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Clojure: Updating keys in a map
I’ve been playing with Clojure over the last few weeks and as a result I’ve been using a lot of maps to represent the data. For example if we have the following map of teams to Glicko ratings and ratings deviations: (def teams { "Man. United" {:points 1500 :rd 350} "Man. City" {:points 1450 :rd 300} }) We might want to increase Man. United’s points score by one for which we could use the update-in function: > (update-in teams ["Man. United" :points] inc) {"Man. United" {:points 1501, :rd 350}, "Man. City" {:points 1450, :rd 300} The 2nd argument to update-in is a nested associative structure i.e. a sequence of keys into the map in this instance. If we wanted to reset Man. United’s points score we could use assoc-in: > (assoc-in teams ["Man. United" :points] 1) {"Man. United" {:points 1, :rd 350}, "Man. City" {:points 1450, :rd 300} If we want to update multiple keys at once then we can chain them using the -> (thread first) macro: (-> teams (assoc-in ["Man. United" :points] 1600) (assoc-in ["Man. United" :rd] 200)) {"Man. United" {:points 1600, :rd 200}, "Man. City" {:points 1450, :rd 300} If instead of replacing just one part of the value we want to replace the whole entry we could use associnstead: > (assoc teams "Man. United" {:points 1600 :rd 300}) {"Man. United" {:points 1600, :rd 300}, "Man. City" {:points 1450, :rd 300} assoc can also be used to add a new key/value to the map. e.g. > (assoc teams "Arsenal" {:points 1500 :rd 330}) {"Man. United" {:points 1500, :rd 350}, "Arsenal" {:points 1500, :rd 330}, "Man. City" {:points 1450, :rd 300} dissoc plays the opposite role and returns a new map without the specified keys: > (dissoc teams "Man. United" "Man. City") {} And those are all the map based functions I’ve played around with so far…
September 24, 2013
by Mark Needham
· 6,179 Views
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The Ups and Downs of PHP Template Engines
A PHP template engine is a way of outputting PHP in your HTML without using PHP syntax or PHP tags. It's supposed to be used by having a PHP class that will send your HTML the variables you want to display, and the HTML simply displays this data. This means that you are forced to separate your PHP logic from the HTML output, which is great; separation in your code is what you should be aiming for. The best way to understand what a template engine does it to see the code. Below is a basic page where you might want to display a title and a list of products. getAllProducts(); ?> title; ?> description; ?> The idea of using a template engine is that you would remove the $title variable and the $products variable and put this in a class, and then call a template file to display the HTML. getAllProducts(); $this->renderHtml('all-products.html', $vars); } } ?> The renderHtml() method will pass in the variables you want to display to the template file, which will look similar to this. {{ title } {% for product in products %} {{ product.title } {{ product.description } {% else %} No products exist. {% endfor %} As you can see, there is a separation of the PHP logic and display of code. Another reason why you might use a template engine is because now you have an HTML view file, which you can give to your front-end developer to style, and a template engine is arguably easier to read than using PHP syntax. What Frameworks Currently Use Template Engines? There are a few large frameworks that currently use a template engine. Some that I've used are Laravel, Drupal 8 and Expression Engine. All of these use different template engines but the understanding of how they work is similar. Laravel - Blade Templating Laravel uses a template engine called Blade. Here is an example of how you will use blade in your HTML views. @section('sidebar') This is the master sidebar. @show @yield('content') Output a Variable {{ $val } Foreach Loop @foreach ($users as $user) {{ $user->name } @endforeach If/else Statement @if ($user->name == 'Dave') Welcome Dave! @else Welcome Guest! @endif Blade Templating Drupal - Twig The Drupal CMS uses a template engine called Twig. This was developed to make templating quicker and more secure. It works in a similar way as blade but the syntax is slightly different. Output a Variable {{ var } For Loop {% for user in users %} * {{ user.name } {% else %} No user have been found. {% endfor %} Inherit Templates {% extends "layout.html" %} {% block content %} Content of the page... {% endblock %} Twig Smarty Another populate template engine is called Smarty. Again, Smarty was developed for code and HTML separation, and to make your templates easier to read. Output a Variable {$name} Foreach Loop {foreach $users as $user} {strip} {$user.name}{$user.phone} {/strip} {/foreach} If Statement {if $name == 'Fred'} Welcome Sir. {elseif $name == 'Wilma'} Welcome Ma'am. {else} Welcome, whatever you are. {/if} Smarty Using a Template Engine The three examples of template engines I gave above are not the only template engines available. There are many, and not just for PHP. Lots of other languages can use a template engine. Even though they are different engines, they are all similar in a way; they were all developed to make front-end templating quicker and easier to read. They all mention that this forces separation of your code and makes HTML easier to read, because you don't have any PHP tags in your HTML. But when I work with these different engines, I never enjoy developing with them. I actually find that they drastically slow down my development because I now have to look up the Smarty syntax or the Twig syntax for the thing I want to do. What they mention about code separation is exactly right; you shouldn't have logic in your HTML. However, you don't need a templating system to do this. In a previous tutorial I demonstrated how you can separate your HTML from your code with a simple method using output buffering. Separate HTML From Code So, while dealing with logic separation is up to the developer to do properly, the benefit of a template language is that it enforces it. If you're worried about separation you can use an MVC framework, or just create a method, and use the ob_buffer to get the HTML contents. If a developer is going to add log-in to an HTML file, they can't complain about separation and not being able to debug easily. I also don't agree with what's mentioned about the template engines being easier to read. Take a foreach in blade for an example of the difference: name; ?> @foreach ($users as $user) {{ $user->name } @endforeach There's not much difference between these code samples, except in Blade you use: {{ $user->name } In PHP, on the other hand, you use: name; ?> I even made the PHP do more than I have to. I could have simply used the printf() function to output the div, so it would look like this: %s', $user->name); } ?> Is it really so difficult to read that we have to learn a whole new template language to output variables in your HTML? I don't think so. Benefit of Using a Template Engine In my experience, there isn't a benefit to using a template engine over native PHP templating, but there must be some benefit, or there would be no reason to use it. So, I asked this question on Google+: what is the benefit or using a template engine? One of the answers I had directed me to this post on stackoverflow explaining some of the benefits of using a template engine. Some of the benefits mentioned are: New syntax Automatic escaping Template inheritance Ease of reading for non-developers Now, I would argue that learning a new syntax is not a benefit. Having to look up the correct syntax every time I need to do a foreach loop or an if statement is going to take up so much more time than simply using PHP. Automatic escaping is a real benefit. So many developers forget to escape when outputting content on the page, and this takes care of that for you. But it's really not that difficult to create a function that will escape the content of a variable. If you want some good examples, there's a formatting file (/wp-includes/formatting.php) in WordPress with loads of escaping functions you can use in different situations. Then you make sure you escape your content before sending it to the view. Template inheritance is another good benefit for some pages, and could be used for skinning different areas of the site. The ease of reading for non-developers is the one I disagree with most. PHP is not a hard language to read. It's not even a hard language to learn. If you have a front-end developer that is changing your HTML and can't understand what you're doing with the PHP, then I would recommend that they go and learn the basics of PHP. I'm not saying they need to learn how everything works and OOP principles, but just the basics so they can identify what an if statement is, what a for loop is, and so on. The native PHP syntax is not that different from the template engine syntax, so if they can learn that, then they most certainly can learn PHP syntax. For me, the only real benefit to using a template engine is security and autoescaping the output of the HTML. I'm not here to discourage people from using template engines; I can see they have their place, but like anything, you have to use them on the right projects. It depends on your team for the project, the size of the application, who's coding the HTML and whether the content author will want to change the HTML. In some cases, template engines might be perfect for your project. Here is a good article for reasons why you should be using template engines: Template Engines In PHP. In conclusion, I'm not really a fan of these template engines. For me, they just add another layer, another language you need to learn with little benefit. So, am I going to use these in my future projects? I'm still undecided. I can see they have a place and a reason for being used, but I think things take longer when developing with them, and they're not easy to debug.
September 24, 2013
by Paul Underwood
· 17,596 Views
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How to generate Hailstone Sequence in Java?
Program Statement How to generate Hailstone Sequence in Java? Solution The Hailstone sequence of numbers can be generated from a starting positive integer, n by: If n is 1 then the sequence ends. If n is even then the next n of the sequence = n/2 If n is odd then the next n of the sequence = (3 * n) + 1 Code ? package com.skilledmonster.examples.operations; import java.util.Scanner; /** * Program to generate Hailstone Sequence. * This program reads a number from the user then displays the Hailstone sequence * for that number followed by a line that shows the number of steps taken to reach 1. * * @author Jagadeesh Motamarri * @version 1.0 */ public class HailstoneSequenceGenerator { public static void main(String[] args) { Scanner inputScanner = new Scanner(System.in); System.out.printf("Enter a Number: "); try { int number = inputScanner.nextInt(); int steps = 0; while (number != 1) { if (number % 2 == 0) { System.out.println(number + " is even, so I take half: " + number / 2); number /= 2; } else { System.out.println(number + " is odd, so I make 3n + 1: " + (number * 3 + 1)); number = number * 3 + 1; } steps++; } System.out.println("The process took " + steps + (steps < 2 ? " step" : " steps") + " to reach 1"); } catch (Exception e) { System.out.println("Not a Number!! Run your Program again "); } } } Output As shown in the console output, for interger 17, it took 12 steps to reach 1 using Hailstone Sequence. References http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture
September 20, 2013
by Jagadeesh Motamarri
· 31,668 Views · 16 Likes
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Top 10 Methods for Java Arrays
The following are top 10 methods for Java Array. They are the most voted questions from stackoverflow. 0. Decalre an array String[] aArray = new String[5]; String[] bArray = {"a","b","c", "d", "e"}; String[] cArray = new String[]{"a","b","c","d","e"}; 1. Print an array in Java int[] intArray = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; String intArrayString = Arrays.toString(intArray); // print directly will print reference value System.out.println(intArray); // [I@7150bd4d System.out.println(intArrayString); // [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] 2. Create ArrayList from array String[] stringArray = { "a", "b", "c", "d", "e" }; ArrayList arrayList = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList(stringArray)); System.out.println(arrayList); // [a, b, c, d, e] 3. Check if an array contains a certain value String[] stringArray = { "a", "b", "c", "d", "e" }; boolean b = Arrays.asList(stringArray).contains("a"); System.out.println(b); // true 4. Concatenate two arrays int[] intArray = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; int[] intArray2 = { 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 }; // Apache Commons Lang library int[] combinedIntArray = ArrayUtils.addAll(intArray, intArray2); 5. Declare array inline method(new String[]{"a", "b", "c", "d", "e"}); 6. Joins the elements of the provided array into a single String // containing the provided list of elements // Apache common lang String j = StringUtils.join(new String[] { "a", "b", "c" }, ", "); System.out.println(j); // a, b, c 7. Covnert ArrayList to Array String[] stringArray = { "a", "b", "c", "d", "e" }; ArrayList arrayList = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList(stringArray)); String[] stringArr = new String[arrayList.size()]; arrayList.toArray(stringArr); for (String s : stringArr) System.out.println(s); 8. Convert Array to Set Set set = new HashSet(Arrays.asList(stringArray)); System.out.println(set); //[d, e, b, c, a] 9. Reverse an array int[] intArray = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; ArrayUtils.reverse(intArray); System.out.println(Arrays.toString(intArray)); //[5, 4, 3, 2, 1] 10. Remove element of an array int[] intArray = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; int[] removed = ArrayUtils.removeElement(intArray, 3);//create a new array System.out.println(Arrays.toString(removed)); One more – convert int to byte array byte[] bytes = ByteBuffer.allocate(4).putInt(8).array(); for (byte t : bytes) { System.out.format("0x%x ", t); } In addition, do you know what arrays look like in memory ?
September 18, 2013
by Ryan Wang
· 71,563 Views · 2 Likes
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How to Create, Debug and Deploy Visual Studio Extension Packages
Learn about deploying and debugging Visual Studio packages.
September 18, 2013
by Andrey Karpov
· 54,853 Views
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Using the Visual Studio Automation Object Model
About a year ago, we published in our blog a series of articles on the development of Visual Studio plugins in C#. We have recently revised those materials and added new sections and now invite you to have a look at the updated version of the manual as a series of articles here on DZone. The other articles in the series can be found here: Part 1 - How to Create, Debug and Deploy Visual Studio Extension Packages Part 2 - Using the Visual Studio Automation Object Model This article (the second in the series) contains an overview of the Visual Studio Automation Object Model. In it, we examine the model's overall structure and the means of obtaining access to its interfaces through DTE/DTE2 top-level objects. Several examples of utilizing elements of the model are provided. Also discussed are the issues of using the model's interfaces within multithreaded applications; an example of implementing such a mechanism for multithreaded interaction with COM interfaces in managed code is provided as well. Introduction The Visual Studio development environment is built upon the principles of automation and extensibility, providing developers with the ability to integrate almost any custom element into the IDE and allowing for an easy interaction with its default and user-created components. As the means of implementing these tasks, Visual Studio users are provided with several cross-complementing toolsets; the most basic and versatile among these is the Visual Studio Automation Object Model. The Automation Object Model is represented by a series of libraries containing a vast and well-structured API set that covers all aspects of IDE automation and the majority of its extensibility capabilities. Although, in comparison to other IDE extensibility tools, this model does not provide access to some portions of Visual Studio (this applies mostly to the extension of some IDE's features), it is nonetheless the most flexible and versatile among them. The majority of the model's interfaces are accessible from within every type of IDE extension module, which allows interacting with the environment even from an external independent process. Moreover, the model itself could be extended along with the extension of Visual Studio IDE, providing other third-party developers with an access to user-created custom components. Automation Object Model Structure The Visual Studio automation model is composed of several interconnected functional object groups covering all aspects of the development environment; it also provides capabilities for controlling and extending these groups. Accessing any of them is possible through the top-level global DTE interface (Development Tools Environment). Figure 1 shows the overall structure of the automation model and how it is divided among functionality groups. Figure 1 — Visual Studio Automation Object Model A user could extend the model in one of the following groups: Project models (implementing new project types, support for new languages); Document models (implementing new document types and document editors) Code editor level models (support for specific language constructs) Project build-level models An automation model could be extended from plug-ins of VSPackage type only. All of the automation model's interfaces could be conventionally subdivided into two large groups. The first group consists of the interfaces of the EnvDTE and Visual Studio Interop namespaces. These interfaces allow interactions with basic common components of the IDE itself, such as tool windows, editors, event handling services and so on. The second group consists of the interfaces of the specific project model. The figure above specifies this interface group as late-bound properties, i.e. these interfaces are implemented in a separate dynamically loaded library. Each standard (i.e. the one that is included in a regular Visual Studio distribution) project model, such as Visual C++ or Visual Basic, provides a separate implementation for these interfaces. Third-party developers are able to extend the automation model by adding their own custom project models and by providing an implementation of these automation interfaces. Also worth noting is that the interfaces of the 1st group, which was specified above, are universal, meaning that they could be utilized for interaction with any of the project models or Visual Studio editions, including the integrated\isolated Visual Studio shells. In this article, we will examine this group in more detail. But still, despite the model's versatility, not every group belonging to the model could be equally utilized from all the types of IDE extensions. For instance, some of the model's capabilities are inaccessible to external processes; these capabilities are tied to specific extension types, such as add-in or VSPackage. Therefore, when selecting the type for the extension to be developed, it is important to consider the functionality that this extension will require. The Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop namespace also provides a group of COM interfaces, which can be used to extend and automate Visual Studio application from managed code. Managed Package Framework (MPF) classes, which we utilized earlier for creating a VSPackage plugin, are actually themselves based on these interfaces. Although theses interfaces are not a part of EnvDTE automation model described above, nevertheless they greatly enhance this model by providing additional functionality for VSPackage extensions, which is otherwise unavailable for extensions of other types. Obtaining References to DTE/DTE2 Objects In order to create a Visual Studio automation application, it is necessary to obtain access to the automation objects themselves in the first place. To accomplish this, first of all it is necessary to hook up the correct versions of libraries containing the required managed API wrappers in the EnvDTE namespace. Secondly, the reference to the automation model top-level object, that is the DTE2 interface, should be obtained. In the course of Visual Studio’s evolution, several of its automation objects had been modified or received some additional functionality. So, to maintain a backward compatibility with existing extension packages, new EnvDTE80, EnvDTE90, EnvDTE100 etc. namespaces were created instead of updating the interfaces from the original EnvDTE namespace. The majority of such updated interfaces from these new namespaces do maintain the same names as in the original ones, but with the addition of an ordinal number at the end of the name, for example Solution and Solution2. It is advised that these updated interfaces should be utilized when creating a new project, as they do contain the most recent functionality. It's worth noting that properties and methods of DTE2 interface usually return object references with types corresponding to the original DTE. For example, accessing dte2.Solution will return Solution and not the Solution2 as it would seem. Although these new EnvDTE80, EnvDTE90, EnvDTE100 namespaces do contain some of the updated functionality as mentioned above, still it is the EnvDTE interface that contains the majority of automation objects. Therefore, in order to possess access to all of the existing interfaces, it is necessary to link all versions of the managed COM wrapper libraries to the project, as well as to obtain the references to DTE and also to DTE2. The way of obtaining a top-level EnvDTE object reference is dependent upon the type of IDE extension being developed. Let's examine three such extension types: add-in, VSPackage and an MSVS-independent external process. Add-in Extension In the case of an add-in extension, access to the DTE interface can be obtained inside the OnConnection method, which should be implemented for the IDTExtensibility interface that provides access to the extension-environment interaction events. The OnConnection method is called at the moment when the module is loaded by the IDE. It can happen either when the environment is being loaded itself or after the extension was called for the first time in the IDE session. The example of obtaining the reference follows: public void OnConnection(object application, ext_ConnectMode connectMode, object addInInst, ref Array custom) { _dte2 = (DTE2)application; ... } An add-in module can be initialized either at the moment of IDE start-up, or when it is called for the first time in the current IDE session. So, the connectMode can be used to correctly determine the moment of initialization inside the OnConnection method. switch(connectMode) { case ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_UISetup: ... break; case ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_Startup: ... break; case ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_AfterStartup: ... break; case ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_CommandLine: ... break; } As in the example above, add-in could be loaded either simultaneously with the IDE itself (if the startup option in the add-in manager is checked), when it is called the first time or when it is called through the command line. The ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_UISetup option is invoked only for a single time in the plug-in's overall lifetime, which is during its first initialization. This case should be used for initializing user UI elements that are to be integrated into the environment (more on this later on). If an add-in is being loaded during Visual Studio start-up (ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_Startup), then at the moment OnConnect method receives control for the first time, it is possible that the IDE still is not fully initialized itself. In such a case, it is advised to postpone the acquisition of the DTE reference until the environment is fully loaded. The OnStartupComplete handler provided by the IDTExtensibility can be used for this. public void OnStartupComplete(ref Array custom) { ... } VSPackage Extension For VSPackage type of extension, the DTE could be obtained through the global Visual Studio service with the help of GetService method of a Package subclass: DTE dte = MyPackage.GetService(typeof(DTE)) as DTE; Please note that the GetService method could potentially return null in case Visual Studio is not fully loaded or initialized at the moment of such access, i.e. it is in the so called "zombie" state. To correctly handle this situation, it is advised that the acquisition of DTE reference should be postponed until this interface is inquired. But in case the DTE reference is required inside the Initialize method itself, the IVsShellPropertyEvents interface can be utilized (also by deriving our Package subclass from it) and then the reference could be safely obtained inside the OnShellPropertyChange handler. DTE dte; uint cookie; protected override void Initialize() { base.Initialize(); IVsShell shellService = GetService(typeof(SVsShell)) as IVsShell; if (shellService != null) ErrorHandler.ThrowOnFailure( shellService.AdviseShellPropertyChanges(this,out cookie)); ... } public int OnShellPropertyChange(int propid, object var) { // when zombie state changes to false, finish package initialization if ((int)__VSSPROPID.VSSPROPID_Zombie == propid) { if ((bool)var == false) { this.dte = GetService(typeof(SDTE)) as DTE; IVsShell shellService = GetService(typeof(SVsShell)) as IVsShell; if (shellService != null) ErrorHandler.ThrowOnFailure( shellService.UnadviseShellPropertyChanges(this.cookie) ); this.cookie = 0; } } return VSConstants.S_OK; } It should be noted that the process of VSPackage module initialization at IDE startup could vary for different Visual Studio versions. For instance, in case of VS2005 and VS2008, an attempt at accessing DTE during IDE startup will almost always result in null being returned, owning to the relative fast loading times of these versions. But, one does not simply obtain access into DTE. In Visual Studio 2010 case, it mistakenly appears that one could simply obtain an access to the DTE from inside the Initialize() method. In fact, this impression is a false one, as such a method of DTE acquisition could potentially cause the occasional appearance of "floating" errors which are hard to identify and debug, and even the DTE itself may be still uninitialized when the reference is acquired. Because of these disparities, the aforementioned acquisition method for handling IDE loading states should not be ignored on any version of Visual Studio. Independent External Process The DTE interface is a top-level abstraction for Visual Studio environment in the automation model. In order to acquire a reference to this interface from an external application, its ProgID COM identifier could be utilized; for instance, it will be "VisualStudio.DTE.10.0" for Visual Studio 2010. Consider this example of initializing a new IDE instance and when obtaining a reference to the DTE interface. // Get the ProgID for DTE 8.0. System.Type t = System.Type.GetTypeFromProgID( "VisualStudio.DTE.10.0", true); // Create a new instance of the IDE. object obj = System.Activator.CreateInstance(t, true); // Cast the instance to DTE2 and assign to variable dte. EnvDTE80.DTE2 dte = (EnvDTE80.DTE2)obj; // Show IDE Main Window dte.MainWindow.Activate(); In the example above, we've actually created a new DTE object, starting deven.exe process by the CreateInstance method. But at the same time, the GUI window of the environment will be displayed only after the Activate method is called. Next, let's review a simple example of obtaining the DTE reference from an already running Visual Studio Instance: EnvDTE80.DTE2 dte2; dte2 = (EnvDTE80.DTE2) System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.GetActiveObject( "VisualStudio.DTE.10.0"); However, in case several instances of the Visual Studio are executing at the moment of our inquiry, the GetActiveObject method will return a reference to the IDE instance that was started the earliest. Let's examine a possible way of obtaining the reference to DTE from a running Visual Studio instance by the PID of its process. using EnvDTE80; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComTypes; [DllImport("ole32.dll")] private static extern void CreateBindCtx(int reserved, out IBindCtx ppbc); [DllImport("ole32.dll")] private static extern void GetRunningObjectTable(int reserved, out IRunningObjectTable prot); public static DTE2 GetByID(int ID) { //rot entry for visual studio running under current process. string rotEntry = String.Format("!VisualStudio.DTE.10.0:{0}", ID); IRunningObjectTable rot; GetRunningObjectTable(0, out rot); IEnumMoniker enumMoniker; rot.EnumRunning(out enumMoniker); enumMoniker.Reset(); IntPtr fetched = IntPtr.Zero; IMoniker[] moniker = new IMoniker[1]; while (enumMoniker.Next(1, moniker, fetched) == 0) { IBindCtx bindCtx; CreateBindCtx(0, out bindCtx); string displayName; moniker[0].GetDisplayName(bindCtx, null, out displayName); if (displayName == rotEntry) { object comObject; rot.GetObject(moniker[0], out comObject); return (EnvDTE80.DTE2)comObject; } } return null; } Here we've acquired the DTE interface by identifying the required instance of the IDE in the table of running COM objects (ROT, Running Object Table) by its process identifier. Now we can access the DTE for every of the executing instances of Visual Studio, for example: Process Devenv; ... //Get DTE by Process ID EnvDTE80.DTE2 dte2 = GetByID(Devenv.Id); Additionally, to acquire any project-specific interface (including custom model extensions), for example the CSharpProjects model, through a valid DTE interface, the GetObject method should be utilized: Projects projects = (Projects)dte.GetObject("CSharpProjects"); The GetObject method will return a Projects collection of regular Project objects, and each one of them will contain a reference to our project-specific properties, among other regular ones. Visual Studio Text Editor Documents An automation model represents Visual Studio text documents through the TextDocument interface. For example, C/C++ source code files are opened by the environment as text documents. The TextDocument is based upon the common automation model document interface (the Document interface), which represents files of any type opened in Visual Studio editor or designer. A reference to the text document object can be obtained through the 'Object' field of the Document object. Let's acquire a text document for the currently active (i.e. the one possessing focus) document from IDE's text editor: EnvDTE.TextDocument objTextDoc = (TextDocument)PVSStudio.DTE.ActiveDocument.Object("TextDocument"); Modifying Documents The TextSelection document allows controlling the text selection or to modify it. The methods of this interface represent the functionality of Visual Studio text editor, i.e. they allow the interaction with the text as it is presented directly by the UI. EnvDTE.TextDocument Doc = (TextDocument)PVSStudio.DTE.ActiveDocument.Object(string.Empty); Doc.Selection.SelectLine(); TextSelection Sel = Doc.Selection; int CurLine = Sel.TopPoint.Line; String Text = Sel.Text; Sel.Insert("test\r\n"); In this example, we selected a text line under the cursor, read the selected text and replaced it with a 'test' string. The TextDocument interface also allows text modification through the EditPoint interface. This interface is somewhat similar to the TextSelection, but instead of operating with the text through the editor UI, it directly manipulates text buffer data. The difference between them is that the text buffer is not influenced by such editor-specific notions as WordWrap and Virtual Spaces. It should be noted that both of these editing methods are not able to modify read-only text blocks. Let's examine the example of modifying text with EditPoint by placing additional lines at the end of current line with a cursor: objEditPt = objTextDoc.StartPoint.CreateEditPoint(); int lineNumber = objTextDoc.Selection.CurrentLine; objEditPt.LineDown(lineNumber - 1); EditPoint objEditPt2 = objTextDoc.StartPoint.CreateEditPoint(); objEditPt2.LineDown(lineNumber - 1); objEditPt2.CharRight(objEditPt2.LineLength); String line = objEditPt.GetText(objEditPt.LineLength); String newLine = line + "test"; objEditPt.ReplaceText(objEditPt2, newLine, (int)vsEPReplaceTextOptions.vsEPReplaceTextKeepMarkers); Navigating the Documents VSPackage modules are able to obtain access to a series of global services that could be used for opening and handling environment documents. These services could be acquired by the Package.GetGlobalService() method from Managed Package Framework. It should be noted that the services described here are not part of the EnvDTE model and are accessible only from a Package-type extension, and therefore they could not be utilized in other types of Visual Studio extensions. Nonetheless, they can be quite useful for handling IDE documents when they are utilized in addition to the Documents interface described earlier. Next, we'll examine these services in more detail. The IVsUIShellOpenDocument interface controls the state of documents opened in the environment. Following is the example that uses this interface to open a document through path to a file, which this document will represent: String path = "C:\Test\test.cpp"; IVsUIShellOpenDocument openDoc = Package.GetGlobalService(typeof(IVsUIShellOpenDocument)) as IVsUIShellOpenDocument; IVsWindowFrame frame; Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop.IServiceProvider sp; IVsUIHierarchy hier; uint itemid; Guid logicalView = VSConstants.LOGVIEWID_Code; if (ErrorHandler.Failed( openDoc.OpenDocumentViaProject(path, ref logicalView, out sp, out hier, out itemid, out frame)) || frame == null) { return; } object docData; frame.GetProperty((int)__VSFPROPID.VSFPROPID_DocData, out docData); The file will be opened in a new editor or will receive focus in case it already has been opened earlier. Next, let's read a VsTextBuffer text buffer from this document we opened: // Get the VsTextBuffer VsTextBuffer buffer = docData as VsTextBuffer; if (buffer == null) { IVsTextBufferProvider bufferProvider = docData as IVsTextBufferProvider; if (bufferProvider != null) { IVsTextLines lines; ErrorHandler.ThrowOnFailure(bufferProvider.GetTextBuffer( out lines)); buffer = lines as VsTextBuffer; Debug.Assert(buffer != null, "IVsTextLines does not implement IVsTextBuffer"); if (buffer == null) { return; } } } The IVsTextManager interface controls all of the active text buffers in the environment. For example, we can navigate a text document using the NavigateToLineAndColumn method of this manager on a buffer we've acquired earlier: IVsTextManager mgr = Package.GetGlobalService(typeof(VsTextManagerClass)) as IVsTextManager; mgr.NavigateToLineAndColumn(buffer, ref logicalView, line, column, line, column); Subscribing and Handling Events Automation objects events are represented by the DTE.Events property. This element references all of the common IDE events (such as CommandEvents, SolutionEvents), as well as the events of separate environment components (project types, editors, tools etc.), also including the ones designed by third-party developers. To acquire a reference for this automation object, the GetObject method could be utilized. When subscribing to the DTE events, one should remember that this interface could be still unavailable at the moment of extension being initialized. So it is always important to consider the sequence of your extension initialization process if the access to DTE.Events is required in the Initialize() method of your extension package. The correct handling of initialization sequence will vary for different extension types, as it was described earlier. Let's acquire a reference for an events object of Visual C++ project model defined by the VCProjectEngineEvents interface and assign a handler for the removal of an element from the Solution Explorer tree: VCProjectEngineEvents m_ProjectItemsEvents = PVSStudio.DTE.Events.GetObject("VCProjectEngineEventsObject") as VCProjectEngineEvents; m_ProjectItemsEvents.ItemRemoved += new _dispVCProjectEngineEvents_ItemRemovedEventHandler( m_ProjectItemsEvents_ItemRemoved); MDI Windows Events The Events.WindowEvents property could be utilized to handle regular events of an environment MDI window. This interface permits the assignment of a separate handler for a single window (defined through the EnvDTE.Window interface) or the assignment of a common handler for all of the environment's windows. The following example contains the assignment of a handler for the event of switching between IDE windows: WindowEvents WE = PVSStudio.DTE.Events.WindowEvents; WE.WindowActivated += new _dispWindowEvents_WindowActivatedEventHandler( Package.WE_WindowActivated); The next example is the assignment of a handler for window switching to the currently active MDI window through the WindowEvents indexer: WindowEvents WE = m_dte.Events.WindowEvents[MyPackage.DTE.ActiveWindow]; WE.WindowActivated += new _dispWindowEvents_WindowActivatedEventHandler( MyPackage.WE_WindowActivated); IDE Commands Events The actual handling of the environment's commands and their extension through the automation model is covered in a separate article of this series. In this section, we will examine the handling of the events related to these commands (and not of the execution of the commands themselves). Assigning the handlers to these events is possible through the Events.CommandEvents interface. The CommandEvents property, as in the case of MDI windows events, also permits the assignment of a handler either for all of the commands or for a single one through the indexer. Let's examine the assignment of a handler for the event of a command execution being complete (i.e. when the command finishes its execution): CommandEvents CEvents = DTE.Events.CommandEvents; CEvents.AfterExecute += new _dispCommandEvents_AfterExecuteEventHandler(C_AfterExecute); But in order to assign such a handler for an individual command, it is necessary to identify this command in the first place. Each command of the environment is identified by a pair of GUID:ID, and in case of user-created commands, these values are specified directly by the developer during their integration, for example through the VSCT table. Visual Studio possesses a special debug mode that allows identifying any of the environment's commands. To activate this mode, it is required that the following key is to be added to the system registry (an example for Visual Studio 2010): [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\General] "EnableVSIPLogging"=dword:00000001 Now, after restarting the IDE, hovering your mouse over the menu or toolbar elements with CTRL+SHIFT being simultaneously pressed (though sometime it will not work until you left-click it) will display a dialog window containing all of the command's internal identifiers. We are interested in the values of Guid and CmdID. Let's examine the handling of events for the File.NewFile command: CommandEvents CEvents = DTE.Events.CommandEvents[ "{5EFC7975-14BC-11CF-9B2B-00AA00573819}", 221]; CEvents.AfterExecute += new _dispCommandEvents_AfterExecuteEventHandler(C_AfterExecute); The handler obtained in this way will receive control only after the command execution is finished. void C_AfterExecute(string Guid, int ID, object CustomIn, object CustomOut) { ... } This handler should not be confused with an immediate handler for the execution of the command itself which could be assigned during this command's initialization (from an extension package and in case the command is user-created). Handling the IDE commands is described in a separate article that is entirely devoted to IDE commands. In concluding this section, it should be mentioned that in the process of developing our own VSPackage extension, we've encountered the necessity to store the references to interface objects containing our handler delegates (such as CommandEvents, WindowEvents etc.) on the top-level fields of our main Package subclass. The reason for this is that in the case of the handler being assigned through a function-level local variable, it is lost immediately after leaving the method. Such behavior could probably be attributed to the .NET garbage collector, although we've obtained these references from the DTE interface that definitely exists during the entire lifetime of our extension package. Handling Project and Solution Events for VSPackage Extensions Let's examine some of the interfaces from the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop namespace -- the ones that permit us to handle the events related to Visual Studio projects and solutions to be more precise. Although these interfaces are not a part of the EnvDTE automation model, they could be implemented by the main class of the VSPackage extension (that is the class that was inherited from the Package base class of Managed Package Framework). That is why, if you are developing the extension of this type, these interfaces conveniently supplement the basic set of interfaces provided by the DTE object. By the way, this is another argument for creating a full-fledged VSPackage plugin using MPF. The IVsSolutionEvents could be implemented by the class inherited from Package, and it is available starting from Visual Studio version 2005, and the isolated\integrated shells based applications. This interface permits you to track the loading, unloading, opening and closing of projects or even the whole solutions in the development environment by implementing such of its methods as OnAfterCloseSolution, OnBeforeCloseProject and OnQueryCloseSolution. For example: public int OnAfterLoadProject(IVsHierarchy pStubHierarchy, IVsHierarchy pRealHierarchy) { //your custom handler code return VSConstants.S_OK; } As you can see, this method takes the IVsHierarchy object as an input parameter that represents the loading project. Managing such objects will be examined in another article devoted to the interaction with the Visual Studio project model. The IVsSolutionLoadEvents interface, in a similar fashion to the interface described above, should be implemented by the Package subclass and is available to versions of Visual Studio starting from 2010 and above. This interface allows you to handle such interesting aspects as batch loading of project groups and background solution loadings (the OnBeforeLoadProjectBatch and OnBeforeBackgroundSolutionLoadBegins methods), and also to intercept the end of this background loading operation as well (the OnAfterBackgroundSolutionLoadComplete method). Such event handlers should come in handy in case your plug-in needs to execute some code immediately after its initialization, and, at the same time, the plug-in depends on projects\solutions that are loaded inside the IDE. In this case, executing such a code without waiting for the solution loading to be finished could lead to either incorrect (incomplete) results because of the incompletely formed projects tree, or even to runtime exceptions. While developing the PVS-Studio IDE plug-in, we've encountered another interesting aspect of VSPackage plug-in initialization. When one Package plug-in enters a waiting state (for instance, by displaying a dialog window to the user), further initialization of VSPackage extensions is suspended until the blocking plug-in returns. So, when handling loading and initialization inside the environment, one should always remember this possible scenario as well. And finally, I want to return one final time to the fact that for the interface methods described above to operate correctly, you should inherit your main class from theses interfaces: class MyPackage: Package, IVsSolutionLoadEvents, IVsSolutionEvents { //Implementation of Package, IVsSolutionLoadEvents, IVsSolutionEvents ... } Supporting Visual Studio Color Schemes If the extension you are developing will be integrated into the interface of the development environment, for instance, by creating custom tool windows or document MDI windows (and the most convenient way for such an integration is a VSPackage extesnion), it is advisable that the coloring of your custom UI components should match the common color scheme used by Visual Studio itself. The importance of this task was elevated with the release of Visual Studio 2012, containing two hugely opposite color themes (Dark and Light), which the user could switch "on the fly" from the IDE options window. The GetVSSysColorEx method from Visual Studio Interop interface IVsUIShell2 could be utilized to obtain an environment's color settings. This interface is available to VSPackage plugins only: IVsUIShell2 vsshell = this.GetService(typeof(SVsUIShell)) as IVsUIShell2; By passing the __VSSYSCOLOREX and __VSSYSCOLOREX3 enums to the GetVSSysColorEx method, you can get the currently selected color for any of the Visual Studio UI elements. For example, let's obtain one of the colors from the context menu's background gradient: uint Win32Color; vsshell.GetVSSysColorEx((int)__VSSYSCOLOREX3.VSCOLOR_COMMANDBAR_MENU_BACKGROUND_GRADIENTBEGIN, out Win32Color); Color BackgroundGradient1 = ColorTranslator.FromWin32((int)Win32Color); Now we can use this Color object to "paint" our custom context menus. To determine the point in the time at which the color theme of your components should be reapplied, you can, for example, utilize events of the environment command responsible for opening of IDE's settings window (Tools -> Options). How to subscribe your handlers to such an event was described earlier in this article. But if you are, for some reason, unable to utilize the IVsUIShell2 object (for instance, in case you are developing a non-VSPackage extension), but at the same time you still need to support Visual Studio color themes, then it is possible to obtain color values for your environment's various UI components directly from the system registry. We will not cover this approach in the article, but here you can download a free and open-source tool designed for Visual Studio color theme editing. The tool is written in C# and it contains all the code required for reading and modifying Visual Studio 2012 color themes from the managed code. Interacting with COM Interfaces from Within a Multithreaded Application Initially the PVS-Studio extension package had not contained any specific thread-safety mechanisms for its interaction with Visual Studio APIs. At the same time, we had been attempting to confine the interactions with these APIs within a single background thread that was created and owned by our plug-in. And such an approach functioned flawlessly for quite a long period. However, several bug reports from our users, each one containing a similar ComExeption error, prompted us to examine this issue in more detail and to implement a threading safety mechanism for our COM Interop. Although the Visual Studio automation model is not a thread-safe one, it still provides a way for interacting with multi-threaded applications. The Visual Studio application is a COM (Component Object Mode) server. For the task of handling calls from COM clients (in our case, this will be our extension package) to thread-unsafe servers, COM provides a mechanism known as an STA (single-threaded apartment) model. In the terms of COM, an apartment represents a logical container inside a process in which objects and threads share the same thread access rules. STA can hold only a single thread, but an unlimited number of objects, inside such container. Calls from other threads to such thread-unsafe objects inside STA are converted into messages and posted to a message queue. Messages are retrieved from the message queue and converted back into method calls one at a time by the thread running in the STA, so it becomes possible for only a single thread to access these unsafe objects on the server. Utilizing Apartment Mechanism Inside Managed Code The .NET Framework does not utilize COM Apartment mechanics directly. Therefore, when a managed application calls a COM object in the COM interoperation scenarios, CLR (Common Language Runtime) creates and initializes apartment container. A managed thread is able to create and enter either an MTA (multi-threaded apartment, a container that, contrary to an STA, can host several threads at the same time), or an STA, though a thread will be started as an MTA by default. The type of the apartment could be specified before thread is launched: Thread t = new Thread(ThreadProc); t.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); ... t.Start(); As an apartment type could not be changed once a thread had been started, the STAThread attribute should be used to specify the main thread of a managed application as an STA: [STAThread] static void Main(string[] args) {...} Implementing Message Filters for COM Interoperation Errors in a Managed Environment STA serializes all calls to the COM server, so one of the calling clients could potentially be blocked or even rejected when the server is busy, processing different calls or another thread is already inside the apartment container. In case the COM server rejects its client, .NET COM interop will generate a System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException ("The message filter indicated that the application is busy"). When working on a Visual Studio module (add-in, vspackage) or a macro, the execution control usually passes into the module from the environment's main STA UI thread (such as in the case of handling events or environment state changes, etc.). Calling automation COM interfaces from this main IDE thread is safe. But if other background threads are planned to be utilized and EnvDTE COM interfaces are to be called from these background threads (as in the case of long calculations that could potentially hang the IDE's interface, if these are performed on the main UI thread), then it is advised to implement a mechanism for handling calls rejected by a server. While working on the PVS-Studio plug-in, we've often encountered these kinds of COM exceptions in situations when other third-party extensions were active inside the IDE simultaneously with the PVS-Studio plug-in. Heavy user interaction with the UI also was the usual cause for such issues. It is quite logical that these situations often resulted in simultaneous parallel calls to COM objects inside STA and consequently to the rejection of some of them. To selectively handle incoming and outgoing calls, COM provides the IMessageFilter interface. If the server implements it, all of the calls are passed to the HandleIncomingCall method, and the client is informed on the rejected calls through the RetryRejectedCall method. This in turn allows the rejected calls to be repeated, or at least to correctly present this rejection to a user (for example, by displaying a dialog with a 'server is busy' message). Following is the example of implementing the rejected call handling for a managed application: [ComImport()] [Guid("00000016-0000-0000-C000-000000000046")] [InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)] public interface IMessageFilter { [PreserveSig] int HandleInComingCall( int dwCallType, IntPtr hTaskCaller, int dwTickCount, IntPtr lpInterfaceInfo); [PreserveSig] int RetryRejectedCall( IntPtr hTaskCallee, int dwTickCount, int dwRejectType); [PreserveSig] int MessagePending( IntPtr hTaskCallee, int dwTickCount, int dwPendingType); } class MessageFilter : MarshalByRefObject, IDisposable, IMessageFilter { [DllImport("ole32.dll")] [PreserveSig] private static extern int CoRegisterMessageFilter( IMessageFilter lpMessageFilter, out IMessageFilter lplpMessageFilter); private IMessageFilter oldFilter; private const int SERVERCALL_ISHANDLED = 0; private const int PENDINGMSG_WAITNOPROCESS = 2; private const int SERVERCALL_RETRYLATER = 2; public MessageFilter() { //Starting IMessageFilter for COM objects int hr = MessageFilter.CoRegisterMessageFilter( (IMessageFilter)this, out this.oldFilter); System.Diagnostics.Debug.Assert(hr >= 0, "Registering COM IMessageFilter failed!"); } public void Dispose() { //disabling IMessageFilter IMessageFilter dummy; int hr = MessageFilter.CoRegisterMessageFilter(this.oldFilter, out dummy); System.Diagnostics.Debug.Assert(hr >= 0, "De-Registering COM IMessageFilter failed!") System.GC.SuppressFinalize(this); } int IMessageFilter.HandleInComingCall(int dwCallType, IntPtr threadIdCaller, int dwTickCount, IntPtr lpInterfaceInfo) { // Return the ole default (don't let the call through). return MessageFilter.SERVERCALL_ISHANDLED; } int IMessageFilter.RetryRejectedCall(IntPtr threadIDCallee, int dwTickCount, int dwRejectType) { if (dwRejectType == MessageFilter.SERVERCALL_RETRYLATER) { // Retry the thread call immediately if return >=0 & // <100. return 150; //waiting 150 mseconds until retry } // Too busy; cancel call. SERVERCALL_REJECTED return -1; //Call was rejected by callee. //(Exception from HRESULT: 0x80010001 (RPC_E_CALL_REJECTED)) } int IMessageFilter.MessagePending( IntPtr threadIDCallee, int dwTickCount, int dwPendingType) { // Perform default processing. return MessageFilter.PENDINGMSG_WAITNOPROCESS; } } Now we can utilize our MessageFilter while calling COM interfaces from a background thread: using (new MessageFilter()) { //COM-interface dependent code ... } References MSDN. Referencing Automation Assemblies and the DTE2 Object. MSDN. Functional Automation Groups. MZ-Tools. HOWTO: Use correctly the OnConnection method of a Visual Studio add-in. The Code Project. Understanding The COM Single-Threaded Apartment. MZ-Tools. HOWTO: Add an event handler from a Visual Studio add-in. Dr. eX's Blog. Using EnableVSIPLogging to identify menus and commands with VS 2005 + SP1.
September 18, 2013
by Andrey Karpov
· 11,317 Views
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A Painless Introduction to Java's ThreadLocal Storage
Let’s look at some best practices for using another powerful class: ThreadLocal from java.lang, which is also implemented using WeakReference.
September 16, 2013
by Patson Luk
· 134,916 Views · 3 Likes
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Lambda Links and the Search for Final Closure (Java 8 and Scala)
Java 8 lambda walkthrough | Java Code Geeks Java 8 Lambdas – The missing link to moving away from Java – all that jazz Guava Functions & Java 8 Lambdas | Java Code Geeks Futures in Akka with Scala | Java Code Geeks Java 8, Lambdas | zeroturnaround.com Ade Trenaman, Why Java 8 doesn’t rock my Scala Java 8 vs Scala: a Feature Comparison Why We Need Lambda Expressions in Java – Part 1 | Javalobby Love and hate for Java 8 – JavaWorld Mary Had a Little Lambda Project Lambda in Java SE 8 Lambda Jam 2013 Content on InfoQ Everything About Java 8 Enabling Microservice Architectures with Scala Functional Reactive Programming in the Netflix API
September 14, 2013
by Tim Spann DZone Core CORE
· 4,988 Views · 1 Like
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Top 10 Websites for Advanced-level Java Developers
this is my collection of websites for advanced level java developers. these websites provide news, answers to popular questions, interview questions, science lectures, etc. quality is the key factor of good websites. in my opinion, they all have the highest quality. in the following, i will also share how i use these websites for learning or for fun. 1. stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.com is probably the most popular website in the programming world. there are millions of good questions and answers. learning an api or a programming language often rely on code examples, stackoverflow has a lot of code segments. another good thing about stackoverflow is that it is social. you can view questions under some certain tags, e.g. “java” and “regex”, then you can see what question is most frequently asked and most voted. this can serve as a good resource for learning, also a good resource to write popular topics of java bloggers. url: http://stackoverflow.com/ 2. dzone.com i would say this website is fun, lots of developers share their blog articles. it is like an adventure, you never know what you are going to read next from this site. url: http://www.dzone.com 3. leetcode.com if interview question is java specific, like “what array look like in memory in java”, you can get answers from java websites. however, if the question is something like “how to convert an sorted array to a balanced tree”, then leetcode is the right place to go. it is a social platform for preparing it technical interviews and contains a collection of algorithm related questions. the best part is that it also has an online judge which can check if your code is correct or not by feeding different size of data. to be successful in a technical interview, they believe it is mainly repeating these three important steps: code → read → discuss. url: http://leetcode.com/ 4. java se technical documentation this website contains all documents you will need to use api of java se. even if you are an advanced level java developer, i’m pretty sure that you will find something useful and official here. for example, you can read some tutorials of “essential java classes”, “deployment”, etc. url: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/ 5. github you probably know that you can host your projects free there, but you may not know it is an excellent resource for learning java libraries and frameworks. for instance, if you want to learn spring mvc framework, you can search and find some open source projects. as the “monkey see monkey do” rule works for learning frameworks, you will be able to learn the frameworks quickly by examples, especially you are an experienced developers. url: https://github.com/ 6. coursera this is the best site for video lectures. you can find a lot of good computer science courses from famous professors of top schools. some of them are even the inventor of some computer science areas. url: https://www.coursera.org/ 7. java world this site contains a large collection of java tutorials on various kinds of topics. a lot of articles are well written and has pictures/diagram for illustrations. it can be used as a book for deep learning. url: http://www.javaworld.com/ 8. ibm developerworks it has a lot of nice articles wrtten by ibm people. url: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/ 9. wikipedia this is one of the best resources for looking up and learning almost any concepts. for example, as an experienced java developer you may just want to know some concept, but not learn much. this is a great place to find updated information for free. for example, what is service-oriented programming . url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 10. program creek comparing with the above 9 websites, the size of programcreek.com is much smaller. but the good thing about it is that it is a well-written site that can provide some fun to read. you can find some topics that haven’t been written by any other websites, and each of the articles always contains nice diagram or code examples. it contains articles written by people from different areas (research, industry) and it is always updated and share all good-quality stuff for java developers. url: http://www.programcreek.com/
September 12, 2013
by Ryan Wang
· 173,352 Views · 8 Likes
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Groovy Goodness: Check if a String Only Contains Whitespaces
In Groovy we can check if a String value only contains whitespaces with the isAllWhitespace() method. The method checks for spaces, but also takes into account tab and newline characters as whitespace. assert ''.allWhitespace assert ' '.allWhitespace assert '\t '.allWhitespace assert ' \r\n '.allWhitespace assert !'mrhaki'.allWhitespace
September 12, 2013
by Hubert Klein Ikkink
· 12,975 Views
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Groovy Goodness: Replace Characters in a String with CollectReplacements
We can use the collectReplacements(Closure) method to replace characters in a String. We pass a closure to the method and the closure is invoked for each character in the String value. If we return null the character is not transformed, otherwise we can return the replacement character. def s = 'Gr00vy is gr8' def replacement = { // Change 8 to eat if (it == '8') { 'eat' // Change 0 to o } else if (it == '0') { 'o' // Do not transform } else { null } } assert s.collectReplacements(replacement) == 'Groovy is great'Code written with Groovy 2.1.6
September 11, 2013
by Hubert Klein Ikkink
· 10,246 Views
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Top 10 Books for Advanced-level Java Developers
Java is a very popular programming language. Here are the top 10 books for advanced Java developers.
September 5, 2013
by Ryan Wang
· 142,502 Views · 1 Like
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Load Balancing Apache Tomcat with Nginx
This post comes from Karan Malhi at the Mulesolft blog. Nginx (pronounced "engine X") is an HTTP and reverse proxy server. It is well known for its high performance and stability. It is pretty feature-rich and very simple to configure. Nginx hosts nearly 12.18 percent (22.2M) of active sites across all domains. Nginx uses event-driven architecture to handle requests. When compared to a thread-per-request model, event-driven is highly scalable with a low and predicatble memory footprint. Nginx is very easy to set up as a load balancer for an Apache Tomcat farm. In this blog post, I will show you how to set it up as a round-robin load balancer for two ApacheTomcat servers. You first need to install Nginx, you can find the installation instructions here. If you are on a Mac, then you could use Homebrew brew install nginx After installing, you can run it using the nginx command sudo nginx You can now test the installation by opening the following URL in a browser: http://localhost:8080 Lets change the default port 8080 to port 80. You can do that in the nginx.conf file which by default is located at /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf. First, stop nginx: sudo nginx -s stop Now, open the nginx.conf file and locate the listen attribute of the server. Change the value from 8080 to 80. Here is where I made the change in my configuration: server { listen 80; server_name localhost; Save the file and start nginx. You should now be able to test the configuration change by visiting http://localhost Install two instances of Apache Tomcat. Open their server.xml files and change the HTTP port numbers to 8080 and 8081 respectively. You can find more information on Apache Tomcat configuration here. Once you have made the changes and saved the configuration files, you should now start each instance of Apache Tomcat. Here are a few ways you can start Apache Tomcat. Typically you should be able to locate the bin directory inside your Tomcat installation and invoke the startup.sh file as shown: bin/startup.sh Now that the Tomcat instances are started, let's set up the round robin load balancer. You would need to use the Nginx upstream module. The upstream module allows you to group servers that can be referenced by the proxy_pass directive. In your nginx.conf, locate the http block and add the upstream block to create a group of servers: http { upstream tomcat_servers{ ip_hash; server 127.0.0.1:8080; server 127.0.0.1:8081; } ip_hash above configures the load balancing method where requests are routed to servers based on IP Addresses of the client, so a request from a client with a particular IP will always go to the same back end Tomcat Server. Finally, you need to locate the location block within the server block and map the root(/) location to the tomcat_servers group created using the upstream module above. location / { proxy_pass http://tomcat_servers; } That's it!. Restart Nginx and you should now be able to send a request to http://localhost and the request will be served by one of the Tomcat servers.
September 3, 2013
by Ross Mason
· 37,063 Views · 1 Like
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Weblogic Thread Monitoring Tips
If you are working as a middleware administrator or application support individual, you may have realized by now how crucial it is to have proper knowledge of the JVM along with a good understanding of the Java concurrency principles (yes you have to learn how to analyze thread dumps). There is one principle I’m sure about: it is never too late to improve our knowledge and troubleshooting skills. Reaching a skill “plateau” is quite common and typically not due to our ability to learn but because of our fear and lack of willingness to embrace the challenges. One of such challenges is possibly your ability to understand and assess the health of the JVM & middleware threads of the Java EE container you are responsible for such as Oracle Weblogic Server. If this is your situation then this post is for you. Question: How can you monitor the JVM threads in an efficient manner using the Weblogic admin console? Also, please elaborate how you can differentiate between healthy threads vs. slow running threads. Finally, what other tools can help you achieve this task? Answer: Please note that Weblogic Server 10.3.5 was used for the following example. Oracle Weblogic Server is always installed with an admin console that provides you with out-of-the-box monitoring functions of the various Java EE resources exposed via the JMX API. Weblogic threads (created and assigned by the WLS kernel to the default self-tuning thread pool) are also fully exposed. This monitoring page allows you to: Monitor the full list of all Java threads under Weblogic control. Correlate any slow running thread with your application, request and assigned Work Manager, if any. Generate a JVM Thread Dump of the Weblogic managed server directly from the page via the Dump Thread Stacks button. Thread states - summary view This section provides a summary of all different Weblogic threads and states. Thread states - detailed view The detailed view is much more interesting. This is where you will be spending most of your analysis time. Make sure that you add all proper columns including the associated Work Manager, application name etc. The live Weblogic thread monitoring analysis process I usually follow is as per below. This approach is very useful for production environments when you are trying to determine the source of a performance slowdown or just to give you an idea of the health of the Weblogic threads. Refresh the page every 3-5 seconds. In between the refresh actions, identify the threads that are still executing the same request (slow running threads). This can be determined if you see the same Weblogic thread “Name” executing the same “Current Request” with the same “Total requests” value. Other criteria’s would be if Weblogic “promote” the affected thread(s) to Hogger or STUCK. Continue until you are done with your monitoring activity. As soon as one or a few slow running threads are found, identify the affected request(s) and application(s). Immediately after, generate a JVM Thread Dump using the Dump Thread Stacks button and copy/paste the output to a text editor for live or future analysis. I also recommend that you use other tools to monitor the JVM and threads such as JVisualVM. JVisualVM will give a full view of all the threads, including GC related threads. It will also allow you to monitor the Java heap and correlate any finding with the health of the activity of the garbage collector. Finally, if you suspect that you are dealing with a deeper thread concurrency problem such as thread lock contention or Java-level deadlock, you will need to generate a native thread dump (JVisualVM, kill -3 PID, jstack etc.) which will allow you to review the different monitor locks and locked ownable synchronizers.
September 3, 2013
by Pierre - Hugues Charbonneau
· 24,415 Views
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How to Display HTML in Android TextView
This example explains to display HTML in Android TextView. Many times while you design an application, you may encounter a place where you will like to use HTML content in your screen. This may be to display a static “eula” or “help” content. In android there is a lovely class android.text.HTML that processes HTML strings into displayable styled text. Currently android doesn’t support all HTML tags. Android API documentation does not stipulate what HTML tags are supported. I have looked into the android Source code and from a quick look at the source code, here’s what seems to be supported as of now. http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/ext/com.google.android/android/2.2_r1.1/android/text/Html.java , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , From HTML method returns displayable styled text from the provided HTML string. As per );"="" android’s official Documentations any tags in the HTML will display as a generic replacement image which your program can then go through and replace with real images. Html.formHtml method takes an Html.TagHandler and an Html.ImageGetter as arguments as well as the text to parse. We can parse null as for the Html.TagHandler but you’d need to implement your own Html.ImageGetter as there isn’t a default implementation. The Html.ImageGetterneeds to run synchronously and if you’re downloading images from the web you’ll probably want to do that asynchronously. But in my example I am using the images from resources to make my ImageGetter implementation simpler. package com.javatechig.example.ui; import android.os.Bundle; import android.app.Activity; import android.graphics.drawable.Drawable; import android.text.Html; import android.view.Menu; import android.widget.TextView; /* * @author: nilanchala * http://javatechig.com/ */ public class MainActivity extends Activity { private final String htmlText = " Heading TextThis tutorial " + "explains how to display " + "HTML text in android text view. " + "" + " Example from " + "Javatechig.com"; @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.activity_main); TextView htmlTextView = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.html_text); htmlTextView.setText(Html.fromHtml(htmlText, new ImageGetter(), null)); } @Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { // Inflate the menu; this adds items to the action bar if it is present. getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.main, menu); return true; } private class ImageGetter implements Html.ImageGetter { public Drawable getDrawable(String source) { int id; if (source.equals("hughjackman.jpg")) { id = R.drawable.hughjackman; } else { return null; } Drawable d = getResources().getDrawable(id); d.setBounds(0,0,d.getIntrinsicWidth(),d.getIntrinsicHeight()); return d; } }; }
August 30, 2013
by Nilanchala Panigrahy
· 34,052 Views · 2 Likes
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When Reading Excel with POI, Beware of Floating Points
Our problem began when we tried to read a certain cell that contained the value 929 as a numeric field and store it into an integer.
August 30, 2013
by Lieven Doclo
· 48,102 Views · 1 Like
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What is an Inner Interface in Java?
inner interface is also called nested interface, which means declare an interface inside of another interface. for example, the entry interface is declared in the map interface. public interface map { interface entry{ int getkey(); } void clear(); } why use inner interface? there are several compelling reasons for using inner interface: it is a way of logically grouping interfaces that are only used in one place. it increases encapsulation. nested interfaces can lead to more readable and maintainable code. one example of inner interface used in java standard library is java.util.map and java.util.map.entry. here java.util.map is used also as a namespace. entry does not belong to the global scope, which means there are many other entities that are entries and are not necessary map’s entries. this indicates that entry represents entries related to the map. how inner interface works? to figure out how inner interface works, we can compare it with nested classes. nested classes can be considered as a regular method declared in outer class. since a method can be declared as static or non-static, similarly nested classes can be static and non-static. static class is like a static method, it can only access outer class members through objects. non-static class can access any member of the outer class. because an interface can not be instantiated, the inner interface only makes sense if it is static. therefore, by default inter interface is static, no matter you manually add static or not. a simple example of inner interface? map.java public interface map { interface entry{ int getkey(); } void clear(); } mapimpl.java public class mapimpl implements map { class implentry implements map.entry{ public int getkey() { return 0; } } @override public void clear() { //clear } }
August 28, 2013
by Ryan Wang
· 23,264 Views · 2 Likes
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How to create a JQuery DataTable using JSON and Servlet
in this article i’ll introduce the basic coding that require to create jquery datatable using json passed by simple servlet. datatable is very powerful jquery based grid with advance features which can be build in short span of time with customize features. installation 1. download latest jquery datatable download 2. above download will provide two jquery plugin jquery.js and querytables.js 3. default stylesheet which shipped with latest datatable download package note: you can download full source code from github link creating the datatable we can write below code to create the basic datatable with data feedsummary.jsp ========================== $(document).ready will ready to execute the javascript and var otable = $(‘#tableid’).datatable says that write datatable on tableid place. datatables will adding sorting, filtering, paging and information to your table by default, providing the end user of your web-site with the ability to control the display of the table and find the information that they want from it as quickly as possible. the pointer tableid and column name will be defined in table tag as below feedsummary.jsp ===================== first namelast nameaddress 1address 2 above datatable code invoke feedservlet which will return json string as defined below feedservlet.java =============== protected void dopost(httpservletrequest request, httpservletresponse response) throws servletexception, ioexception { printwriter out = response.getwriter(); string json = "{ \"demo\":[[\"first name\",\"last name\","+ +\"address1\",\"address2\"],[\"first name\",\"last name\",\"address1\",\"address2\"]]}"; out.println(json); } now either we can use servlet annotation or web.xml as below to register above feedservlet web.xml ========= feedservlet feedservlet feedservlet feedservlet /feedservlet running incorporate the above point and deploy with server to view the result as follows: http://localhost:8080/exampledatatablejson/feedsummary.jsp jquery datatable image conclusion you can download full source code from github link and most welcome to fork or update the same. references: http://datatables.net/examples/
August 27, 2013
by Nitin Kumar
· 90,237 Views · 1 Like
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The Definitive Guide on How to Use Static, Class or Abstract Methods in Python
Doing code reviews is a great way to discover things that people might struggle to comprehend. While proof-reading OpenStack patches recently, I spotted that people were not correctly using the various decorators Python provides for methods. So, here's my attempt at providing me with a link to send in my next code reviews. :-) How Methods Work in Python A method is a function that is stored as a class attribute. You can declare and access such a function this way: >>> class Pizza(object): ... def __init__(self, size): ... self.size = size ... def get_size(self): ... return self.size ... >>> Pizza.get_size What Python tells you here is that the attribute get_size of the class Pizza is a method that is unbound. What does this mean? We'll know as soon as we try to call it: >>> Pizza.get_size() Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in TypeError: unbound method get_size() must be called with Pizza instance as first argument (got nothing instead) We can't call it because it's not bound to any instance of Pizza. A method wants an instance as its first argument (in Python 2 it must be an instance of that class and in Python 3 it could be anything). Let's try to do that, then: >>> Pizza.get_size(Pizza(42)) 42 It worked! We called the method with an instance as its first argument, so everything's fine. But you will agree with me if I say this is not a very handy way to call methods -- we have to refer to the class each time we want to call a method. And if we don't know what class our object is, this is not going to work for very long. So what Python does for us is that it binds all the methods from the class Pizza to any instance of this class. This means that the attribute get_size of an instance of Pizza is a bound method: a method for which the first argument will be the instance itself. >>> Pizza(42).get_size > >>> Pizza(42).get_size() 42 As expected, we don't have to provide any argument to get_size, since it's bound, its self argument is automatically set to our Pizza instance. Here's an even better proof of that: >>> m = Pizza(42).get_size >>> m() 42 Indeed, you don't even have to keep a reference to your Pizza object. Its method is bound to the object, so the method is sufficient to itself. But what if you wanted to know which object this bound method is bound to? Here's a little trick: >>> m = Pizza(42).get_size >>> m.__self__ <__main__.Pizza object at 0x7f3138827910> >>> # You could guess, look at this: ... >>> m == m.__self__.get_size True Obviously, we still have a reference to our object, and we can find it back if we want. In Python 3, the functions attached to a class are not considered an unbound method anymore, but as simple functions that are bound to an object if required. So the principle stays the same, the model is just simplified. >>> class Pizza(object): ... def __init__(self, size): ... self.size = size ... def get_size(self): ... return self.size ... >>> Pizza.get_size Static Methods Static methods are a special case of methods. Sometimes, you'll write code that belongs to a class, but that doesn't use the object itself at all. For example: class Pizza(object): @staticmethod def mix_ingredients(x, y): return x + y def cook(self): return self.mix_ingredients(self.cheese, self.vegetables) In such a case, writing mix_ingredients as a non-static method would work too, but it would provide a self argument that would not be used. Here, the decorator @staticmethod buys us several things: Python doesn't have to instantiate a bound method for each Pizza object we instiantiate. Bound methods are objects too, and creating them has a cost. Having a static method avoids that: >>> Pizza().cook is Pizza().cook False >>> Pizza().mix_ingredients is Pizza.mix_ingredients True >>> Pizza().mix_ingredients is Pizza().mix_ingredients True It eases the readability of the code: seeing @staticmethod, we know that the method does not depend on the state of object itself. It allows us to override the mix_ingredients method in a subclass. If we used a function mix_ingredients defined at the top-level of our module, a class inheriting from Pizza wouln't be able to change the way we mix ingredients for our pizza without overriding cook itself. Class Methods Having said that, what are class methods? Class methods are methods that are not bound to an object, but to … a class! >>> class Pizza(object): ... radius = 42 ... @classmethod ... def get_radius(cls): ... return cls.radius ... >>> >>> Pizza.get_radius > >>> Pizza().get_radius > >>> Pizza.get_radius is Pizza().get_radius True >>> Pizza.get_radius() 42 No matter which way you use to access this method, it will always be bound to the class it is attached too, and its first argument will be the class itself (remember that classes are objects, too). When to use this kind of method? Well, class methods are mostly useful for two types of methods: Factory methods that are used to create an instance for a class using, for example, some sort of pre-processing. If we use a @staticmethod instead, we would have to hard-code the Pizza class name in our function, making any class inheriting from Pizza unable to use our factory for its own use. class Pizza(object): def __init__(self, ingredients): self.ingredients = ingredients @classmethod def from_fridge(cls, fridge): return cls(fridge.get_cheese() + fridge.get_vegetables()) Static methods calling static methods: if you split a static method in to several static methods, you shouldn't hard-code the class name but you should use class methods. Using this way to declare your method, the Pizza name is never directly referenced, and inheritance and method overriding will work flawlessly class Pizza(object): def __init__(self, radius, height): self.radius = radius self.height = height @staticmethod def compute_circumference(radius): return math.pi * (radius ** 2) @classmethod def compute_volume(cls, height, radius): return height * cls.compute_circumference(radius) def get_volume(self): return self.compute_volume(self.height, self.radius) Abstract Methods An abstract method is a method defined in a base class, but that may not provide any implementation. In Java, it would describe the methods of an interface. So, the simplest way to write an abstract method in Python is: class Pizza(object): def get_radius(self): raise NotImplementedError Any class inheriting from Pizza should implement and override the get_radius method, otherwise an exception would be raised. This particular way of implementing an abstract method has a drawback. If you write a class that inherits from Pizza and forget to implement get_radius, the error will only be raised when you try to use that method. >>> Pizza() <__main__.Pizza object at 0x7fb747353d90> >>> Pizza().get_radius() Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in File "", line 3, in get_radius NotImplementedError There's a way to trigger this way earlier, when the object is being instantiated, using the ABC module that's provided with Python. import abc class BasePizza(object): __metaclass__ = abc.ABCMeta @abc.abstractmethod def get_radius(self): """Method that should do something.""" Using abc and its special class, as soon as you try to instantiate BasePizza or any class inheriting from it, you'll get a TypeError. >>> BasePizza() Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in TypeError: Can't instantiate abstract class BasePizza with abstract methods get_radius Mixing Static, Class and Abstract Methods When building classes and inheritances, the time will come when you will have to mix all of these method decorators. So, here's some tips about such a situation. Keep in mind that declaring a class as abstract doesn't freeze the prototype of that method. That means that it must be implemented, but it can be implemented with any argument list. import abc class BasePizza(object): __metaclass__ = abc.ABCMeta @abc.abstractmethod def get_ingredients(self): """Returns the ingredient list.""" class Calzone(BasePizza): def get_ingredients(self, with_egg=False): egg = Egg() if with_egg else None return self.ingredients + egg This is valid, since Calzone fulfills the interface requirement we defined for BasePizza objects. That means that we could also implement it as being a class or a static method, for example: import abc class BasePizza(object): __metaclass__ = abc.ABCMeta @abc.abstractmethod def get_ingredients(self): """Returns the ingredient list.""" class DietPizza(BasePizza): @staticmethod def get_ingredients(): return None This is also correct and fulfills the contract we have with our abstract BasePizza class. The fact that the get_ingredients method doesn't need to know about the object to return a result is an implementation detail, not a criteria to have our contract fulfilled. Therefore, you can't force an implementation of your abstract method to be a regular, class or static method, and arguably you shouldn't. Starting with Python 3 (this won't work as you would expect in Python 2, see issue 5867), it's now possible to use the @staticmethod and @classmethod decorators on top of @abstractmethod: import abc class BasePizza(object): __metaclass__ = abc.ABCMeta ingredient = ['cheese'] @classmethod @abc.abstractmethod def get_ingredients(cls): """Returns the ingredient list.""" return cls.ingredients Don't misread this: If you think this is going to force your subclasses to implement get_ingredients as a class method, you are wrong. This simply implies that your implementation of get_ingredients in the BasePizza class is a class method. An implementation in an abstract method? Yes! In Python, contrary to methods in Java interfaces, you can have code in your abstract methods and call it via super(): import abc class BasePizza(object): __metaclass__ = abc.ABCMeta default_ingredients = ['cheese'] @classmethod @abc.abstractmethod def get_ingredients(cls): """Returns the ingredient list.""" return cls.default_ingredients class DietPizza(BasePizza): def get_ingredients(self): return ['egg'] + super(DietPizza, self).get_ingredients() In such a case, every pizza you will build by inheriting from BasePizza will have to override the get_ingredients method, but will be able to use the default mechanism to get the ingredient list by using super().
August 21, 2013
by Julien Danjou
· 20,148 Views
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Remove Characters at the Start and End of a String in PHP
In a previous article about how you can remove whitesapce from a string, I spoke about using the functions ltrim() and rtrim(). These work by passing in a string to remove whitespace. Using the ltrim() function will remove the whitespace from the start of the string, using the rtrim() function will remove the whitespace from the end of the string. But you can also use these functions to remove characters from a string. These functions take a second parameter that allows you to specify what characters to remove. // This will search for the word start at the beginning of the string and remove it ltrim($string, 'start'); // This will search for the word end at the end of the string and remove it rtrim($string, 'end'); Remove Trailing Slashes From a String A common use for this functionality is to remove the trailing slash from a URL. Below is a code snippet that allows you to easily do this using the rtrim() function. function remove_trailing_slashes( $url ) { return rtrim($url, '/'); } A common use for the ltrim() function is to remove the "http://" from a URL. Use the function below to remove both "http" and "https" from a URL: function remove_http( $url ) { $url = ltrim($url, 'http://'); $url = ltrim($url, 'https://'); return $url; }
August 20, 2013
by Paul Underwood
· 41,745 Views
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