Previously, we covered some tips and tricks for the Grid control. In this article, we will go over a few tips and tricks for the wx.ListCtrl widget when it’s in “report” mode. Take a look at the tips below: How to create a simple ListCtrl How to sort the rows of a ListCtrl How to make the ListCtrl cells editable in place Associating objects with ListCtrl rows Alternate the row colors of a ListCtrl How to create a simple ListCtrl The list control is a pretty common widget. In Windows, you will see the list control in Windows Explorer. It has four modes: icon, small icon, list, and report. They roughly match up with icons, tiles, list, and details views in Windows Explorer respectively. We’re going to focus on the ListCtrl in Report mode because that’s the mode that most developers use it in. Here’s a simple example of how to create a list control: import wx ######################################################################## class MyForm(wx.Frame): #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self): wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, wx.ID_ANY, "List Control Tutorial") # Add a panel so it looks the correct on all platforms panel = wx.Panel(self, wx.ID_ANY) self.index = 0 self.list_ctrl = wx.ListCtrl(panel, size=(-1,100), style=wx.LC_REPORT |wx.BORDER_SUNKEN ) self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(0, 'Subject') self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(1, 'Due') self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(2, 'Location', width=125) btn = wx.Button(panel, label="Add Line") btn.Bind(wx.EVT_BUTTON, self.add_line) sizer = wx.BoxSizer(wx.VERTICAL) sizer.Add(self.list_ctrl, 0, wx.ALL|wx.EXPAND, 5) sizer.Add(btn, 0, wx.ALL|wx.CENTER, 5) panel.SetSizer(sizer) #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def add_line(self, event): line = "Line %s" % self.index self.list_ctrl.InsertStringItem(self.index, line) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(self.index, 1, "01/19/2010") self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(self.index, 2, "USA") self.index += 1 #---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Run the program if __name__ == "__main__": app = wx.App(False) frame = MyForm() frame.Show() app.MainLoop() As you can probably tell from the code above, it’s really easy to create a ListCtrl instance. Notice that we set the style to report mode using the wx.LC_REPORT flag. To add column headers, we call the ListCtrl’s InsertColumn method and pass an integer to tell the ListCtrl which column is which and a string for the user’s convenience. Yes, the columns are zero-based, so the first column is number zero, the second column is number one, etc. The next important piece is contained in the button’s event handler, add_line, where we learn how to add rows of data to the ListCtrl. The typical method to use is the InsertStringItem method. If you wanted an image added to each row as well, then you’d use a more complicated method like InsertColumnInfo along with the InsertImageStringItem method. You can see how to use them in the wxPython demo. We’re sticking with the easy stuff in this article. Anyway, when you call InsertStringItem you give it the correct row index and a string. You use the SetStringItem method to set the data for the other columns of the row. Notice that the SetStringItem method requires three parameters: the row index, the column index and a string. Lastly, we increment the row index so we don’t overwrite anything. Now you can get out there and make your own! Let’s continue and find out how to sort rows! How to sort the rows of a ListCtrl The ListCtrl widget has had some extra scripts written for it that add functionality to the widget. These scripts are called mixins. You can read about them here. For this recipe, we’ll be using the ColumnSorterMixin mixin. The code below is a stripped down version of one of the wxPython demo examples. import wx import wx.lib.mixins.listctrl as listmix musicdata = { 0 : ("Bad English", "The Price Of Love", "Rock"), 1 : ("DNA featuring Suzanne Vega", "Tom's Diner", "Rock"), 2 : ("George Michael", "Praying For Time", "Rock"), 3 : ("Gloria Estefan", "Here We Are", "Rock"), 4 : ("Linda Ronstadt", "Don't Know Much", "Rock"), 5 : ("Michael Bolton", "How Am I Supposed To Live Without You", "Blues"), 6 : ("Paul Young", "Oh Girl", "Rock"), } ######################################################################## class TestListCtrl(wx.ListCtrl): #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self, parent, ID=wx.ID_ANY, pos=wx.DefaultPosition, size=wx.DefaultSize, style=0): wx.ListCtrl.__init__(self, parent, ID, pos, size, style) ######################################################################## class TestListCtrlPanel(wx.Panel, listmix.ColumnSorterMixin): #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self, parent): wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent, -1, style=wx.WANTS_CHARS) self.index = 0 self.list_ctrl = TestListCtrl(self, size=(-1,100), style=wx.LC_REPORT |wx.BORDER_SUNKEN |wx.LC_SORT_ASCENDING ) self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(0, "Artist") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(1, "Title", wx.LIST_FORMAT_RIGHT) self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(2, "Genre") items = musicdata.items() index = 0 for key, data in items: self.list_ctrl.InsertStringItem(index, data[0]) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 1, data[1]) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 2, data[2]) self.list_ctrl.SetItemData(index, key) index += 1 # Now that the list exists we can init the other base class, # see wx/lib/mixins/listctrl.py self.itemDataMap = musicdata listmix.ColumnSorterMixin.__init__(self, 3) self.Bind(wx.EVT_LIST_COL_CLICK, self.OnColClick, self.list_ctrl) sizer = wx.BoxSizer(wx.VERTICAL) sizer.Add(self.list_ctrl, 0, wx.ALL|wx.EXPAND, 5) self.SetSizer(sizer) #---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Used by the ColumnSorterMixin, see wx/lib/mixins/listctrl.py def GetListCtrl(self): return self.list_ctrl #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def OnColClick(self, event): print "column clicked" event.Skip() ######################################################################## class MyForm(wx.Frame): #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self): wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, wx.ID_ANY, "List Control Tutorial") # Add a panel so it looks the correct on all platforms panel = TestListCtrlPanel(self) #---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Run the program if __name__ == "__main__": app = wx.App(False) frame = MyForm() frame.Show() app.MainLoop() This code is a little on the odd side in that we have inherit the mixin in the wx.Panel based class rather than the wx.ListCtrl class. You can do it either way though as long as you rearrange the code correctly. Anyway, we are going to home in on the key differences between this example and the previous one. The first difference of major importance is in the looping construct where we insert the list control’s data. Here we include the list control’s SetItemData method to include the necessary inner-workings that allow the sorting to take place. As you might have guessed, this method associates the row index with the music data dict’s key. Next we instantiate the ColumnSorterMixin and tell it how many columns there are in the list control. We could have left the EVT_LIST_COL_CLICK binding off this example as it has nothing to do with the actual sorting of the rows, but in the interest of increasing your knowledge, it was left in. All it does is show you how to catch the user’s column click event. The rest of the code is self-explanatory. If you want to know about the requirements for this mixin, especially when you have images in your rows, please see the relevant section in the source (i.e. listctrl.py). Now, wasn’t that easy? Let’s continue our journey and find out how to make the cells editable! How to make the ListCtrl cells editable in place Sometimes, the programmer will want to allow the user to click on a cell and edit it in place. This is kind of a lightweight version of the wx.grid.Grid control. Here’s an example: import wx import wx.lib.mixins.listctrl as listmix ######################################################################## class EditableListCtrl(wx.ListCtrl, listmix.TextEditMixin): ''' TextEditMixin allows any column to be edited. ''' #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self, parent, ID=wx.ID_ANY, pos=wx.DefaultPosition, size=wx.DefaultSize, style=0): """Constructor""" wx.ListCtrl.__init__(self, parent, ID, pos, size, style) listmix.TextEditMixin.__init__(self) ######################################################################## class MyPanel(wx.Panel): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self, parent): """Constructor""" wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent) rows = [("Ford", "Taurus", "1996", "Blue"), ("Nissan", "370Z", "2010", "Green"), ("Porche", "911", "2009", "Red") ] self.list_ctrl = EditableListCtrl(self, style=wx.LC_REPORT) self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(0, "Make") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(1, "Model") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(2, "Year") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(3, "Color") index = 0 for row in rows: self.list_ctrl.InsertStringItem(index, row[0]) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 1, row[1]) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 2, row[2]) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 3, row[3]) index += 1 sizer = wx.BoxSizer(wx.VERTICAL) sizer.Add(self.list_ctrl, 0, wx.ALL|wx.EXPAND, 5) self.SetSizer(sizer) ######################################################################## class MyFrame(wx.Frame): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self): """Constructor""" wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, wx.ID_ANY, "Editable List Control") panel = MyPanel(self) self.Show() #---------------------------------------------------------------------- if __name__ == "__main__": app = wx.App(False) frame = MyFrame() app.MainLoop() In this script, we put the TextEditMixin in our wx.ListCtrl class instead of our wx.Panel, which is the opposite of the previous example. The mixin itself does all the heavy lifting. Again, you’ll have to check out the mixin’s source to really understand how it works. Associating objects with ListCtrl rows This subject comes up a lot: How do I associate data (i.e. objects) with my ListCtrl’s rows? Well, we’re going to find out exactly how to do that with the following code: import wx ######################################################################## class Car(object): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self, make, model, year, color="Blue"): """Constructor""" self.make = make self.model = model self.year = year self.color = color ######################################################################## class MyPanel(wx.Panel): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self, parent): """Constructor""" wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent) rows = [Car("Ford", "Taurus", "1996"), Car("Nissan", "370Z", "2010"), Car("Porche", "911", "2009", "Red") ] self.list_ctrl = wx.ListCtrl(self, size=(-1,100), style=wx.LC_REPORT |wx.BORDER_SUNKEN ) self.list_ctrl.Bind(wx.EVT_LIST_ITEM_SELECTED, self.onItemSelected) self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(0, "Make") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(1, "Model") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(2, "Year") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(3, "Color") index = 0 self.myRowDict = {} for row in rows: self.list_ctrl.InsertStringItem(index, row.make) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 1, row.model) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 2, row.year) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 3, row.color) self.myRowDict[index] = row index += 1 sizer = wx.BoxSizer(wx.VERTICAL) sizer.Add(self.list_ctrl, 0, wx.ALL|wx.EXPAND, 5) self.SetSizer(sizer) #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def onItemSelected(self, event): """""" currentItem = event.m_itemIndex car = self.myRowDict[currentItem] print car.make print car.model print car.color print car.year ######################################################################## class MyFrame(wx.Frame): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self): """Constructor""" wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, wx.ID_ANY, "List Control Tutorial") panel = MyPanel(self) self.Show() #---------------------------------------------------------------------- if __name__ == "__main__": app = wx.App(False) frame = MyFrame() app.MainLoop() The list control widget actually doesn’t have a built-in way to accomplish this feat. If you want that, then you’ll want to check out the ObjectListView widget, which wraps the ListCtrl and gives it a lot more functionality. In the meantime, we’ll take a minute and go over the code above. The first piece is just a plain Car class with four attributes. Then in the MyPanel class, we create a list of Car objects that we’ll use for the ListCtrl’s data. To add the data to the ListCtrl, we use a for loop to iterate over the list. We also associate each row with a Car object using a Python dictionary. We use the row’s index for the key and the dict’s value ends up being the Car object. This allows us to access all the Car/row object’s data later on in the onItemSelected method. Let’s check that out! In onItemSelected, we grab the row’s index with the following little trick: event.m_itemIndex. Then we use that value as the key for our dictionary so that we can gain access to the Car object associated with that row. At this point, we just print out all the Car object’s attributes, but you could do whatever you want here. This basic idea could easily be extended to use a result set from a SqlAlchemy query for the ListCtrl’s data. Hopefully you get the general idea. Now if you were paying close attention, like Robin Dunn (creator of wxPython) was, then you might notice some really silly logic errors in this code. Did you find them? Well, you won’t see it unless you sort the rows, delete a row or insert a row. Do you see it now? Yes, I stupidly based the “unique” key in my dictionary on the row’s position, which will change if any of those events happen. So let’s look at a better example: import wx ######################################################################## class Car(object): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self, make, model, year, color="Blue"): """Constructor""" self.id = id(self) self.make = make self.model = model self.year = year self.color = color ######################################################################## class MyPanel(wx.Panel): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self, parent): """Constructor""" wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent) rows = [Car("Ford", "Taurus", "1996"), Car("Nissan", "370Z", "2010"), Car("Porche", "911", "2009", "Red") ] self.list_ctrl = wx.ListCtrl(self, size=(-1,100), style=wx.LC_REPORT |wx.BORDER_SUNKEN ) self.list_ctrl.Bind(wx.EVT_LIST_ITEM_SELECTED, self.onItemSelected) self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(0, "Make") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(1, "Model") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(2, "Year") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(3, "Color") index = 0 self.myRowDict = {} for row in rows: self.list_ctrl.InsertStringItem(index, row.make) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 1, row.model) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 2, row.year) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 3, row.color) self.list_ctrl.SetItemData(index, row.id) self.myRowDict[row.id] = row index += 1 sizer = wx.BoxSizer(wx.VERTICAL) sizer.Add(self.list_ctrl, 0, wx.ALL|wx.EXPAND, 5) self.SetSizer(sizer) #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def onItemSelected(self, event): """""" currentItem = event.m_itemIndex car = self.myRowDict[self.list_ctrl.GetItemData(currentItem)] print car.make print car.model print car.color print car.year ######################################################################## class MyFrame(wx.Frame): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self): """Constructor""" wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, wx.ID_ANY, "List Control Tutorial") panel = MyPanel(self) self.Show() #---------------------------------------------------------------------- if __name__ == "__main__": app = wx.App(False) frame = MyFrame() app.MainLoop() In this example, we add a new attribute to our Car class that creates a unique id for each instance that is created using Python’s handy id builtin. Then in the loop where we add the data to the list control, we call the widget’s SetItemData method and give it the row index and the car instance’s unique id. Now it doesn’t matter where the row ends up because it’s had the unique id affixed to it. Finally, we have to modify the onItemSelected to get the right object. The magic happens in this code: # this code was helpfully provided by Robin Dunn car = self.myRowDict[self.list_ctrl.GetItemData(currentItem)] Cool, huh? Our last example will cover how to alternate the row colors, so let’s take a look! Alternate the row colors of a ListCtrl As this section’s title suggests, we will look at how to alternate colors of the rows of a ListCtrl. Here’s the code: import wx import wx.lib.mixins.listctrl as listmix ######################################################################## class MyPanel(wx.Panel): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self, parent): """Constructor""" wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent) rows = [("Ford", "Taurus", "1996", "Blue"), ("Nissan", "370Z", "2010", "Green"), ("Porche", "911", "2009", "Red") ] self.list_ctrl = wx.ListCtrl(self, style=wx.LC_REPORT) self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(0, "Make") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(1, "Model") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(2, "Year") self.list_ctrl.InsertColumn(3, "Color") index = 0 for row in rows: self.list_ctrl.InsertStringItem(index, row[0]) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 1, row[1]) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 2, row[2]) self.list_ctrl.SetStringItem(index, 3, row[3]) if index % 2: self.list_ctrl.SetItemBackgroundColour(index, "white") else: self.list_ctrl.SetItemBackgroundColour(index, "yellow") index += 1 sizer = wx.BoxSizer(wx.VERTICAL) sizer.Add(self.list_ctrl, 0, wx.ALL|wx.EXPAND, 5) self.SetSizer(sizer) ######################################################################## class MyFrame(wx.Frame): """""" #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def __init__(self): """Constructor""" wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, wx.ID_ANY, "List Control w/ Alternate Colors") panel = MyPanel(self) self.Show() #---------------------------------------------------------------------- if __name__ == "__main__": app = wx.App(False) frame = MyFrame() app.MainLoop() The code above will alternate each row’s background color. Thus you should see yellow and white rows. We do this by calling the ListCtrl instance’s SetItemBackgroundColour method. If you were using a virtual list control, then you’d want to override the OnGetItemAttr method. To see an example of the latter method, open up your copy of the wxPython demo; there’s one in there. Wrapping Up We’ve covered a lot of ground here. You should now be able to do a lot more with your wx.ListCtrl than when you started, assuming you’re new to using it, of course. Feel free to ask questions in the comments or suggest future recipes. I hope you found this helpful! Note: All examples were tested on Windows XP with Python 2.5 and wxPython 2.8.10.1. They were also tested on Windows 7 Professional with Python 2.6 Additional Reading The official wxPython wx.ListCtrl documentation The ListControls wiki page ListCtrl Tooltips wiki page The ObjectListView website The UltimateListCtrl, a pure Python implementation now included with wxPython Source Code listctrl.zip listctrl.tar Source: http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2011/01/04/wxpython-wx-listctrl-tips-and-tricks/

The simplest in-memory cache implementation should support Addition of objects into cache either via key-value, or via object creation mechanism Deletion of objects from cache based on key, or object type Querying cache store to check existence of an object There are several ways to achieve this using multiple design patterns. But if we were to implement those design patterns in our applications, we would end up designing a framework similar to Enterprise Library Caching block. So to keep things fairly simple – we need a simple implementation of caching objects in-memory and this cache to be thread-safe for multi-threading applications. So for that, you can just copy this piece of code into your application and you should be all set with an in-memory cache. public static class CacheStore { /// /// In-memory cache dictionary /// private static Dictionary _cache; private static object _sync; /// /// Cache initializer /// static CacheStore() { _cache = new Dictionary(); _sync = new object(); } /// /// Check if an object exists in cache /// /// Type of object /// Name of key in cache /// True, if yes; False, otherwise public static bool Exists(string key) where T : class { Type type = typeof(T); lock (_sync) { return _cache.ContainsKey(type.Name + key); } } /// /// Check if an object exists in cache /// /// Type of object /// True, if yes; False, otherwise public static bool Exists() where T : class { Type type = typeof(T); lock (_sync) { return _cache.ContainsKey(type.Name); } } /// /// Get an object from cache /// /// Type of object /// Object from cache public static T Get() where T : class { Type type = typeof(T); lock (_sync) { if (_cache.ContainsKey(type.Name) == false) throw new ApplicationException("An object of the desired type does not exist: " + type.Name); lock (_sync) { return (T)_cache[type.Name]; } } } /// /// Get an object from cache /// /// Type of object /// Name of key in cache /// Object from cache public static T Get(string key) where T : class { Type type = typeof(T); lock (_sync) { if (_cache.ContainsKey(key + type.Name) == false) throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("An object with key '{0}' does not exists", key)); lock (_sync) { return (T)_cache[key + type.Name]; } } } /// /// Create default instance of the object and add it in cache /// /// Class whose object is to be created /// Object of the class public static T Create(string key, params object[] constructorParameters) where T : class { Type type = typeof(T); T value = (T)Activator.CreateInstance(type, constructorParameters); lock (_sync) { if (_cache.ContainsKey(key + type.Name)) throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("An object with key '{0}' already exists", key)); lock (_sync) { _cache.Add(key + type.Name, value); } } return value; } /// /// Create default instance of the object and add it in cache /// /// Class whose object is to be created /// Object of the class public static T Create(params object[] constructorParameters) where T : class { Type type = typeof(T); T value = (T)Activator.CreateInstance(type, constructorParameters); lock (_sync) { if (_cache.ContainsKey(type.Name)) throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("An object of type '{0}' already exists", type.Name)); lock (_sync) { _cache.Add(type.Name, value); } } return value; } public static void Add(string key, T value) { Type type = typeof(T); if (value.GetType() != type) throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("The type of value passed to cache {0} does not match the cache type {1} for key {2}", value.GetType().FullName, type.FullName, key)); lock (_sync) { if (_cache.ContainsKey(key + type.Name)) throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("An object with key '{0}' already exists", key)); lock (_sync) { _cache.Add(key + type.Name, value); } } } /// /// Remove an object type from cache /// /// Type of object public void Remove() { Type type = typeof(T); lock (_sync) { if (_cache.ContainsKey(type.Name) == false) throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("An object of type '{0}' does not exists in cache", type.Name)); lock (_sync) { _cache.Remove(type.Name); } } } /// /// Remove an object stored with a key from cache /// /// Type of object /// Key of the object public void Remove(string key) { Type type = typeof(T); lock (_sync) { if (_cache.ContainsKey(key + type.Name) == false) throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("An object with key '{0}' does not exists in cache", key)); lock (_sync) { _cache.Remove(key + type.Name); } } } } Every method has 2 overloads With Key as a parameter: This method adds a new key-value in the cache store for a particular object type. This also means that for a particular object (say Employee), you can have multiple cached-objects (say, multiple employees in an organization) Without Key as a parameter – This method adds a new key (type of the object) and value in the cache store. This means, for a particular object type (say ConfigurationSettings) there will single object in the cache (say, configuration value) Implementation example using CacheStore is: MonoAssemblyResolver targetAssembly = null; if (CacheStore.Exists(projMapping.TargetAssemblyPath)) { targetAssembly = CacheStore.Get(projMapping.TargetAssemblyPath); } else { targetAssembly = new MonoAssemblyResolver(projMapping.TargetAssemblyPath); CacheStore.Add(projMapping.TargetAssemblyPath, targetAssembly); } Since this uses plain-C# and is light weight, this can be used in ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, WPF, or Windows Phone applications. So happy coding! Source: http://www.ganshani.com/2012/01/31/in-memory-cache-implementation-in-c

We all know the Java platform allows us to create reusable objects in memory. However, all of those objects exist only as long as the Java virtual machine remains running. It would be nice if the objects we create could exist beyond the lifetime of the virtual machine. Well, with object serialization, you can flatten your objects and reuse them in powerful ways. Object serialization is the process of saving an object’s state to a sequence of bytes, as well as the process of rebuilding those bytes into a live object at some future time. The Java Serialization API provides a standard mechanism for developers to handle object serialization. The API is small and easy to use, provided the classes and methods are understood. By implementating java.io.Serializable, you get “automatic” serialization capability for objects of your class. No need to implement any other logic, it’ll just work. The Java runtime will use reflection to figure out how to marshal and unmarshal your objects. In earlier version of Java, reflection was very slow, and so serializaing large object graphs (e.g. in client-server RMI applications) was a bit of a performance problem. To handle this situation, the java.io.Externalizable interface was provided, which is like java.io.Serializable but with custom-written mechanisms to perform the marshalling and unmarshalling functions (you need to implement readExternal and writeExternal methods on your class). This gives you the means to get around the reflection performance bottleneck. In recent versions of Java (1.3 onwards, certainly) the performance of reflection is vastly better than it used to be, and so this is much less of a problem. I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to get a meaningful benefit from Externalizable with a modern JVM. Also, the built-in Java serialization mechanism isn’t the only one, you can get third-party replacements, such as JBoss Serialization, which is considerably quicker, and is a drop-in replacement for the default. A big downside of Externalizable is that you have to maintain this logic yourself – if you add, remove or change a field in your class, you have to change your writeExternal/readExternal methods to account for it. In summary, Externalizable is a relic of the Java 1.1 days. There’s really no need for it any more. References http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Programming/serialization http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/Serializable.html http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/Externalizable.html From http://singztechmusings.in/marshalling-unmarshalling-java-objects-serialization-vs-externalization/

In previous posts I compared JAXB (JSR-222) to Simple and XStream when starting from Java objects. In this post I'll compare JAXB to XMLBeans when starting from an XML schema. I will use XMLBeans 2.5.0 (December 2009) which is the latest release. XML Schema (customer.xsd) Below is the XML schema that will be used to generate our domain models. Generating the Classes XMLBeans Below is the call to generate the XMLBeans classes from our XML schema. For the purposes of this example we will use the -srconly flag to generate only the source. 1 scomp -d out -srconly customer.xsd Below are all the artifacts that are generated by XMLBeans. The XML Schema Binary (XSB) files contain metadata need to perform binding and validation: com/example Address.java CustomerDocument.java PhoneNumber.java com/example/impl AddressImpl.java CustomerDocumentImpl.java PhoneNumberImpl.java schemaorg_apache_xmlbeans element/http_3A_2F_2Fwww_2Eexample_2Ecom customer.xsb javaname/com/example Address.xsb CustomerDocument.xsb PhoneNumber.xsb CustomerDocument Customer.xsb namespace/http_3A_2F_2Fwww_2Eexample_2Ecom xmlns.xsb src customer.xsd system/s16C99350D7D3A2544A7BFD5E35CA8BC8 address6f49type.xsb customer3fdddoctype.xsb customer11d7elemtype.xsb customerelement.xsb index.xsb phonenumber9c83type.xsb TypeSystemHolder.class type/http_3A_2F_2Fwww_2Eexample_2Ecom address.xsb phone_2Dnumber.xsb JAXB Below is the call to generate the JAXB classes from an XML schema: 1 xjc -d out customer.xsd Below are all the artifacts that are generated by JAXB. Note how many fewer artifacts are created: com.example Address.java Customer.java ObjectFactory.java package-info.java PhoneNumber.java Java Model - XMLBeans XMLBeans produces a set of Java interfaces that are backed by implementation classes. Below we will examine one of these pairs. Address This is one of the interfaces that is generated by XMLBeans. There are a few interesting things worth noting: This interface exposes POJO properties (line 24), and a DOM like model (line 29). This interface includes a factory (line 66). This factory is used for creating instances of the Address object (line 68), and for unmarshalling instances of Address from XML (line 75). package com.example; /** * An XML address(@http://www.example.com). * * This is a complex type. */ public interface Address extends org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlObject { public static final org.apache.xmlbeans.SchemaType type = (org.apache.xmlbeans.SchemaType) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.typeSystemForClassLoader(Address.class.getClassLoader(), "schemaorg_apache_xmlbeans.system.s16C99350D7D3A2544A7BFD5E35CA8BC8").resolveHandle("address6f49type"); /** * Gets the "street" element */ java.lang.String getStreet(); /** * Gets (as xml) the "street" element */ org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString xgetStreet(); /** * Sets the "street" element */ void setStreet(java.lang.String street); /** * Sets (as xml) the "street" element */ void xsetStreet(org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString street); /** * Gets the "city" element */ java.lang.String getCity(); /** * Gets (as xml) the "city" element */ org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString xgetCity(); /** * Sets the "city" element */ void setCity(java.lang.String city); /** * Sets (as xml) the "city" element */ void xsetCity(org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString city); /** * A factory class with static methods for creating instances * of this type. */ public static final class Factory { public static com.example.Address newInstance() { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().newInstance( type, null ); } public static com.example.Address newInstance(org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().newInstance( type, options ); } /** @param xmlAsString the string value to parse */ public static com.example.Address parse(java.lang.String xmlAsString) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( xmlAsString, type, null ); } public static com.example.Address parse(java.lang.String xmlAsString, org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( xmlAsString, type, options ); } /** @param file the file from which to load an xml document */ public static com.example.Address parse(java.io.File file) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, java.io.IOException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( file, type, null ); } public static com.example.Address parse(java.io.File file, org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, java.io.IOException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( file, type, options ); } public static com.example.Address parse(java.net.URL u) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, java.io.IOException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( u, type, null ); } public static com.example.Address parse(java.net.URL u, org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, java.io.IOException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( u, type, options ); } public static com.example.Address parse(java.io.InputStream is) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, java.io.IOException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( is, type, null ); } public static com.example.Address parse(java.io.InputStream is, org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, java.io.IOException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( is, type, options ); } public static com.example.Address parse(java.io.Reader r) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, java.io.IOException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( r, type, null ); } public static com.example.Address parse(java.io.Reader r, org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, java.io.IOException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( r, type, options ); } public static com.example.Address parse(javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamReader sr) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( sr, type, null ); } public static com.example.Address parse(javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamReader sr, org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( sr, type, options ); } public static com.example.Address parse(org.w3c.dom.Node node) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( node, type, null ); } public static com.example.Address parse(org.w3c.dom.Node node, org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( node, type, options ); } /** @deprecated {@link org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream} */ public static com.example.Address parse(org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream xis) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLStreamException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( xis, type, null ); } /** @deprecated {@link org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream} */ public static com.example.Address parse(org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream xis, org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLStreamException { return (com.example.Address) org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().parse( xis, type, options ); } /** @deprecated {@link org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream} */ public static org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream newValidatingXMLInputStream(org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream xis) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLStreamException { return org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().newValidatingXMLInputStream( xis, type, null ); } /** @deprecated {@link org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream} */ public static org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream newValidatingXMLInputStream(org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLInputStream xis, org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlOptions options) throws org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlException, org.apache.xmlbeans.xml.stream.XMLStreamException { return org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlBeans.getContextTypeLoader().newValidatingXMLInputStream( xis, type, options ); } private Factory() { } // No instance of this class allowed } } AddressImpl Below is the source for the implementation class: /** * XML Type: address * Namespace: http://www.example.com * Java type: com.example.Address * * Automatically generated - do not modify. */ package com.example.impl; /** * An XML address(@http://www.example.com). * * This is a complex type. */ public class AddressImpl extends org.apache.xmlbeans.impl.values.XmlComplexContentImpl implements com.example.Address { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; public AddressImpl(org.apache.xmlbeans.SchemaType sType) { super(sType); } private static final javax.xml.namespace.QName STREET$0 = new javax.xml.namespace.QName("http://www.example.com", "street"); private static final javax.xml.namespace.QName CITY$2 = new javax.xml.namespace.QName("http://www.example.com", "city"); /** * Gets the "street" element */ public java.lang.String getStreet() { synchronized (monitor()) { check_orphaned(); org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue target = null; target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue)get_store().find_element_user(STREET$0, 0); if (target == null) { return null; } return target.getStringValue(); } } /** * Gets (as xml) the "street" element */ public org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString xgetStreet() { synchronized (monitor()) { check_orphaned(); org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString target = null; target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString)get_store().find_element_user(STREET$0, 0); return target; } } /** * Sets the "street" element */ public void setStreet(java.lang.String street) { synchronized (monitor()) { check_orphaned(); org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue target = null; target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue)get_store().find_element_user(STREET$0, 0); if (target == null) { target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue)get_store().add_element_user(STREET$0); } target.setStringValue(street); } } /** * Sets (as xml) the "street" element */ public void xsetStreet(org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString street) { synchronized (monitor()) { check_orphaned(); org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString target = null; target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString)get_store().find_element_user(STREET$0, 0); if (target == null) { target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString)get_store().add_element_user(STREET$0); } target.set(street); } } /** * Gets the "city" element */ public java.lang.String getCity() { synchronized (monitor()) { check_orphaned(); org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue target = null; target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue)get_store().find_element_user(CITY$2, 0); if (target == null) { return null; } return target.getStringValue(); } } /** * Gets (as xml) the "city" element */ public org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString xgetCity() { synchronized (monitor()) { check_orphaned(); org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString target = null; target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString)get_store().find_element_user(CITY$2, 0); return target; } } /** * Sets the "city" element */ public void setCity(java.lang.String city) { synchronized (monitor()) { check_orphaned(); org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue target = null; target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue)get_store().find_element_user(CITY$2, 0); if (target == null) { target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.SimpleValue)get_store().add_element_user(CITY$2); } target.setStringValue(city); } } /** * Sets (as xml) the "city" element */ public void xsetCity(org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString city) { synchronized (monitor()) { check_orphaned(); org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString target = null; target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString)get_store().find_element_user(CITY$2, 0); if (target == null) { target = (org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlString)get_store().add_element_user(CITY$2); } target.set(city); } } } Java Model - JAXB JAXB implementations produce annotated POJOs. The generated classes closely resemble the ones we created by hand in the comparisons to Simple and XStream. Address // // This file was generated by the JavaTM Architecture for XML Binding(JAXB) Reference Implementation, vJAXB 2.1.10 in JDK 6 // See http://java.sun.com/xml/jaxb // Any modifications to this file will be lost upon recompilation of the source schema. // Generated on: 2012.01.23 at 01:19:09 PM EST // package com.example; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessType; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessorType; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElement; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlType; /** * Java class for address complex type. * * The following schema fragment specifies the expected content contained within this class. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * */ @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) @XmlType(name = "address", propOrder = { "street", "city" }) public class Address { @XmlElement(required = true) protected String street; @XmlElement(required = true) protected String city; /** * Gets the value of the street property. * * @return * possible object is * {@link String } * */ public String getStreet() { return street; } /** * Sets the value of the street property. * * @param value * allowed object is * {@link String } * */ public void setStreet(String value) { this.street = value; } /** * Gets the value of the city property. * * @return * possible object is * {@link String } * */ public String getCity() { return city; } /** * Sets the value of the city property. * * @param value * allowed object is * {@link String } * */ public void setCity(String value) { this.city = value; } } Demo Code In the demo code we will unmarshal an XML file, add a phone number to the resulting customer object, and then marshal the customer back to XML. XMLBeans With XMLBeans the generated domain model is used to unmarshal (line 12) and marshal (line 19). The generated model also contains methods for interacting with collections (line 15), this is necessary as XMLBeans represent collection properties as arrays. package com.example; import java.io.File; import com.example.CustomerDocument.Customer; public class Demo { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { File xml = new File("src/com/example/input.xml"); CustomerDocument customerDocument = CustomerDocument.Factory.parse(xml); Customer customer = customerDocument.getCustomer(); PhoneNumber homePhoneNumber = customer.addNewPhoneNumber(); homePhoneNumber.setType("home"); homePhoneNumber.set("555-HOME"); customerDocument.save(System.out); } } JAXB JAXB separates the marshal/unmarshal calls into the standard runtime APIs (lines 9, 13 and 22). A java.util.List is used for collection properties (line 18). package com.example; import java.io.File; import javax.xml.bind.*; public class Demo { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance("com.example"); File xml = new File("src/com/example/input.xml"); Unmarshaller unmarshaller = jc.createUnmarshaller(); Customer customer = (Customer) unmarshaller.unmarshal(xml); PhoneNumber homePhoneNumber = new PhoneNumber(); homePhoneNumber.setType("home"); homePhoneNumber.setValue("555-HOME"); customer.getPhoneNumber().add(homePhoneNumber); Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller(); marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true); marshaller.marshal(customer, System.out); } } Summary Both XMLBeans and JAXB produce Java models that make it easy for developers to interact with XML. The JAXB model however is annotated POJOs which has the following advantages: JPA annotations could easily be applied to the JAXB model enabling the model to be persisted in a relational database. Once generated the JAXB model could be modified to handle changes in the XML schema, the XMLBeans model would need to be regenerated. Starting with Java SE 6 no additional compile/runtime dependencies are required for the JAXB model. There are multiple JAXB implementations available: EclipseLink MOXy, Metro, Apache JaxMe, etc. JAXB is the standard binding layer for JAX-WS (SOAP) and JAX-RS (RESTful) Web Services. From http://blog.bdoughan.com/2012/01/how-does-jaxb-compare-to-xmlbeans.html

Add following javascript function to aspx page function check() { alert("this is check value " + ''); } Add following variable declaration on server side i.e aspx.cs public string checkvalue ="indrnilhafa";

I was looking at the pycon US 2012 website when I stumbled upon the huge list of sponsors, which is really impressive. It got me thinking. Are all of these companies using python? If so, which ones are the best companies to work for? If it was up to you, and location and money wasn't a factor, what company would you work for and why? If you already work at one of these companies, can you share what it is you use python for, and what it is like working there? Here is a list of companies that use Python, in no particular order (most of these are pycon US 2012 sponsors). If I missed a company, please let me know. DropBox Heroku Google surveymonkey nebula nasuni microsoft gondor facebook eventbrite new relic zeomega CashStar.com linode dotcloud ccp games revolution systems canonical bit.ly activestate caktus group disqus leapfrog online spotify snoball evite plaidcloud mozilla lab305 walt disney animation studios white oak technologies aldebaran robotics cloud foundry stratasan myyearbook.com threadless cisco kontagent toast driven accense technology net-ng truveris kelly creative tech aarki freshbooks wisertogether bitbucket eucalyptus fwix imaginary landscape cox media group openstack devsar emma shining panda vocollect bigdoor reddit dreamhost Red hat Quora Yelp mixpanel justin.tv YouTube Digg Urban Airship Rackspace To parcipate in this discussion, check out the Survey.

WADL (Web Application Description Language) is to REST what WSDL is to SOAP. The mere existence of this language causes a lot of controversy (see: Do we need WADL? and To WADL or not to WADL). I can think of few legitimate use cases for using WADL, but if you are here already, you are probably not seeking for yet another discussion. So let us move forward to the WADL itself. In principle WADL is similar to WSDL, but the structure of the language is much different. Whilst WSDL defines a flat list of messages and operations either consuming or producing some of them, WADL emphasizes the hierarchical nature of RESTful web services. In REST, the primary artifact is the resource. Each resource (noun) is represented as an URI. Every resource can define both CRUD operations (verbs, implemented as HTTP methods) and nested resources. The nested resource has a strong relationship with a parent resource, typically representing an ownership. A simple example would be http://example.com/api/books resource representing a list of books. You can (HTTP) GET this resource, meaning to retrieve the whole list. You can also GET the http://example.com/api/books/7 resource, fetching the details of 7th book inside books resource. Or you can even PUT new version or DELETE the resource altogether using the same URI. You are not limited to a single level of nesting: GETting http://example.com/api/books/7/reviews?page=2&size=10 will retrieve the second page (up to 10 items) of reviews of 7th book. Obviously you can also place other resources next to books, like http://example.com/api/readers The requirement arose to formally and precisely describe every available resource, method, request and response, just like WSDL guys were able to do. WADL is one of the options to describe “available URIs", although some believe that well-written REST service should be self-descriptive (see HATEOAS). Nevertheless here is a simple, empty WADL document: Nothing fancy here. Note that the tag defines base API address. All named resources, which we are just about to add, are relative to this address. Also you can define several tags to describe more than one APIs. So, let's add a simple resource: This defines resource under http://example.com/api/books with two methods possible: GET to retrieve the whole list and POST to create (add) new item. Depending on your requirements you might want to allow DELETE method as well (to delete all items), and it is the responsibility of WADL to document what is allowed. Remember our example at the beginning: /books/7? Obviously 7 is just an example and we won't declare every possible book id in WADL. Instead there is a handy placeholder syntax:There are two important aspects you should note: first, The {bookId} place-holder was used in place of nested resource. Secondly, to make it clear, we are documenting this place-holder using tag. We will see soon how it can be used in combination with methods. Just to make sure you are still with me, the document above describes GET /books and GET /books/some_id resources. The web service is getting complex, however it describes quite a lot of operations. First of all GET /books/42/reviews is a valid operation. But the interesting part is the nested tag. As you can see we can describe parameters of each method independently. In our case optional query parameters (as opposed to template parameters used previously for URI place-holders) were defined. This gives the client additional knowledge about acceptable page and size query parameters. This means that /books/7/reviews?page=2&size=10 is a valid resource identifier. And did I mention that every resource, method and parameter can have documentation attached as per the WADL specification? We will stop here and only mention about remaining pieces of WADL. First of all, as you have probably guessed so far, there is also a child tag possible for each . Both request and response can define exact grammar (e.g. in XML Schema) that either the request or the response must follow. The response can also document possible HTTP response codes. But since we will be using the knowledge you have gained so far in a code-first application, I intentionally left the definition. WADL is agile and it allows you to define as little (or as much) information as you need. So we know the basics of WADL, now we would like to use it, maybe as a consumer or as a producer in a Java-based application. Fortunately there is a wadl.xsd XML Schema description of the language itself, which we can use to generate JAXB-annotated POJOs to work with (using xjc tool in the JDK): $ wget http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl/wadl.xsd $ xjc wadl.xsd And there it... hangs! The life of a software developer is full of challenges and non-trivial problems. And sometimes it is just an annoying network filter that makes suspicious packets (together with half hour of your life) disappear. It is not hard to spot the problem, once you recall that article written around 2008: W3C’s Excessive DTD Traffic: Accessing xml.xsd from the browser returns an HTML page instantly, but xjc tool waits forever. Downloading this file locally and correcting the schemaLocation attribute in wadl.xsd helped. It's always the little things... $ xjc wadl.xsd parsing a schema... compiling a schema... net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Application.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Doc.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Grammars.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/HTTPMethods.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Include.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Link.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Method.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/ObjectFactory.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Option.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Param.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/ParamStyle.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Representation.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Request.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Resource.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/ResourceType.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Resources.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/Response.java net/java/dev/wadl/_2009/_02/package-info.java Since we'll be using these classes in a maven based project (and I hate committing generated classes to source repository), let's move xjc execution to maven lifecycle: org.codehaus.mojo jaxb2-maven-plugin 1.3 net.java.dev.jaxb2-commons jaxb-fluent-api 2.0.1 com.sun.xml jaxb-xjc xjc -Xfluent-api bindings.xjb net.java.dev.wadl Well, pom.xml isn't the most concise format ever... Never mind, this will generate WADL XML classes during every build, before the source code is compiled. I also love the fluent-api plugin that adds with*() methods along with ordinary setters, returning this to allow chaining. Pretty convenient. Finally we define more pleasant package name for generated artifacts (if you find net.java.dev.wadl._2009._02 package name pleasant enough, you can skip this step) and add Wadl prefix to all generated classes bindings.xjb file: We are now ready to produce and consume WADL in XML format using JAXB and POJO classes. Equipped with that knowledge and the foundation we are ready to develop some interesting library – which will be the subject of the next article. From http://nurkiewicz.blogspot.com/2012/01/gentle-introduction-to-wadl-in-java.html

When a subclass violates the Liskov Substitution Principle, or uses only part of a superclass, it is a warning sign that composition can simplify the design. Refactoring to composition transform the superclass into an object of its own, which becomes the collaborator of the class under refactoring. Instead of inheriting every public method, the object will just expose the strictly needed methods. This refactoring is one of the most underused in the PHP world. Don't be afraid to try out composition when you see duplicated code. Why composition? The elimination of duplication through inheritance presents some issues. First, inheritance can be exploited just for code reuse instead of for establishing semantic relationships. Abstract classes with names such as VehicleAbstract, extended by Vehicle, are artificial constructs that do not represent anything in the problem domain. Moreover, inheritance exposes every public method of the superclass, possibly violating encapsulation. It's only a matter of time before someone calls a method which was not supposed to be available. The third problem is related to unit testing, and the duplication of test code. Should we test just the subclasses behavior? Or should we test also the inherited features? In the latter case, we will duplicate test code. Inheritance and delegation (also known as composition) are the two basic relationships between classes in OOP. They are equivalent from a theoretical, functional point of view - but so is a Turing Machine or the whitespace language. Steps Create a field in the subclass, and initialize it to $this. It will contain the collaborator. Change the methods in the subclass to use the delegate field. Methods which are inherited may need to be introduced as a delegation to parent. Remove the subclass declaration, and replace the delegate with a new instance of the superclass. Throughout the refactoring, the tests should always pass. This refactoring is crucial as it opens up further possibilities: for example, Dependency Injection performed on the collaborator, or the extraction of an interface containing the public methods called by the former subclass. Example We start form the end of the Pull Up Method example: we want to transform the NewsFeedItem superclass into a collaborator with the same behavior. assertEquals("Hello, world! -- giorgiosironi", $post->__toString()); } public function testALinkShowsItsAuthor() { $link = new Link("http://en.wikipedia.com", "giorgiosironi"); $this->assertEquals("http://en.wikipedia.com -- giorgiosironi", $link->__toString()); } } abstract class NewsFeedItem { /** * @var string references the author's Twitter username */ protected $author; /** * @return string an HTML printable version */ public function __toString() { return $this->displayedText() . " -- $this->author"; } /** * @return string */ protected abstract function displayedText(); } class Post extends NewsFeedItem { private $text; public function __construct($text, $author) { $this->text = $text; $this->author = $author; } protected function displayedText() { return $this->text; } } class Link extends NewsFeedItem { private $url; public function __construct($url, $author) { $this->url = $url; $this->author = $author; } protected function displayedText() { return "url\">$this->url"; } } Public methods cannot be inherited from a collaborator, so as a preliminary step they must be delegated to it. class Post extends NewsFeedItem { private $text; public function __construct($text, $author) { $this->text = $text; $this->author = $author; } protected function displayedText() { return $this->text; } } class Link extends NewsFeedItem { private $url; public function __construct($url, $author) { $this->url = $url; $this->author = $author; } protected function displayedText() { return "url\">$this->url"; } public function __toString() { return parent::__toString(); } } Deciding a name for the role of the collaborator is an important step. It is very likely to change with respect to a name that follows LSP and is used for a superclass. We choose Format, since the parent models a way to print out the author and content fields. We also extract a method, display(), in the superclass, to split the formatting behavior from the wiring to the fields. We plan to use display() as a collaborator, while __toString() was made for inheritance and will be discontinued. abstract class NewsFeedItem { /** * @var string references the author's Twitter username */ protected $author; /** * @return string an HTML printable version */ public function __toString() { return $this->display($this->displayedText(), $this->author); } public function display($text, $author) { return "$text -- $author"; } /** * @return string */ protected abstract function displayedText(); } class Post extends NewsFeedItem { private $text; private $format; public function __construct($text, $author) { $this->text = $text; $this->author = $author; $this->format = $this; } protected function displayedText() { return $this->text; } public function __toString() { return parent::__toString(); } } class Link extends NewsFeedItem { private $url; private $format; public function __construct($url, $author) { $this->url = $url; $this->author = $author; $this->format = $this; } protected function displayedText() { return "url\">$this->url"; } public function __toString() { return parent::__toString(); } } We can start using the delegate instead of parent, and of relying on inheritance. __toString() is the only point where we have to intervene: class Post extends NewsFeedItem { private $text; private $format; public function __construct($text, $author) { $this->text = $text; $this->author = $author; $this->format = $this; } protected function displayedText() { return $this->text; } public function __toString() { return $this->format->display($this->displayedText(), $this->author); } } class Link extends NewsFeedItem { private $url; private $format; public function __construct($url, $author) { $this->url = $url; $this->author = $author; $this->format = $this; } protected function displayedText() { return "url\">$this->url"; } public function __toString() { return $this->format->display($this->displayedText(), $this->author); } } Now we can eliminate abstract and the abstract method in the superclass, plus the extends keyword in the subclasses. This means now $this->format would be initialized to an instance of TextSignedByAuthorFormat, which is the new name for NewsFeedItem. We also have to push down $this->author. class TextSignedByAuthorFormat { /** * @return string an HTML printable version */ public function __toString() { return $this->display($this->displayedText(), $this->author); } public function display($text, $author) { return "$text -- $author"; } } class Post { private $text; private $author; private $format; public function __construct($text, $author) { $this->text = $text; $this->author = $author; $this->format = new TextSignedByAuthorFormat(); } protected function displayedText() { return $this->text; } public function __toString() { return $this->format->display($this->displayedText(), $this->author); } } class Link { private $url; private $author; private $format; public function __construct($url, $author) { $this->url = $url; $this->author = $author; $this->format = new TextSignedByAuthorFormat(); } protected function displayedText() { return "url\">$this->url"; } public function __toString() { return $this->format->display($this->displayedText(), $this->author); } } Finally, we can simplify part of the code. We delete the __toString() on TextSignedByAuthorFormat which is dead code; and inline the displayedMethod() on Post, which served the inheritance-based solution but now is an unnecessary indirection. class TextSignedByAuthorFormat { public function display($text, $author) { return "$text -- $author"; } } class Post { private $text; private $author; private $format; public function __construct($text, $author) { $this->text = $text; $this->author = $author; $this->format = new TextSignedByAuthorFormat(); } public function __toString() { return $this->format->display($this->text, $this->author); } } class Link { private $url; private $author; private $format; public function __construct($url, $author) { $this->url = $url; $this->author = $author; $this->format = new TextSignedByAuthorFormat(); } protected function displayedText() { return "url\">$this->url"; } public function __toString() { return $this->format->display($this->displayedText(), $this->author); } } There are many further steps we could make: inject the TextSignedByAuthorFormat object. Consequently, if the logic in the collaborator expands we can refactor tests to use a Test Double. Move $this->author into the format. Apply Extract Interface (Format should be the name), to be able to support multiple output formats. Another implementation could place a link on the author too, or could strip all or some of the tags for displaying in a RSS or in a tweet.

In this post, you'll find a quick, 7-line code block of JavaScript that you can use to covert dates to the MM/DD/YYYY format.

When I first sat down to redesign my personal site I knew that I wanted to incorporate HTML5 Canvas somewhere in the layout. The problem was that I hadn't worked with canvas before and had to start from scratch. I went through the pain of learning every aspect of adding text, drawing shapes, importing image, etc... before I found the amazing canvas framework Processing.JS The content of this article was originally posted in Joey Cadle Allgaier's blog. For those who don't quite fully grasp what HTML5 Canvas check out the W3Schools entry for the element before reading any further, but it's basically an element that defines graphics. Canvas Basics Adding a canvas element is as simple as adding the below markup. The canvas element alone acts as a block level element with all children hidden without the use of javascript to draw text, objects, images, etc... Please note that HTML5 markup and the canvas element is only support by modern browsers such as Firefox (1.5+), Safari (1.3+), Chrome, Opera (9+), and Internet Explorer (9+). Obviously we don't want to go adding canvas elements without some type of alternative display for browsers that do not support canvas rendering. Thankfully all graphics rendered via canvas are layered above any markup contained within the element. Here's how we degrade canvas so that browsers such as Internet Explorer 8 know they need to stop being lazy and upgrade to a more modern browser. First we'll add a link to an HTML5 element shiv for any user with a browser later than IE9 in the portion of our document, adding the element to our stack of recognized html markup: Now let's update our canvas element to target non-modern browsers: Please upgrade your browser to something newer, like Google Chrome The above markup lets anyone using a non-modern browser that they should probably upgrade their browser. You can put substitute text with an image if you want. For instance, any visitor to this site using a browser that doesn't support HTML5 Canvas is met with a standard JPEG logo as opposed to the canvas alternative. CSS Styling Canvas It's always good practice to style your canvas element as until drawing has been accomplished the styling will act as a kind of start screen. While we're at it, we'll also style the child within our canvas element. Styling the child elements inside of your canvas is important so that in non modern browsers we're taking up the same amount of space. #myCanvas, #myCanvas p { width: 460px; height: 250px; background-color: #f5f5f5; color: #555; text-align: center; } In modern browsers our canvas element now displays exactly as we styled it, and non-modern browsers also show a similar styling but with a note for the user to upgrade their browser. Take note that css such as text coloring and background coloring is only useful until our canvas element is initialized. Once initialized the things we draw onto our canvas can not be styled via css. Now that we've covered the basics, how do we go about drawing to the canvas? We could use modern javascript to draw to the canvas, but in this article we're going learn how to use the javascript framework Processing.JS to handle all our drawing. Getting Started With Processing.JS Processing.JS is a port of the Processing Visual Programming Language developed by Ben Fry and Casey Reas designed for use on the web. You develop code using the processing language and processing.js transforms those actions into canvas elements. You can download the latest version of Processing.JS at their website: http://processingjs.org. Let's get started by adding a link to processing.js in the portion of our document: Processing.JS now adds functionality for us to reference our canvas element to a file (file-type: .pde) in which all of our processing code exists. Let's reference our code by adding the "data-processing-sources" attribute to our canvas element: Please upgrade your browser to something newer, like Google Chrome Now all we have to do is create the source file referenced, (in this case "myProcessingCode.pde") and add our Processing code. Writing Processing Code We're going to cover a few basic drawing methods such as shapes, text, and images, but before that I want to go over the two core functions of Processing.JS: setup, and draw. The setup function contains all of the code we want to run when our canvas is initialized. Most importantly this is where you set such key values such as our canvas element's size and framerate. Let's go ahead and set the size, framerate and background of our canvas element: void setup() { size(500, 250); background(245); framerate(30); } In the above code we're telling Processing.JS to set the size of our canvas to a width/height of 500/250 and to set the background of our canvas to an rgb value of 245, 245, 245 (#F5F5F5) and to set our canvas framerate (essential to looping, which we'll discuss later), all at canvas initialization. Note that all Processing functions are designated with "void" and in this case Processing.js recognizes the setup function as the function to be ran at intialization of our canvas. Adding a custom function is simple: void myFunction() { // do something here } Our initial setup function sets values to what our css styling is for background-color and size and our canvas now mimics what we saw before adding any processing code. Now we'll add a 50x50 pink rectangle with a 1 pixel white stroke to a random position of our canvas using by modifying our setup function. void setup() { size(500, 250); background(245); framerate(30); color pink = #ffb5b5; color white = #ffffff; fill(pink); stroke(white); int positionX = int(floor(random(20, 408))); // 20 pixel left and right padding int positionY = int(floor(random(20, 158))); // 20 pixel top and bottom padding rect(positionX, positionY, 50, 50); // x, y, width, height } Going over each function we see that we first declare some color variables using the following syntax: color myColor = #hexvalue; Always assign complicated colors to color variables so that we can link them to methods such as fill, background, and stroke. You can forego the use of hex values and instead use rgb values as so color myColor = color(255, 181 , 181);. Next we declare our fill by using the fill() method. The color value we assign to this method will be the fill color of any shape method we then call. This also applies to our stroke() method. If you do not call fill() and stroke() before declaring the shape the shape will have a default fill color of white and a default 1 pixel stroke of black. If you don't want to fill or stroke the next shape drawn you can do so by replacing fill() and stroke() with noFill() and/or noStroke() methods. noFill(); // the next shape will not be filled noStroke(); // the next shape will not be stroked We can also declare if we want our shape to be antialiased or "smoothed" (no smoothing set by default) or change the weight of our stroke (default stroke weight is 1px) by calling the smooth() and strokeWeight() methods: smooth(); // antialias our shape strokeWeight(10); // set the stroke weight to 10 pixels We now declare a positionX and positionY variable to randomize where our rectangle should appear by using the data method int, since we know our value will be an integer, and we'll make use of the random() method. The random method can and will return a floated value so we'll use the floor() method to round the number returned by random() down. int myInt = int(floor(random(start, end)) Note that in my example I know that the size the canvas is 500x250 so to ensure that my rectangle is positioned at least 20 pixels from the border of the canvas edges my starting value is 20 and my ending value is 500 (canvas size) minus 40 (20 pixel left/right padding) minus 52 (width/height of rectangle including 1pixel stroke) for the position of X and 250(canvas size) minus ... for the Y position. You, however, can use any value you see fit or declare a non random value like so int positionX = 10; The only thing left is to create our shape. We've chosen to create a rectangle by using the rect() method: rect(x, y, width, height); Remember declaring just a bare rect() without setting any fill() and/or stroke() will result in a shape you can't see, so don't forget to call those methods as stated earlier. If you hate rectangles you can change the shape by changing the rect() method to ellipse(), line(), point(), quad(), arc(), or triangle() ellipse(x, y, width, height); line(xStart, yStart, xEnd, yEnd); // doesn't auto stroke point(x, y); // doesn't auto stroke quad(x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3, x4, y4); // x,y position of each corner of a rectangle arc(x, y, width, height, start[radian], stop[radian]); // PI radians with or without math operators eg: PI, PI/2, TWO_PI-PI, PI+TWO_PI, etc... triangle(x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3); // x,y of each point of a triangle For more 2D shape methods (including curves) check the reference section of the Processing.JS website. Shapes via SVG If you're familiar with SVG and are constantly working with it you'll want to know that you can define shapes via an SVG file by using PShape Datatype: PShape mySVG; // set the PShape datatype to the mySVG variable mySVG = loadShape("mySVGfile.svg"); // load your .svg file using loadShape(); smooth(); // antialias the shape shape(mySVG, x, y, width, height); Note you must always load your svg file using the loadShape() method before calling the shape() method. Adding Text Processing.JS provides us with the PFont Datatype and the methods loadFont(), textFont(), and text() methods. Font loading in canvas can be a bit complex as, despite the ease of the loadFont() method, font support for canvas varies across browsers. Firefox supports canvas fonts the best, but has a pre-defined list of fonts. As of now it's best to use a surely installed font (such as Arial) or to use the PFont_list() method to check the fonts a user has available to load. For more information see the Processing.JS reference to PFont_list(). Let's add some text to our canvas: void setup() { size(500, 250); background(245); framerate(30); color pink = #ffb5b5; color white = #ffffff; fill(pink); stroke(white); int positionX = int(floor(random(20, 408))); int positionY = int(floor(random(20, 158))); rect(positionX, positionY, 50, 50); fill(64); // color the text #404040 rgb(64, 64, 64) PFont fontArial = loadFont("arial"); // load the Arial font textFont(fontArial, 32); // set the font-size of fontArial to 32 point text("Joey Cadle Rocks!", 110, 60); // Add the text to canvas at x, y position } The draw() Function and Image Loading Processing.JS's draw() function is where most of your drawing should take place. The biggest thing to note is that Processing.JS automaticly loops the draw() function at whatever frameRate() you specify in your setup(). Because of this automatic looping we're given the loop() and noLoop() methods. In this next append to our code we'll be loading images by making use of the PImage Datatype and the methods loadImage(), requestImage(), image(), and get(). Lets use the draw() function to handle our drawing from now on and let's load an image using requestImage() as opposed to loadImage() as loadImage() freezes canvas until the image is loaded while requestImage() does not. Here's a look at just the image loading code: PImage img; // PImage for preloading PImage part; // PImage for display img = requestImage("yourImage.png"); // accepted formats are .jpg, .gif, and .png part = img.get(); // get all pixels from the image image(part, 20, 20); // display the image at x, y coordinates Note that we're now going to initialize our PImage and PFont objects outside of our setup() and draw() functions so that they're accessible throughout our script. PImage img; PImage part; PFont fontArial = loadFont("arial"); void setup() { size(500, 250); background(245); frameRate(30); img = requestImage("yourImage.png"); } void draw() { background(245); part = img.get(); image(part, 20, 20); color pink = #ffb5b5; color white = #ffffff; fill(pink); stroke(white); int positionX = int(floor(random(20, 430))); int positionY = int(floor(random(20, 180))); rect(positionX, positionY, 50, 50); fill(64); textFont(fontArial, 32); text("Joey Cadle Rocks!", 110, 60); noLoop(); // Tell Processing.JS to stop looping. } Now we're getting down the heart of Processing.JS by utilizing it's two main features. Note that most methods, including noLoop() and loop() are accessible in other frameworks such as JQuery. You can do things like: $('.some_div').click(function() { loop(); } By specifying a noLoop() in our draw() function we're able to Making Use of Looping We're going to add some animation and some event listing for a mouse movement. We'll remove our rectangle and choose to move our image and text with our mouse. This can be done by calling the mouseMoved() function and making good use of the looping of our draw() function. Our ability to have our image and text follow our mouse hinges on the fact that Processing.JS consistently holds the current position of our mouse in the variables mouseX and mouseY. We'll add 5 frame delay to our movement with some simple math. PImage img; PImage part; PFont fontArial = loadFont("arial"); void setup() { size(500, 250); background(245); frameRate(30); x = 20; // set initial x position y = 20; // set initial y position mX = x; // set mouseX to above x mY = y; // set mouseY to above y delay = 5; // set the frames we want to delay movement img = requestImage("yourImage.png"); } void draw() { x += (mX - x) / delay; // reset our x with current x position minus mouseX position and delay it y += (mY - y) / delay; // reset our y with current y position minus mouseY position and delay it fontX = x + 90; // add the width of our image to ensure its to the right (in the demo case: 90) fontY = y + 40; // add the height of our image to ensure its level (in the demo case: 40) background(245); part = img.get(); image(part, x, y); // draw our image at x, y based on x,y values above. fill(64); textFont(fontArial, 32); text("Joey Cadle Rocks!", fontX, fontY); // Add the text to canvas at fontX and fontY position } void mouseMoved() { mX = mouseX; // set mX to our mouseX position mY = mouseY; // set mY to our mouseY position } Processing.JS has other built in event listeners such as the mouseClicked() and mouseDragged functions. Check out their website for a full list of listeners, but as far as we're concerned, our canvas is now animated and interactive! For a full demo check out the live example here. Conlusion This article is intended to show simplified use of Processing.JS. Do not in anyway take this article and use it to judge the limits of Processing.JS or Canvas in general. The native canvas API is incredibly powerful, as if Processing.JS, this article is just a taste of what you can achieve. Thanks for reading. Short URL: http://bit.ly/z25Lvg Source: http://joeycadle.com/blog/article/1/2012/22/01/html5-canvas-and-processing-js

Tests developed during TDD can be classified into several levels, depending on the size of the object graph they need to work with. End-to-end tests span the whole application graph, while unit tests usually target a single public class at a time. In the middle we find functional tests, which exercise a group of objects. A recurring problem is that of nearby classes C creeping into unit tests of unrelated classes; this situation transform what would be a unit test of the original class O into a functional tests of O and C together (possibly with multiple C classes involved). Functional tests are handy for specifying behavior at an higher level of abstraction than that of a single object, and sometimes for checking the wiring of a component of the application. However, if they are introduced involuntarily in place of unit tests they are prone to raise maintenance problems, since they will need to change every time the C class is updated. Moreover, they will fail along with the unit test of C, pointing to a problem into either O or C, which are not able to localize immediately. Consider this test, where the original class is DocumentsDeclarationNodeCommand and the collaborating one is InMemoryDocumentCopy: @Test public void shouldSendTheListOfDocumentsAndWaitForAcknowledgement() throws ConnectionClosedException { UpstreamConnection upstream = mock(UpstreamConnection.class); DownstreamConnection downstream = mock(DownstreamConnection.class); InMemoryDocumentCopy first = new InMemoryDocumentCopy("1.txt", "hello"); InMemoryDocumentCopy second = new InMemoryDocumentCopy("2.txt", "hello2"); DocumentsDeclarationNodeCommand command = DocumentsDeclarationNodeCommand.fromDocumentCopies( Arrays.asList(first, second), 10001); command.execute(upstream, downstream); InOrder inOrder = inOrder(upstream, downstream); inOrder.verify(upstream).command("DOCUMENTS|PORT=10001"); inOrder.verify(upstream).command("1.txt|5"); inOrder.verify(upstream).command("2.txt|6"); inOrder.verify(upstream).endCommandSection(); inOrder.verify(downstream, times(1)).readResponse(); } The two expectations on command() make this test a functional one: a change in the textual serialization format of InMemoryDocumentCopy (such as "1.txt|sha1_hash|5") will break this checks, even if DocumentsDeclarationNodeCommand still works. Yet we cannot avoid to verify that the documents are really sent to the server by this object. Functional tests can be transformed again into unit tests by testing O with a Test Double instead of C (a Stub, or a Mock.) The only remaining dependency will be the one of the interface of C, which can be even extracted into an independent entity (a first-class interface in language that support them such as Java, C# and PHP.) Pure functions What happens when you can't easily inject a Test Double to maintain the tests at the unit level? This issues exists in functional languages where functions call a tree of other functions. A analogue approach to dependency injection is to inject the function as a parameter, but doesn't probably scale to the level of injection we perform on objects: every function signature would have to receive all the collaborating ones as additional parameters. There are even mocking frameworks for functional languages like Marick's one which are able to isolate a function from its collaborators. Uncle Bob uses the Derived Expectation pattern instead: testing "update-all" (let [ o1 (make-object ...) o2 (make-object ...) o3 (make-object ...) os [o1 o2 o3] us (update-all os) ] (is (= (nth us 0) (reposition (accelerate (accumulate-forces os o1) (is (= (nth us 1) (reposition (accelerate (accumulate-forces os o2) (is (= (nth us 2) (reposition (accelerate (accumulate-forces os o3) ) ) The update-all function calls internally reposition, accelerate and accumulate-forces (or it calls other functions which in turn call these three). Instead of specifying unreadable literal expectations in the tests like (1.096, 4.128), this approach let the test specify update-all link to the other functions without introducing magic numbers. It is therefore a unit test for update-all, while the same test containing numbers would be a functional test. Note that this approach is safe for functional languages because the collaborating functions have no state, being pure; you can call reposition and accelerate how many times you want, and their result won't change. This is not necessarily true for collaborators in object-oriented languages: in principle, a method can return a different value for each call. Tests with derived expectations As long as the composed methods do not change their result, this approach would build real unit tests, whose success does not depend on the correctness of classes other than the one under test. Apart from corner cases like the composed methods throwing exceptions, a change in the collaborator's behavior would change only the collaborator's test. Value Objects are the ideal collaborator to stub out with derived expectations: they are immutable, so their methods always return the same result. Their code is usually self-contained and simple, so it's difficult for a method to throw an exception or to break internally once the Value Object has been correctly built. Being simple, final classes they do not implement an explicit interface; and they are not commonly substituted by Test Doubles. Their behavior is mixed in with the objects using them. The test becomes: @Test public void shouldSendTheListOfDocumentsAndWaitForAcknowledgement() throws ConnectionClosedException { UpstreamConnection upstream = mock(UpstreamConnection.class); DownstreamConnection downstream = mock(DownstreamConnection.class); InMemoryDocumentCopy first = new InMemoryDocumentCopy("1.txt", "hello"); InMemoryDocumentCopy second = new InMemoryDocumentCopy("2.txt", "hello2"); DocumentsDeclarationNodeCommand command = DocumentsDeclarationNodeCommand.fromDocumentCopies( Arrays.asList(first, second), 10001); command.execute(upstream, downstream); InOrder inOrder = inOrder(upstream, downstream); inOrder.verify(upstream).command("DOCUMENTS|PORT=10001"); inOrder.verify(upstream).command(first.toString()); inOrder.verify(upstream).command(second.toString()); inOrder.verify(upstream).endCommandSection(); inOrder.verify(downstream, times(1)).readResponse(); } Conclusion We saw that Test Doubles like Mocks and Stubs are not the only way to achieve isolated tests, which fail only where the class under test fail and not when a collaborator changes its implementation. In the Example, DocumentsDeclarationNodeCommand is tested by involving the real collaborator, but setting up Derived Expectation from it instead of literal ones. The result is this test is only tied to the method signatures of the collaborator instead of to the real behavior (the output format of toString()). This technique doesn't need to be used often: its purpose is to isolate from an immutable object, without introducing a Test Double.

In this tutorial we are making a HTML5 Slideshow (canvas) with its own animated transitioning effect. The main idea is: drawing images with higher contrast in the ends of transitions. Here are our demo and downloadable packages: Live Demo download in package Ok, download the source files and let's start coding ! Step 1. HTML This is the markup of our resulting slideshow page. index.html HTML5 Canvas Slideshow Back to original tutorial on Script Tutorials Step 2. CSS Here are all the stylesheets: css/main.css /* page layout styles */ *{ margin:0; padding:0; } body { background-color:#eee; color:#fff; font:14px/1.3 Arial,sans-serif; } header { background-color:#212121; box-shadow: 0 -1px 2px #111111; display:block; height:70px; position:relative; width:100%; z-index:100; } header h2{ font-size:22px; font-weight:normal; left:50%; margin-left:-400px; padding:22px 0; position:absolute; width:540px; } header a.stuts,a.stuts:visited{ border:none; text-decoration:none; color:#fcfcfc; font-size:14px; left:50%; line-height:31px; margin:23px 0 0 110px; position:absolute; top:0; } header .stuts span { font-size:22px; font-weight:bold; margin-left:5px; } .container { color: #000; margin: 20px auto; position: relative; width: 900px; } #slideshow { border:1px #000 solid; box-shadow:4px 6px 6px #444444; display:block; margin:0 auto; height:300px; width:900px; } .container .slides { display:none; } Step 3. JS js/pixastic.custom.js Pixastic – JavaScript Image Processing Library. I have used it to change the brightness and contrast of our canvas. You can download this library here. Or, you can find this library in our package too. js/script.js var canvas, ctx; var aImages = []; var iCurSlide = 0; var iCnt = 0; var iSmTimer = 0; var iContr = 0; var iEfIter = 50; $(function(){ // creating canvas objects canvas = document.getElementById('slideshow'); ctx = canvas.getContext('2d'); // collect all images $('.slides').children().each(function(i){ var oImg = new Image(); oImg.src = this.src; aImages.push(oImg); }); // draw first image ctx.drawImage(aImages[iCurSlide], 0, 0); var iTimer = setInterval(changeSlideTimer, 5000); // set inner timer }); function changeSlideTimer() { iCurSlide++; if (iCurSlide == $(aImages).length) { iCurSlide = 0; } clearInterval(iSmTimer); iSmTimer = setInterval(drawSwEffect, 40); // extra one timer } // draw switching effect function drawSwEffect() { iCnt++; if (iCnt <= iEfIter / 2) { iContr += 0.004; // change brightness and contrast Pixastic.process(canvas, 'brightness', { 'brightness': 2, 'contrast': 0.0 + iContr, 'leaveDOM': true }, function(img) { ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0); } ); } if (iCnt > iEfIter / 2) { // change brightness Pixastic.process(canvas, 'brightness', { 'brightness': -2, 'contrast': 0, 'leaveDOM': true }, function(img) { ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0); } ); } if (iCnt == iEfIter / 2) { // switch actual image iContr = 0; ctx.drawImage(aImages[iCurSlide], 0, 0); Pixastic.process(canvas, 'brightness', { 'brightness': iEfIter, 'contrast': 0, 'leaveDOM': true }, function(img) { ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0); } ); } else if (iCnt == iEfIter) { // end of cycle, clear extra sub timer clearInterval(iSmTimer); iCnt = 0; iContr = 0; } } As you can see – the main functionality is easy. I have defined the main timer (which will change images), and one inner timer, which will change the brightness and contrast of our canvas. Live Demo download in package Conclusion I hope that today’s html5 slideshow lesson was interesting for you as always. We have made another nice html5 example. I will be glad to see your thanks and comments. Good luck! Source: http://www.script-tutorials.com/html5-canvas-slideshow/

Software Engineering is all about reuse. We programmers therefore love to split applications up into smaller components so that each of them can be reused or extended in an independent manner. A keyword here is "loose coupling". Slightly simplified, this means, each component should have as few dependencies to other components as possible. Most important, if I have a component B which relies on component A, I don't want that A needs to know about B. The component A should just provide a clean interface which could be used and extended by B. In Java there are many frameworks which provide this exact functionality: JavaEE, Spring, OSGI. However, each of those frameworks come with their own way to do things and provide lots and lots of additional functionality - whether you want it or not! Since we here at scireum love modularity (we build 4 products out of a set of about 10 independet modules) we built our own little framework. I factored out the most important parts and now have a single class with less than 250 lines of code+comments! I call this a microkernel approach, since it nicely compares to the situation we have with operating systems: There are monolithic kernels like the one of Linux with about 11,430,712 lines of code. And there is a concept called a microkernel, like to one of Minix with about 6,000 lines of executable kernel code. There is still an ongoing discussion which of the two solituons is better. A monolithic kernel is faster, a microkernel has way less critical code (critical code means: a bug there will crash the complete system. If you haven't already, you should read more about mikrokernels on Wikipedia. However one might think about operating systems - when it comes to Java I prefer less dependencies and if possible no black magic I don't understand. Especially if this magic involves complex ClassLoader structures. Therefore, here comes Nucleus... How does this work? The framework (Nucleus) solves two problems of modular applications: I want provide a service to other components - but I only want to show an interface and they should be provided with my implementation at runtime without knowning(referencing) it. I want to provide a service or callback for other components. I provide an interface, and I want to know all classes implementig it, so I can invoke them. Ok, we probably need examples for this. Say we want to implement a simple timer service. It provides an interface: public interface EveryMinute { void runTimer() throws Exception; } All classes implementing this interface should be invoked every minute. Additionally we provide some infos - namely, when was the timer executed last. public interface TimerInfo { String getLastOneMinuteExecution(); } Ok, next we need a client for our services: @Register(classes = EveryMinute.class) public class ExampleNucleus implements EveryMinute { private static Part timerInfo = Part.of(TimerInfo.class); public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { Nucleus.init(); while (true) { Thread.sleep(10000); System.out.println("Last invocation: " + timerInfo.get().getLastOneMinuteExecution()); } } @Override public void runTimer() throws Exception { System.out.println("The time is: " + DateFormat.getTimeInstance().format(new Date())); } } The static field "Part timerInfo" is a simple helper class which fetches the registered instance from Nucleus on the first call and loads it into a private field. So accessing this part has almost no overhead to a normal field access - yet we only reference an interface, not an implementation. The main method first initializes Nucleus (this performs the classpath scan etc.) and then simply goes into an infinite loop, printing the last execution of our timer every ten seconds. Since our class wears a @Register annotation, it will be discovered by a special ClassLoadAction (not by Nucleus itself) instantiated and registered for the EveryMinute interface. Its method runTimer will then be invoced by our timer service every minute. Ok, but how would our TimerService look like? @Register(classes = { TimerInfo.class }) public class TimerService implements TimerInfo { @InjectList(EveryMinute.class) private List everyMinute; private long lastOneMinuteExecution = 0; private Timer timer; public TimerService() { start(); } public void start() { timer = new Timer(true); // Schedule the task to wait 60 seconds and then invoke // every 60 seconds. timer.schedule(new InnerTimerTask(), 1000 * 60, 1000 * 60); } private class InnerTimerTask extends TimerTask { @Override public void run() { // Iterate over all instances registered for // EveryMinute and invoke its runTimer method. for (EveryMinute task : everyMinute) { task.runTimer(); } // Update lastOneMinuteExecution lastOneMinuteExecution = System.currentTimeMillis(); } } @Override public String getLastOneMinuteExecution() { if (lastOneMinuteExecution == 0) { return "-"; } return DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance().format( new Date(lastOneMinuteExecution)); } } This class also wears a @Register annotation so that it will also be loaded by the ClassLoadAction named above (the ServiceLoadAction actually). As above it will be instantiated and put into Nucleus (as implementation of TimerInfo). Additionally it wears an @InjectList annotation on the everyMinute field. This will be processed by another class named Factory which performs simple dependency injection. Since its constructur starts a Java Timer for the InnerTimerTask, from that point on all instances registered for EveryMinute will be invoced by this timer - as the name says - every minute. How is it implemented? The good thing about Nucleus is, that it is powerful on the one hand, but very simple and small on the other hand. As you could see, there is no inner part for special or privileged services. Everything is built around the kernel - the class Nuclues. Here is what it does: It scans the classpath and looks for files called "component.properties". Those need to be in the root folder of a JAR or in the /src folder of each Eclipse project respectively. For each identified JAR / project / classpath element, it then collects all contained class files and loads them using Class.forName. For each class, it checks if it implements ClassLoadAction, if yes, it is put into a special list. Each ClassLoadAction is instanciated and each previously seen class is sent to it using: void handle(Class clazz) Finally each ClassLoadAction is notified, that nucleus is complete so that final steps (like annotation based dependency injection) could be performed. That's it. The only other thing Nucleus provides is a registry which can be used to register and retrieve objects for a class. (An in-depth description of the process above, can be found here: http://andreas.haufler.info/2012/01/iterating-over-all-classes-with.html). Now to make this framework useable as shown above, there is a set of classes around Nucleus. Most important is the class ServiceLoadAction, which will instantiate each class which wears a @Register annoation, runs Factory.inject (our mini DI tool) on it, and throws it into Nucleus for the listed classes. Whats important: The ServiceLoadActions has no specific rights or privileges, you can easily write your implementation which does smarter stuff. Next to some annotations, there are three other handy classes when it comes to retrieving instances from Nucleus: Factory, Part and Parts. As noted above, the Factory is a simple dependency injector. Currently only the ServiceLoadAction autmatically uses the Factory, as all classes wearing the @Register annotation are scanned for required injections. You can however use this factory to run injections on your own classes or other ClassLoadActions to do the same as ServiceLoadAction. If you can't or don't want to rely in annotation based dependency magic, you can use the two helper classes Part and Parts. Those are used like normal fields (see ExampleNucleus.timerInfo above) and fetch the appropriate object or list of objects automatically. Since the result is cached, repeated invocations have almost no overhead compared to a normal field. Nucleus and the example shown above is open source (MIT-License) and available here: https://github.com/andyHa/scireumOpen/blob/master/src/examples/ExampleNucleus.java https://github.com/andyHa/scireumOpen/tree/master/src/com/scireum/open/nucleus If you're interested in using Nucleus, I could put the relevant souces into a separater repository and also provide a release jar - just write a comment below an let me know. This post is the fourth part of the my series "Enterprisy Java" - We share our hints and tricks how to overcome the obstacles when trying to build several multi tenant web applications out of a set of common modules.

If you remember from my previous blogs, I’m covering different approaches to parsing XML messages using the outrageously corny scenario of Pete’s Perfect Pizza, the pizza company with big ideas. In this story, you are an employee of Pete’s and have been asked to implement a system for sending orders from the front desk to the kitchen and you came up with the idea of using XML. You’ve just got your SAX Parser working, but Pete’s going global, opening kitchens around the world taking orders using the Internet. But, hang on a minute... didn’t I say this in my last blog? Déjà vu? Today’s blog is the alternative reality version of my JAXB blog as the scenario remains the same, but the solution changes. Instead of demonstrating JAXB, I’ll be investigating XMLBeans. So, Pete’s hired some consultants who’ve come up with a plan for extending your cosy XML message and they’ve specified it using a schema. They’ve also enhanced your message by adding in one of there own customer schemas. The result is that the following XSD files land in your inbox and you need to get busy... A wrapper around the customer and the pizza order This is a list of pizzas ordered by the customer The type of pizza on the menu type of base quantity of pizzas Plain and Simple Garlic Pizza... Ham and Musheroom with an egg thin base traditional Thick base The date is in the Common Era (minus sign in years is not permitted) The time zone although not included UTC is implied Generic Customer Definition The Customer's first name The Customer's surname The house number A line of an address You realise that with this level of complexity, you’ll be messing around with SAX for a long time, and you could also make a few mistakes. There must be a better way right? After-all XML has been around for some time, so there most be a few frameworks around that could be useful. After a bit more Googling you come across XMLBeans and realise that there are... XMLBeans uses a special compiler to convert an XML schema into a bunch of related Java classes that define the types required to access the XML elements, attributes and other content in a type-safe way. This blog isn’t a tutorial covering the ins and outs of XMLBeans, that can be found here, from Apache, except to say the the key idea for parsing, or unmarshalling, XML is that you compile your Java classes using XMLBeans and then use those classes in your application. In using any XML schema to Java class compiler, the neatest approach is to put all your schemas and the compiler in a separate JAR file. You can mix them in with your application’s source code, but that usually clouds the code base making maintenance more difficult. In creating a XMLBeans JAR file, you may come up with a POM file that looks something like this: 4.0.0 com.captaindebug xml-tips-xmlbeans jar 1.0-SNAPSHOT XML Beans for Pete's Perfect Pizza org.apache.xmlbeans xmlbeans 2.4.0 org.codehaus.mojo xmlbeans-maven-plugin xmlbeans true src/main/resources org.apache.maven.plugins maven-compiler-plugin 2.3.2 1.6 1.6 ...which is very straight forward. So, getting back to Pete’s Perfect Pizza, you’ve created your XMLBeans JAR file and all that’s left to do is to explore how it works, as demonstrated in the JUnit tests below: public class PizzaXmlBeansTest { private PizzaOrderDocument instance; @Test public void testLoadPizzaOrderXml() throws IOException, XmlException { String xml = loadResource("/pizza-order1.xml"); instance = PizzaOrderDocument.Factory.parse(xml); PizzaOrder order = instance.getPizzaOrder(); String orderId = order.getOrderID(); assertEquals("123w3454r5", orderId); // Check the customer details... CustomerType customerType = order.getCustomer(); NameType nameType = customerType.getName(); String firstName = nameType.getFirstName(); assertEquals("John", firstName); String lastName = nameType.getLastName(); assertEquals("Miggins", lastName); AddressType address = customerType.getAddress(); assertEquals(new BigInteger("15"), address.getHouseNumber()); assertEquals("Credability Street", address.getStreet()); assertEquals("Any Town", address.getTown()); assertEquals("Any Where", address.getArea()); assertEquals("AW12 3WS", address.getPostCode()); Pizzas pizzas = order.getPizzas(); PizzaType[] pizzasOrdered = pizzas.getPizzaArray(); assertEquals(3, pizzasOrdered.length); // Check the pizza order... for (PizzaType pizza : pizzasOrdered) { PizzaNameType.Enum pizzaName = pizza.getName(); if ((PizzaNameType.CAPRICCIOSA == pizzaName) || (PizzaNameType.MARINARA == pizzaName)) { assertEquals(BaseType.THICK, pizza.getBase()); assertEquals(new BigInteger("1"), pizza.getQuantity()); } else if (PizzaNameType.PROSCIUTTO_E_FUNGHI == pizzaName) { assertEquals(BaseType.THIN, pizza.getBase()); assertEquals(new BigInteger("2"), pizza.getQuantity()); } else { fail("Whoops, can't find pizza type"); } } } private String loadResource(String filename) throws IOException { InputStream is = getClass().getResourceAsStream(filename); if (is == null) { throw new IOException("Can't find the file: " + filename); } return toString(is); } private String toString(InputStream is) throws IOException { ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); copyStreams(is, bos); return bos.toString(); } private void copyStreams(InputStream is, OutputStream os) throws IOException { byte[] buf = new byte[1024]; int c; while ((c = is.read(buf, 0, 1024)) != -1) { os.write(buf, 0, c); os.flush(); } } } The code above may look long and complex, but it really only comprises of three steps: firstly, turn the test file into a suitable type such as a String or InputStream (XMLBeans can handle several different input types). Then use the nested Factory class to process your XML source turning into a document object. Finally, use the returned document object to test that your results are what you'd expected them to be (this is by far the largest step). Once you’re happy with the largely boilerplate usage of XMLBeans, you add it into your Pete's Perfect Pizza kitchen XML parser code and distribute it around the world to Pete’s many pizza kitchens. One of the strong points of using a framework like XMLBeans is that if there’s ever a change to the schema, then all that’s required to incorporate those changes is to recompile, fixing up your client code accordingly. This may seem a bit of a headache, but it’s a much smaller headache than trying re-work a SAX parser. On the downside, XMLBeans has been criticised for being slow, but I’ve never had too many problems. It will theoretically use more memory that SAX - this may or may not be true - it does build sets of classes, but then again so do some SAX ContentHandler derived classes. Finally, it should be noted that there hasn’t been a release of XMLBeans since 2009, which may or may not be a good thing depending upon your viewpoint, though I should emphasized that this code certainly isn’t redundant as, to my certain knowledge, it is still widely used on a number of large scale projects. The source code is available from GitHub at: git://github.com/roghughe/captaindebug.git From http://www.captaindebug.com/2012/01/approaches-to-xml-part-4-xmlbeans.html

package singz.test; import java.util.Date; import java.util.GregorianCalendar; import javax.xml.datatype.DatatypeConfigurationException; import javax.xml.datatype.DatatypeFactory; import javax.xml.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendar; /** * A utility class for converting objects between java.util.Date and * XMLGregorianCalendar types * */ public class XMLGregorianCalendarConversionUtil { // DatatypeFactory creates new javax.xml.datatype Objects that map XML // to/from Java Objects. private static DatatypeFactory df = null; static { try { df = DatatypeFactory.newInstance(); } catch(DatatypeConfigurationException e) { throw new IllegalStateException( "Error while trying to obtain a new instance of DatatypeFactory", e); } } // Converts a java.util.Date into an instance of XMLGregorianCalendar public static XMLGregorianCalendar asXMLGregorianCalendar(java.util.Date date) { if(date == null) { return null; } else { GregorianCalendar gc = new GregorianCalendar(); gc.setTimeInMillis(date.getTime()); return df.newXMLGregorianCalendar(gc); } } // Converts an XMLGregorianCalendar to an instance of java.util.Date public static java.util.Date asDate(XMLGregorianCalendar xmlGC) { if(xmlGC == null) { return null; } else { return xmlGC.toGregorianCalendar().getTime(); } } public static void main(String[] args) { Date currentDate = new Date(); // Current date // java.util.Date to XMLGregorianCalendar XMLGregorianCalendar xmlGC = XMLGregorianCalendarConversionUtil.asXMLGregorianCalendar( currentDate); System.out.println( "Current date in XMLGregorianCalendar format: " + xmlGC.toString()); // XMLGregorianCalendar to java.util.Date System.out.println( "Current date in java.util.Date format: " + XMLGregorianCalendarConversionUtil.asDate(xmlGC).toString()); } } Why do we need XMLGregorianCalendar? Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) allows Java developers to map Java classes to XML representations. JAXB provides two main features: the ability to marshal Java objects into XML and the inverse, i.e. to unmarshal XML back into Java objects. In the default data type bindings i.e. mappings of XML Schema (XSD) data types to Java data types in JAXB, the following types in XML schema (mostly used in web services definition) – xsd:dateTime, xsd:time, xsd:date and so on map to javax.xml.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendar Java type. From http://singztechmusings.in/datatype-conversion-in-java-xmlgregoriancalendar-to-java-util-date-java-util-date-to-xmlgregoriancalendar/

Memory Management in the Java HotSpot Virtual Machine View more documents from white paper Serial vs Parallel With serial collection, only one thing happens at a time. For example, even when multiple CPUs are available, only one is utilized to perform the collection. When parallel collection is used, the task of garbage collection is split into parts and those subparts are executed simultaneously, on different CPUs. The simultaneous operation enables the collection to be done more quickly, at the expense of some additional complexity and potential fragmentation. Concurrent versus Stop-the-world When stop-the-world garbage collection is performed, execution of the application is completely suspended during the collection. Alternatively, one or more garbage collection tasks can be executed concurrently, that is, simultaneously, with the application. Typically, a concurrent garbage collector does most of its work concurrently, but may also occasionally have to do a few short stop-the-world pauses. Stop-the-world garbage collection is simpler than concurrent collection, since the heap is frozen and objects are not changing during the collection. Its disadvantage is that it may be undesirable for some applications to be paused. Correspondingly, the pause times are shorter when garbage collection is done concurrently, but the collector must take extra care, as it is operating over objects that might be updated at the same time by the application. This adds some overhead to concurrent collectors that affects performance and requires a larger heap size. Compacting versus Non-compacting versus Copying After a garbage collector has determined which objects in memory are live and which are garbage, it can compact the memory, moving all the live objects together and completely reclaiming the remaining memory. After compaction, it is easy and fast to allocate a new object at the first free location. A simple pointer can be utilized to keep track of the next location available for object allocation. In contrast with a compacting collector, a non-compacting collector releases the space utilized by garbage objects in-place, i.e., it does not move all live objects to create a large reclaimed region in the same way a compacting collector does. The benefit is faster completion of garbage collection, but the drawback is potential fragmentation. In general, it is more expensive to allocate from a heap with in-place deallocation than from a compacted heap. It may be necessary to search the heap for a contiguous area of memory sufficiently large to accommodate the new object. A third alternative is a copying collector, which copies (or evacuates) live objects to a different memory area. The benefit is that the source area can then be considered empty and available for fast and easy subsequent allocations, but the drawback is the additional time required for copying and the extra space that may be required. Performance Metrics Several metrics are utilized to evaluate garbage collector performance, including: Throughput—the percentage of total time not spent in garbage collection, considered over long periods of time. Garbage collection overhead—the inverse of throughput, that is, the percentage of total time spent in garbage collection. Pause time—the length of time during which application execution is stopped while garbage collection is occurring. Frequency of collection—how often collection occurs, relative to application execution. Footprint—a measure of size, such as heap size. Promptness—the time between when an object becomes garbage and when the memory becomes available. If you’d like to explore more on this and in general about Java’s garbage collection / memory management, have a look at these slides: Java Garbage Collection, Monitoring, and Tuning View more presentations from Carol McDonald Related articles Practical Garbage Collection – Part 1: Introduction (worldmodscode.wordpress.com) Reducing memory churn when processing large data set (stackoverflow.com) The Top Java Memory Problems – Part 2 (dynatrace.com) imabonehead: Performance Tuning the JVM for Running Apache Tomcat | TomcatExpert (tomcatexpert.com) When Does the Garbage Collector Run in JVM ? (javacircles.wordpress.com) Why Garbage Collection Paranoia is Still (sometimes) Justified (prog21.dadgum.com) Adventures in Java Garbage Collection Tuning (rapleaf.com) From http://singztechmusings.in/java-garbage-collection-algorithm-design-choices-and-metrics-to-evaluate-garbage-collector-performance/

When I’m asked by web developers how they can get started with HTML5 Video, I ask them, “Why? What are you trying to solve?” Almost every time, I hear, “I just want my video to work on mobile devices.” Easy. I’ll show you how to get started. In most cases, the video content already exists in one format or another. A year and a half ago, I wrote about HTML5 video codecs and why I think H.264 is the clear leader. Nothing’s really changed. You still need to support a couple of codecs to be compatible with the full suite of modern desktop and mobile browsers, but as content creators, you get to decide how you want to encode your video content. Check out the IE Test Drive Video Format support page for some examples of how codecs work across different browsers. In reality, desktop browsers and web developers are happy to leave existing solutions in place to play existing video/audio content using plugins. That’s cool. Just supplement this with HTML5 Video and Audio tags if the browser is able to play your preferred codec natively. In my experience, the most popular mobile platforms—H.264, AAC, and MP3—are well supported using HTML5 Video and Audio Tags, which are already supported by what most people are already using. Ready to Go? Save Time, Development Cost, and Nerves. Start by learning about the Microsoft Media Platform (MMP), a frameworks are the glues together individual pieces of the Microsoft end-to-end media solution. The MMP: Player Framework (licensed for use under the Microsoft Public License Ms-PL) has recently added a preview of support for HTML5 (API Documentation) that lets you complement the Silverlight player framework with a HTML5 video experience and reach additional mobile platforms. Trust me, I have worked on a number of large-scale projects based on MMP (like the video platform behind the Rugby World Cup 2011). Two good commercial solutions that do all the work for you are JW Player™ (licensed for commercial use) and SublimeVideo® (Player as a Service). What If You Want to Roll Your Own Player? It’s surprisingly easy to roll your own video solution using default browser controls and codecs supported by the browser. The markup below shows what you need to play a video in HTML5 with a “Fall Back” to an unlisted video on YouTube. This WebMatrix is a lightweight IDE for building HTML5 mark-up. Use it—I find it handy. Demo Common Gotchas! 1. Video MIME types Set these on the server Azure Storage Explorer also allows you to do this on individual files. Update application/octet-stream to one of the following: .mp4 - “video/mp4″ .m4v - “video/m4v” .webm - “video/webm” .ogg - “application/ogg” .ogv - “video/ogg” Set these in the web.config 2. Fall-Back Fall-back content (like the YouTube example above) is only displayed by browsers that do not support the tag. If the browser supports the video tag but cannot play any of the media types you have requested, the fall-back code won’t fire. You’ll have to use JavaScript to detect this scenario using the canPlayType() method and provide fall-back content (shown below). Demo 3. Byte Range Requests (seeking) Content should be served from an HTTP 1.1-compatible web server to enable seek ahead to the end of the video. If your server is not HTTP 1.1-compatible (e.g. Azure Storage), you must encode the video with key index frames in the file and *not* at the end so that seek-ahead still works. The “H.264 YouTube HD” profile in Expression Encoder 4 Pro does this. NOTE: If the video file is gzipped, seeking won’t work. Since, with most codecs, the video/audio data is already compressed, gzip/deflate won't save you much bandwidth anyway. IIS also supports Bit Rate Throttling to save you bandwidth on the server side when delivering video content. Real-World Example I presented a session last week at Tech·Ed New Zealand, about a new video analysis system my buddies at NV Interactive, Gus and Zach, are creating for New Zealand Cricket. The solution uses video in wmv format and displays in a browser using Windows Media Plugin. This solution isn’t really supported cross platform, and it definitely doesn’t work on mobile devices. Gus and Zach are using H.264 and MediaElement.js to extend their video experience across a greater number of users and devices. Like the other commercial players, MediaElement.js uses the same HTML/CSS for all players. That means the HTML5 and Flash player experience looks the same for all users. Watch the video of the solution they’re working on: Where Does HTML5 Video Need to Go? There are currently a few key areas not addressed by the current W3C Video Standard (full screen support, live streaming, real-time communication, content protection, metadata, and accessibility). Recently, the W3C Web and TV Workshop covered these areas and offered some early thinking on how they may be adopted as web standards in the future. Live and adaptive streaming are the big topics for me. Currently, there are three proprietary solutions that support live and adaptive streaming we should pay attention to: Microsoft Smooth Streaming Apple HTTP Live Streaming Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is currently in Draft International Standard. It looks likely that it will get W3C support if it is offered royalty free. DASH supports: Live, on-demand, and time-shifted content delivery and trick modes Splicing and ad insertion Byte-range requests Content descriptors for protection, accessibility, and rating What About Real-Time Communications? On HTML5Labs, you can find a Media Capture Audio Prototype that implements the audio portion of this W3C specification. HTML5 Labs is the site where Microsoft prototypes early and unstable specifications from web standards bodies such as W3C. Sharing these prototypes helps Microsoft have informed discussions with developer communities to provide better feedback on draft specifications based on this implementation experience. Their next prototype will support speech recognition and will implement the Microsoft proposal available on the W3C website. After that, the labs team will deliver another update to the Media Capture prototype that will add video capture capabilities. In Conclusion If you are hosting progressive download video and audio on the web, you should be looking to support HTML5 video and audio today to extend the reach of your content. More Resources 5 Things You Need to Know to Start Using and Today (my MIX conference presentation in Las Vegas) HTML5 Guide for Developers - video and audio Elements Simon Pieters - Everything you need to know about HTML5 video and audio Dive Into HTML5 - Video On The Web About the author Nigel Parker is an evangelist in the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft New Zealand. He works with New Zealand software vendors helping them with the early adoption of web technologies. Nigel graduated from the University of Auckland with an honors degree in technology and philosophy. He has an entrepreneurial background and has numerous successful “start-ups” under his belt. He took some risks and broke some new ground during the first “.com” bubble and was one of the few that, despite losing money, didn’t lose heart for the unrealized potential of the tech industry. Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh549238

One of the methods of exchanging data between processes with the multiprocessing module is directly shared memory via multiprocessing.Value. As any method that’s very general, it can sometimes be tricky to use. I’ve seen a variation of this question asked a couple of times on StackOverflow: I have some processes that do work, and I want them to increment some shared counter because [... some irrelevant reason ...] – how can this be done? The wrong way And surprisingly enough, some answers given to this question are wrong, since they use multiprocessing.Value incorrectly, as follows: import time from multiprocessing import Process, Value def func(val): for i in range(50): time.sleep(0.01) val.value += 1 if __name__ == '__main__': v = Value('i', 0) procs = [Process(target=func, args=(v,)) for i in range(10)] for p in procs: p.start() for p in procs: p.join() print v.value This code is a demonstration of the problem, distilling only the usage of the shared counter. A "pool" of 10 processes is created to run the func function. All processes share a Value and increment it 50 times. You would expect this code to eventually print 500, but in all likeness it won’t. Here’s some output taken from 10 runs of that code: > for i in {1..10}; do python sync_nolock_wrong.py; done 435 464 484 448 491 481 490 471 497 494 Why does this happen? I must admit that the documentation of multiprocessing.Value can be a bit confusing here, especially for beginners. It states that by default, a lock is created to synchronize access to the value, so one may be falsely led to believe that it would be OK to modify this value in any way imaginable from multiple processes. But it’s not. Explanation – the default locking done by Value This section is advanced and isn’t strictly required for the overall flow of the post. If you just want to understand how to synchronize the counter correctly, feel free to skip it. The locking done by multiprocessing.Value is very fine-grained. Value is a wrapper around a ctypes object, which has an underlying value attribute representing the actual object in memory. All Value does is ensure that only a single process or thread may read or write this value attribute simultaneously. This is important, since (for some types, on some architectures) writes and reads may not be atomic. I.e. to actually fill up the object’s memory, the CPU may need several instructions, and another process reading the same (shared) memory at the same time could see some intermediate, invalid state. The built-in lock of Value prevents this from happening. However, when we do this: val.value +=1 What Python actually performs is the following (disassembled bytecode with the dis module). I’ve annotated the locking done by Value in #<-- comments: 0 LOAD_FAST 0 (val) 3 DUP_TOP #<--- Value lock acquired 4 LOAD_ATTR 0 (value) #<--- Value lock released 7 LOAD_CONST 1 (1) 10 INPLACE_ADD 11 ROT_TWO #<--- Value lock acquired 12 STORE_ATTR 0 (value) #<--- Value lock released So it’s obvious that while process #1 is now at instruction 7 (LOAD_CONST), nothing prevents process #2 from also loading the (old) value attribute and be on instruction 7 too. Both processes will proceed incrementing their private copy and writing it back. The result: the actual value got incremented only once, not twice. The right way Fortunately, this problem is very easy to fix. A separate Lock is needed to guarantee the atomicity of modifications to the Value: import time from multiprocessing import Process, Value, Lock def func(val, lock): for i in range(50): time.sleep(0.01) with lock: val.value += 1 if __name__ == '__main__': v = Value('i', 0) lock = Lock() procs = [Process(target=func, args=(v, lock)) for i in range(10)] for p in procs: p.start() for p in procs: p.join() print v.value Now we get the expected result: > for i in {1..10}; do python sync_lock_right.py; done 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 A value and a lock may appear like too much baggage to carry around at all times. So, we can create a simple "synchronized shared counter" object to encapsulate this functionality: import time from multiprocessing import Process, Value, Lock class Counter(object): def __init__(self, initval=0): self.val = Value('i', initval) self.lock = Lock() def increment(self): with self.lock: self.val.value += 1 def value(self): with self.lock: return self.val.value def func(counter): for i in range(50): time.sleep(0.01) counter.increment() if __name__ == '__main__': counter = Counter(0) procs = [Process(target=func, args=(counter,)) for i in range(10)] for p in procs: p.start() for p in procs: p.join() print counter.value() Bonus: since we’ve now placed a more coarse-grained lock on the modification of the value, we may throw away Value with its fine-grained lock altogether, and just use multiprocessing.RawValue, that simply wraps a shared object without any locking. Source: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/01/04/shared-counter-with-pythons-multiprocessing/

python -m SimpleHTTPServer is a very handy command that sets up a server listening on a port (by default 8080) having as document root the current directory. However it does not count for the purpose of this article: producing our first dynamic page with Python. We won't care a lot about the performance of various approaches or whether to adopt frameworks like Django: we are just getting started. Even when higher-level abstraction are introduced, we still have to know how the foundation of our house are made. Installation mod_python is an Apache module that bridges the Apache 2 httpd processes with the Python interpreter. You can install it on Ubuntu with a single command: sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-python See the mod_python website for alternative ways of installation. In the words of its homepage, mod_python is a mature but not dead project: it requires very little maintenance due to its stability. It is of course built only for Apache, and exposes its API; in any case, it promises to be faster than CGI (who doesn't?) Apache configuration This configuration lines should made their way into your httpd.conf or in the other configuration files you have on your system: LoadModule python_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_python.so AddHandler mod_python .py PythonHandler hello PythonDebug On We loaded the .so file of the module: if you installed mod_python in a Linux distribution, this line should already be present (use the a2enmod command if it's not in the enabled/ directory). In Ubuntu, it's written in the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/python.load file, where you can add the other lines. The rest of the configuration means that in the directory /var/www/python, we wwant to enable the processing of .py files by mod_python. The hello.py file will be targeted, unless you use a standard handler. PythonDebug On activates a nice stack trace visualization in the browser, in case of runtime errors. Without it, the production setting is to display a blank, generic 500 Server Error. Hello world Our Hello World it's easy to write: from mod_python import apache def handler(req): req.content_type = 'text/plain' req.write("Hello, World!") return apache.OK It's a bit strange that the Content-Type has to be specified on the request object, but there is no response object anyway: all interaction has to be performed on req. A bit less boilerplate? You can use a standard handler to simplify even more your .py files, by changing the configuration to this: PythonHandler mod_python.publisher Now the Hello World example becomes: from mod_python import apache def say(req): return "Hello, World!" and is displayed at http://localhost/python/hello.py/say. While the parameters are actually kept in the request object, you can specify them as required, named parameters: def say(req, name): return "Hello, " + name + "!" http://localhost/python/hello.py/say?name=Giorgio will display: Hello, Giorgio! Including other files import is the standard Python instruction for including other code into the current source file, usually with the form from module import entity. You can use it in your handlers, but you probably need to specify Python paths specific to each of them, to avoid that multiple application clash with each other: PythonPath "sys.path+['/var/python_code']" The string value of this directive should evaluate to a Python list containing all the folders to search for modules, just like sys.path originally does. To show you how it works, I can put this in /var/python_code/hello_lib.py: def say_to(name): return "Hello, " + name + "!" and micro-refactor my handler to: from mod_python import apache from hello_lib import say_to def say(req, name): return say_to(name) Conclusion Of course there's more to mod_python and to build real web applications: they have to manipulate cookies, the session API, and databases. Moreover, their configuration should access Apache internals, with directives for everything from importing automatically modules at the start of a request to setting up HTTP authentication. However, this article is about the HTTP-facing side of a web application. It's interesting to explore how the architecture on the server side works, so probably my next stop will be to try out a framework like Django to see which standard design choices it mades for us (and which may be questionable). In any case, we already have a Turing-complete entry point in our handlers, capable of linking to any Python source code. Resources The official mod_python documentation is long-winded but very good. The Style Guide for Python Code is a more general document that defines the coding standards for the whole Python world, while applying also to our web development scenario.

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) have become a valuable part of the Groovy idiom. DSLs are used in native Groovy builders, Grails and GORM, and testing frameworks. To a developer, DSLs are consumable and understandable, which makes implementation more fluid compared to traditional programming. But how is a DSL implemented? How does it work behind the scenes? This article will demonstrate a simple DSL that can get a developer kickstarted on the basic concepts. What is a DSL DSL's are meant to target a particular type of problem. They are short expressive means of programming that fit well in a narrow context. For example with GORM, you can express hibernate mapping with a DSL rather than XML. static mapping = { table 'person' columns { name column:'name' } } Much of the theory for DSLs and the benefits they deliver are well documented. Refer to these sources as a starting point: Martin Fowler - DSL Writing Domain Specific Languages - Groovy Programming Groovy - Chapter 18 A Simple DSL Example in Groovy The following example offers a simplified view of implementing an internal DSL. Frameworks have much more advanced methods of creating a DSL. However this example does highlight closure delegation and meta object protocol concepts that are essential to understanding the inner workings of a DSL. Requirements Overview Imagine that a customer needs a memo generator. The memos needs to have a few simple fields, such as "to", "from", and "body". The memo can also have sections such as "Summary" or "Important." The summary fields are dynamic and can be anything on demand. In addition, the memo needs to be outputed in three formats: xml, html, and text. We elect to implement this as a DSL in Groovy. The DSL result looks like this: MemoDsl.make { to "Nirav Assar" from "Barack Obama" body "How are things? We are doing well. Take care" idea "The economy is key" request "Please vote for me" xml } The output from the code yields: Nirav Assar Barack Obama How are things? We are doing well. Take care The economy is key Please vote for me The last line in the DSL can also be changed to 'html' or 'text'. This affects the output format. Implementation A static method that accepts a closure is a hassle free way to implement a DSL. In the memo example, the class MemoDsl has a make method. It creates an instance and delegates all calls in the closure to the instance. This is the mechanism where the "to", and "from" sections end up executing methods inside the MemoDsl class. Once the to() method is called, we store the text in the instance for formatting later on. class MemoDsl { String toText String fromText String body def sections = [] /** * This method accepts a closure which is essentially the DSL. Delegate the * closure methods to * the DSL class so the calls can be processed */ def static make(closure) { MemoDsl memoDsl = new MemoDsl() // any method called in closure will be delegated to the memoDsl class closure.delegate = memoDsl closure() } /** * Store the parameter as a variable and use it later to output a memo */ def to(String toText) { this.toText = toText } def from(String fromText) { this.fromText = fromText } def body(String bodyText) { this.body = bodyText } } Dynamic Sections When the closure includes a method that is not present in the MemoDsl class, groovy identifies it as a missing method. With Groovy's meta object protocol, the methodMissing interface on the class is invoked. This is how we handle sections for the memo. In the client code above we have entries for idea and request. MemoDsl.make { to "Nirav Assar" from "Barack Obama" body "How are things? We are doing well. Take care" idea "The economy is key" request "Please vote for me" xml } The sections are processed with the following code in MemoDsl. It creates a section class and appends it to a list in the instance. /** * When a method is not recognized, assume it is a title for a new section. Create a simple * object that contains the method name and the parameter which is the body. */ def methodMissing(String methodName, args) { def section = new Section(title: methodName, body: args[0]) sections << section } Processing Various Outputs Finally the most interesting part of the DSL is how we process the various outputs. The final line in the closure specifies the output desired. When a closure contains a string such as "xml" with no parameters, groovy assumes this is a 'getter' method. Thus we need to implement 'getXml()' to catch the delegation execution: /** * 'get' methods get called from the dsl by convention. Due to groovy closure delegation, * we had to place MarkUpBuilder and StringWrite code in a static method as the delegate of the closure * did not have access to the system.out */ def getXml() { doXml(this) } /** * Use markupBuilder to create a customer xml output */ private static doXml(MemoDsl memoDsl) { def writer = new StringWriter() def xml = new MarkupBuilder(writer) xml.memo() { to(memoDsl.toText) from(memoDsl.fromText) body(memoDsl.body) // cycle through the stored section objects to create an xml tag for (s in memoDsl.sections) { "$s.title"(s.body) } } println writer } The code for html and text is quite similar. The only variation is how the output is formatted. Entire Code The code in its entirety is displayed next. The best approach I found was to design the DSL client code and the specified formats first, then tackle the implementation. I used TDD and JUnit to drive my implementation. Note that I did not go the extra mile to do asserts on the system output in the tests, although this could be easily enhanced to do so. The code is fully executable inside any IDE. Run the various tests to view the DSL output. package com.solutionsfit.dsl.memotemplate class MemolDslTest extends GroovyTestCase { void testDslUsage_outputXml() { MemoDsl.make { to "Nirav Assar" from "Barack Obama" body "How are things? We are doing well. Take care" idea "The economy is key" request "Please vote for me" xml } } void testDslUsage_outputHtml() { MemoDsl.make { to "Nirav Assar" from "Barack Obama" body "How are things? We are doing well. Take care" idea "The economy is key" request "Please vote for me" html } } void testDslUsage_outputText() { MemoDsl.make { to "Nirav Assar" from "Barack Obama" body "How are things? We are doing well. Take care" idea "The economy is key" request "Please vote for me" text } } } package com.solutionsfit.dsl.memotemplate import groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder /** * Processes a simple DSL to create various formats of a memo: xml, html, and text */ class MemoDsl { String toText String fromText String body def sections = [] /** * This method accepts a closure which is essentially the DSL. Delegate the closure methods to * the DSL class so the calls can be processed */ def static make(closure) { MemoDsl memoDsl = new MemoDsl() // any method called in closure will be delegated to the memoDsl class closure.delegate = memoDsl closure() } /** * Store the parameter as a variable and use it later to output a memo */ def to(String toText) { this.toText = toText } def from(String fromText) { this.fromText = fromText } def body(String bodyText) { this.body = bodyText } /** * When a method is not recognized, assume it is a title for a new section. Create a simple * object that contains the method name and the parameter which is the body. */ def methodMissing(String methodName, args) { def section = new Section(title: methodName, body: args[0]) sections << section } /** * 'get' methods get called from the dsl by convention. Due to groovy closure delegation, * we had to place MarkUpBuilder and StringWrite code in a static method as the delegate of the closure * did not have access to the system.out */ def getXml() { doXml(this) } def getHtml() { doHtml(this) } def getText() { doText(this) } /** * Use markupBuilder to create a customer xml output */ private static doXml(MemoDsl memoDsl) { def writer = new StringWriter() def xml = new MarkupBuilder(writer) xml.memo() { to(memoDsl.toText) from(memoDsl.fromText) body(memoDsl.body) // cycle through the stored section objects to create an xml tag for (s in memoDsl.sections) { "$s.title"(s.body) } } println writer } /** * Use markupBuilder to create an html xml output */ private static doHtml(MemoDsl memoDsl) { def writer = new StringWriter() def xml = new MarkupBuilder(writer) xml.html() { head { title("Memo") } body { h1("Memo") h3("To: ${memoDsl.toText}") h3("From: ${memoDsl.fromText}") p(memoDsl.body) // cycle through the stored section objects and create uppercase/bold section with body for (s in memoDsl.sections) { p { b(s.title.toUpperCase()) } p(s.body) } } } println writer } /** * Use markupBuilder to create an html xml output */ private static doText(MemoDsl memoDsl) { String template = "Memo\nTo: ${memoDsl.toText}\nFrom: ${memoDsl.fromText}\n${memoDsl.body}\n" def sectionStrings ="" for (s in memoDsl.sections) { sectionStrings += s.title.toUpperCase() + "\n" + s.body + "\n" } template += sectionStrings println template } }