages. This class worked perfectly, saving all the images in the PDF as jpeg. I did make one alteration to PDXObjectImage.write2file so that I put the images in a particular folder. The PDFBox utilities really impressed me, as I wasn't sure if it was possible to get this information out of the PDF so easily. All the pieces are there for one single utility that would generate better HTML for you along with the images. As far as I know, no solution exists to do all of this in Java (if I'm wrong, please let me know in the comments section). Have any of the readers tried to achieve this process using iText, PDFBox or any other Java library?

Learn the Template Method Design Pattern with easy Java source code examples as James Sugrue continues his design patterns tutorial series, Design Patterns Uncovered