The Open Session in View (OSIV) pattern gives rise to different opinions in the Java development community. Let's go over OSIV and some of the pros and cons of this pattern. The problem The problem that OSIV solves is a mismatch between the Hibernate concept of session and it's lifecycle and the way that many server-side view technologies work. In a typical Java frontend application the service layer starts by querying some of the data needed to build the view. The remaining data needed can be lazy-loaded later, with the condition that the Hibernate session remains open - and there lies the problem. Between the moment that the service layer method finishes it's execution and the moment that the view is rendered, Hibernate has already committed the transaction and closed the session. When the view tries to lazy load the extra data that it needs, if finds the Hibernate session closed, causing a LazyInitializationException. The OSIV solution OSIV tackles this problem by ensuring that the Hibernate session is kept open all the way up to the rendering of the view - hence the name of the pattern. Because the session is kept open, no more LazyInitializationExceptions occur. The session or entity manager is kept open by means of a filter that is added to the request processing chain. In the case of JPA the OpenEntityManagerInViewFilter will create an entity manager at the beginning of the request, and then bind it to the request thread. The service layer will then be executed and the business transaction committed or rolled back, but the transaction manager will not remove the entity manager from the thread after the commit. When the view rendering starts, the transaction manager will then check if there is already an entity manager binded to the thread, and if so use it instead of creating a new one. After the request is processed, the filter will then unbind the entity manager from the thread. The end result is that the same entity manager used to commit the business transaction was kept around in the request thread, allowing the view rendering code to lazy load the needed data. Going back to the original problem Let's step back a moment and go back to the initial problem: the LazyInitializationException. Is this exception really a problem? This exception can also be seen as a warning sign of a wrongly written query in the service layer. When building a view and it's backing services, the developer knows upfront what data is needed, and can make sure that the needed data is loaded before the rendering starts. Several relation types such as one-to-many use lazy-loading by default, but that default setting can be overridden if needed at query time using the following syntax: select p FROM Person p left join fetch p.invoices This means that the lazy loading can be turned off on a case by case basis depending on the data needed by the view. OSIV in projects I've worked In projects I have worked that used OSIV, we could see via query logging that the database was getting hit with a high number of SQL queries, sometimes to the point that developers had to turn off the Hibernate SQL logging. The performance of these application was impacted, but it was kept manageable using second-level caches, and due to the fact that these where intranet-based applications with a limited number of users. Pros of OSIV The main advantage of OSIV is that it makes working with ORM and the database more transparent: Less queries need to be manually written Less awareness is required about the Hibernate session and how to solve LazyInitializationExceptions. Cons of OSIV OSIV seems to be easy to misuse and can accidentally introduce N+1 performance problems in the application. On projects I've worked OSIV did not work out well in the long-term. The alternative of writing custom queries that eager fetch data depending on the use case is manageable and turned out well in other projects I've worked. Alternatives to OSIV Besides the application-level solution of writing custom queries to pre-fetch the needed data, there are other framework-level aproaches to OSIV. The Seam Framework was built by some of the same developers as Hibernate , and solves the problem by introducing the notion of conversation. Can you let me know in the comments bellow your thoughts and experiences with OSIV, thanks for reading.

System Requirements: Eclipse Kepler Service Release 2 JDK 1.5 or above Installed Google App Engine SDK on eclipse – this is required for second version of this example. Create a google spreadsheet – login to your google account and create a new spreadsheet, if you want to read existing one then put that url in SPREADSHEET_URL. Once you create a new spreadsheet our url will be like – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L8xtAJfOObsXL-XemliUV10wkDHQNxjn6jKS4XwzYZ8/ but don’t put this url in SPREADSHEET_URL, Use the below url simply change the bold part. public static final String SPREADSHEET_URL = “https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/1L8xtAJfOObsXL-XemliUV10wkDHQNxjn6jKS4XwzYZ8“; // Fill in google spreadsheet URI package org.gopaldas.readsps; import java.io.IOException; import java.net.URL; import com.google.gdata.client.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetService; import com.google.gdata.data.spreadsheet.ListEntry; import com.google.gdata.data.spreadsheet.ListFeed; import com.google.gdata.data.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetEntry; import com.google.gdata.data.spreadsheet.WorksheetEntry; import com.google.gdata.util.ServiceException; public class ReadSpreadsheet { public static final String GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_USERNAME = "[email protected]"; // Fill in google account username public static final String GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_PASSWORD = "xxxx"; // Fill in google account password public static final String SPREADSHEET_URL = "https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/1L8xtAJfOObsXL-XemliUV10wkDHQNxjn6jKS4XwzYZ8"; //Fill in google spreadsheet URI public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, ServiceException { /** Our view of Google Spreadsheets as an authenticated Google user. */ SpreadsheetService service = new SpreadsheetService("Print Google Spreadsheet Demo"); // Login and prompt the user to pick a sheet to use. service.setUserCredentials(GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_USERNAME, GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_PASSWORD); // Load sheet URL metafeedUrl = new URL(SPREADSHEET_URL); SpreadsheetEntry spreadsheet = service.getEntry(metafeedUrl, SpreadsheetEntry.class); URL listFeedUrl = ((WorksheetEntry) spreadsheet.getWorksheets().get(0)).getListFeedUrl(); // Print entries ListFeed feed = (ListFeed) service.getFeed(listFeedUrl, ListFeed.class); for(ListEntry entry : feed.getEntries()) { System.out.println("new row"); for(String tag : entry.getCustomElements().getTags()) { System.out.println(" "+tag + ": " + entry.getCustomElements().getValue(tag)); } } } }

wanted to go through some of the basic tenets, the technical terminology related to java ee. for many people, java ee/j2ee still mean servlets, jsps or maybe struts at best. no offence or pun intended! this is not a java ee 'bible' by any means. i am not capable enough of writing such a thing! so let us line up the 'keywords' related to java ee and then look at them one by one java ee java ee apis (specifications) containers services multitiered applications components let's try to elaborate on the above mentioned points. ok. so what is java ee? 'ee' stands for enterprise edition. that essentially makes java ee - java enterprise edition. if i had to summarize java ee in a couple of sentences, it would go something like this "java ee is a platform which defines 'standard specifications/apis' which are then implemented by vendors and used for development of enterprise (distributed, 'multi-tired', robust) 'applications'. these applications are composed of modules or 'components' which use java ee 'containers' as their run-time infrastructure." what is this 'standardized platform' based upon? what does it constitute? the platform revolves around 'standard' specifications or apis . think of these as contracts defined by a standard body e.g. enterprise java beans (ejb), java persistence api (jpa), java message service (jms) etc. these contracts/specifications/apis are implemented by different vendors e.g. glassfish, oracle weblogic, apache tomee etc alright. what about containers? containers can be visualized as 'virtual/logical partitions' . each container supports a subset of the apis/specifications defined by the java ee platform they provide run-time 'services' to the 'applications' which they host the java ee specification lists 4 types of containers ejb container web container application client container applet container java ee containers i am not going to dwell into details of these containers in this post. services?? well, 'services' are nothing but a result of the vendor implementations of the standard 'specifications' (mentioned above). examples of specifications are - jersey for jax-rs (restful services), tyrus (web sockets), eclipselink (jpa), weld (cdi) etc. the 'container' is the interface between the deployed application ('service' consumer) and the application server. here is a list of 'services' which are rendered by the 'container' to the underlying 'components' (this is not an exhaustive list) persistence - offered by the java persistence api (jpa) which drives object relational mapping (orm) and an abstraction for the database operations. messaging - the java message service (jms) provides asynchronous messaging between disparate parts of your applications. contexts & dependency injection - cdi provides loosely coupled and type safe injection of resources. web services - jaxrs and jaxws provide support for rest and soap style services respectively transaction - provided by the java transaction api (jta) implementation what is a typical java ee 'application'? what does it comprise of? applications are composed of different ' components ' which in turn are supported by their corresponding ' container ' supported 'component' types are: enterprise applications - make use of the specifications like ejb, jms, jpa etc and are executed within an ejb container web applications - they leverage the servlet api, jsp, jsf etc and are supported by a web container application client - executed in client side. they need an application client container which has a set of supported libraries and executes in a java se environment. applets - these are gui applications which execute in a web browser. how are java ee applications structured? as far as java ee 'application' architecture is concerned, they generally tend follow the n-tier model consisting of client tier, server tier and of course the database (back end) tier client tier - consists of web browsers or gui (swing, java fx) based clients. web browsers tend to talk to the 'web components' on the server tier while the gui clients interact directly with the 'business' layer within the server tier server tier - this tier comprises of the dynamic web components (jsp, jsf, servlets) and the business layer driven by ejbs, jms, jpa, jta specifications. database tier - contains 'enterprise information systems' backed by databases or even legacy data repositories. generic 3-tier java ee application architecture java ee - bare bones, basics.... as quickly and briefly as i possibly could. that's all for now! :-) stay tuned for more java ee content, specifically around the latest and greatest version of the java ee platform --> java ee 7 happy reading!

splunk vs. sumo logic vs. logstash vs. graylog vs. loggly vs. papertrails vs. splunk>storm splunk, sumo logic, logstash, graylog, loggly, papertrails - did i miss someone? i’m pretty sure i did. logs are like fossil fuels - we’ve been wanting to get rid of them for the past 20 years, but we’re not quite there yet. well, if that's the case i want a bmw! to deal with the growth of log data a host of log management & analysis tools have been built over the last few years to help developers and operations make sense of the growing data. i thought it’d be interesting to look at our options and what are each tools’ selling point, from a developer’s standpoint . splunk as the biggest tool in this space, i decided to put splunk in a category of its own. that’s not to say it’s the best tool for what you need, but more to give credit to a product who essentially created a new category. pros splunk is probably the most feature rich solution in the space. it’s got hundreds of apps (i counted 537 ) to make sense of almost every format of log data, from security to business analytics to infrastructure monitoring. splunk’s search and charting tools are feature rich to the point that there’s probably no set of data you can’t get to through its ui or apis. cons splunk has two major cons. the first, that is more subjective, is that it’s an on-premise solution which means that setup costs in terms of money and complexity are high. to deploy in a high-scale environment you will need to install and configure a dedicated cluster. as a developer, it’s usually something you can't or don’t want to do as your first choice. splunk’s second con is that it’s expensive. to support a real-world application you’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars, which most likely means you’ll need sign offs from high-ups in your organization, and the process is going to be slow. if you’ve got a new app and you want something fast that you can quickly spin up and ramp as things progress - keep reading. some more enterprise log analyzers can be found here . saas log analyzers sumo logic sumo was founded as a saas version of splunk, going so far as to imitate some of splunk’s features and visuals early on. having said that, sl has developed to a full fledged enterprise class log management solution. pros sl is chock-full of features to reduce, search and chart mass amounts of data. out of all the saas log analyzers, it’s probably the most feature rich. also, being a saas offering it inherently means setup and ongoing operation are easier. one of sumo logic’s main points of attraction is the ability to establish baselines and to actively notify you when key metrics change after an event such as a new version rollout or a breach attempt. cons this one is shared across all saas log analyzers, which is you need to get the data to the service to actually do something with it. this means that you’ll be looking at possible gbs (or more) uploaded from your servers. this can create issues on multiple fronts - as a developer, if you're logging sensitive or pii you need to make sure it’s redacted. there may be a lag between the time data is logged and the time it’s visible to to the service. there’s additional overhead on your machines transmitting gbs of data, which really depends on your logging throughput. sumo’s pricing is also not transparent , which means you might be looking at a buying process which is more complex than swiping your team’s credit card to get going. loggly loggly is also a robust log analyzer, focusing on simplicity and ease of use for a devops audience. pros whereas sumo logic has a strong enterprise and security focus, loggly is geared more towards helping devops find and fix operational problems. this makes it very developer-friendly. things like creating custom performance and devops dashboards are super-easy to do. pricing is also transparent, which makes start of use easier. cons don't expect loggly to scale into a full blown infrastructure, security or analytics solution. if you need forensics or infrastructure monitoring you’re in the wrong place. this is a tools mainly for devops to parse data coming from your app servers. anything beyond that you’ll have to build yourself. papertrails papertrails is a simple way to look and search through logs from multiple machines, in one consolidated easy-to-use interface. think of it like tailing your log in the cloud, and you won't be too far off. pros pt is what it is. a simple way to look at log files from multiple machines in a singular view in the cloud. the ux itself is very similar to looking at a log on your machine, and so are the search commands. it aims to do something simple and useful, and does it elegantly. it’s also very affordable . cons pt is mostly text based. looking for any advanced integrations, predictive or reporting capabilities? you're barking up the wrong tree. splunk>storm this is splunk’s little (some may say step) saas brother. it’s a pretty similar offering that’s hosted on splunk’s servers. pros storm lets you experiment with splunk without having to install the actual software on-premise, and contains much of the features available in the full version. cons this isn't really a commercial offering, and you're limited in the amount of data you can send. it seems to be more of an online limited version of splunk meant to help people test out the product without having to deploy first. a new service called splunk cloud is aimed at providing a full-blown splunk saas experience. open source analyzers logstash logstash is an open source tool for collecting and managing log files. it’s part of an open-source stack which includes elasticsearch for indexing and searching through data and kibana for charting and visualizing data. together they form a powerful log management solution. pros being an open-source solution means you're inherently getting a lot of a control and a very good price. logstash uses three mature and powerful components, all heavily maintained, to create a very robust and extensible package. for an open-source solution it’s also very easy to install and start using. we use logstash and love it. cons as logstash is essentially a stack, it means you're dealing with three different products. that means that extensibility also becomes complex. logstash filters are written in ruby, kibana is pure javascript and elasticsearch has its own rest api as well as json templates. when you move to production, you’ll also need to separate the three into different machines, which adds to the complexity. graylog2 a fairly new player in the space, gl2 is an open-source log analyzer backed by mongodb as well as elasticsearch (similar to logstash) for storing and searching through log errors. it’s mainly focused on helping developers detect and fix errors in their apps. also in this category you can find fluentd and kafka whose one of its main use-cases is also storing log data. phew, so many choices! takipi for logs while this post is not about takipi, i thought there’s one feature it has which you might find relevant to all of this. the biggest disadvantage in all log analyzers and log files in general, is that the right data has to be put there by you first. from a dev perspective, it means that if an exception isn’t logged, or the variable data you need to understand why it happened isn't there, no log file or analyzer in the world can help you. production debugging sucks. one of the things we’ve added to takipi is the ability to jump into a recorded debugging session straight from a log file error. this means that for every log error you can see the actual source code and variable values at the moment of error. you can learn more about it here . this is one post where i would love to hear from you guys about your experiences with some of the tools mentioned (and some that i didn’t). i’m sure there are things you would disagree with or would like to correct me on - so go ahead, the comment section is below and i would love to hear from you. originally posted on takipi blog

See how HashMap performance has been improved with new features of Java 8.

with the recent release of java 8, developers are still just beginning to asses the strengths and weaknesses of the new platform. the most pressing question is: does java 8 have the fastest jvm so far? a good way to asses the progress of java 8 is to test its ability to work with something that was new to java 7... fork/join. oleg shelajev uses the "infamous" java microbenchmark harness project (jmh) to create a benchmark test for the two most recent versions of java. but before implementing the benchmark, he takes the time to give a brief overview of fork/join and how it changes between java 7 and 8. here is a graph of the results : based on these results, oleg recommends taking a chance and upgrading to java 8, especially if you are working with mapreducing or fork/join. this is his interpretation of the data that lead him to that conclusion: one can see that the baseline results, which show the throughput of running the math directly in a single thread do not differ between the jdk 7 and 8. however, when we include the overhead of managing recursive tasks and going through a forkjoin execution then java 8 is much faster. the numbers for this simple benchmark suggest that the overhead of managing forkjoin tasks is around 35% more performant in the latest release. check out the full article ! it is very informative, has great visuals, and tackles complexity with clarity.

Visa Card ^4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?$^5[1-5][0-9]{14}$ Amex Card ^3[47][0-9]{13}$ Carte Blanche Card ^389[0-9]{11}$ Diners Club Card ^3(?:0[0-5]|[68][0-9])[0-9]{11}$ Discover Card ^65[4-9][0-9]{13}|64[4-9][0-9]{13}|6011[0-9]{12}|(622(?:12[6-9]|1[3-9][0-9]|[2-8][0-9][0-9]|9[01][0-9]|92[0-5])[0-9]{10})$ JCB Card ^(?:2131|1800|35\d{3})\d{11}$ Visa Master Card ^(?:4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?|5[1-5][0-9]{14})$ Insta Payment Card ^63[7-9][0-9]{13}$ Laser Card ^(6304|6706|6709|6771)[0-9]{12,15}$ Maestro Card ^(5018|5020|5038|6304|6759|6761|6763)[0-9]{8,15}$ Solo Card ^(6334|6767)[0-9]{12}|(6334|6767)[0-9]{14}|(6334|6767)[0-9]{15}$ Switch Card ^(4903|4905|4911|4936|6333|6759)[0-9]{12}|(4903|4905|4911|4936|6333|6759)[0-9]{14}|(4903|4905|4911|4936|6333|6759)[0-9]{15}|564182[0-9]{10}|564182[0-9]{12}|564182[0-9]{13}|633110[0-9]{10}|633110[0-9]{12}|633110[0-9]{13}$ Union Pay Card ^(62[0-9]{14,17})$ KoreanLocalCard ^9[0-9]{15}$ BCGlobal ^(6541|6556)[0-9]{12}$ As you can see, regular expressions are incredibly powerful and the above examples are very basic. Regular expressions are essential for all sorts of application from web scraping, form validation and pattern matching. Hopefully you will find this resource useful and would come back to refer again and again.

Facts and Terminology As you probably know, Java uses UTF-16 to represent Strings. In order to understand the confusion about String.length(), you need to be familiar with some Encoding/Unicode terms. Code Point: A unique integer value which represents a character in the code space. Code Unit: A bit sequence used to encode characters (Code Points). One or more Code Units may be required to represent a Code Point. UTF-16 Unicode Code Points are logically divided into 17 planes. The first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) contains the “classic” characters (from U+0000 to U+FFFF). The other planes contain the supplementary characters (from U+10000 to U+10FFFF). Characters (Code Points) from the first plane are encoded in one 16-bit Code Unit with the same value. Supplementary characters (Code Points) are encoded in two Code Units (encoding-specific, see Wiki for the explanation). Example Character: A Unicode Code Point: U+0041 UTF-16 Code Unit(s): 0041 Character: Mathematical double-struck capital A Unicode Code Point: U+1D538 UTF-16 Code Unit(s): D835 DD38 As you can see here, there are characters which are encoded in two Code Units. String.length() Let’s take a look at the Javadoc of the length() method: public int length() Returns the length of this string. The length is equal to the number of Unicode code units in the string. So if you have one supplementary character which consists of two code units, the length of that single character is two. // Mathematical double-struck capital A String str = "\uD835\uDD38"; System.out.println(str); System.out.println(str.length()); //prints 2 Which is correct according to the documentation, but maybe it’s not expected. ~Solution You need to count the code points not the code units: String str = "\uD835\uDD38"; System.out.println(str); System.out.println(str.codePointCount(0, str.length())); See: codePointCount(int beginIndex, int endIndex) References/Sources The Java Language Specification Unicode Glossary: Code Point Wiki: Code Point Unicode Glossary: Code Unit Wiki: Code Unit Wiki: Unicode Wiki: UTF-16 Supplementary Characters in the Java Platform Wiki: Unicode Planes

The Map interface provides some handy new methods in JDK 8. Because the Map methods I cover in this post are implemented as default methods, all existing implementations of the Map interface enjoy the default behaviors defined in the default methods without any new code. The JDK 8 introduced Map methods covered in this post are getOrDefault(Object, V), putIfAbsent(K, V), remove(Object, Object), remove(Object, Object), replace(K, V), and replace(K, V, V). Example Map for Demonstrations I will be using the Map declared and initialized as shown in the following code throughout the examples in this blog post. The statesAndCapitals field is a class-level static field. I intentionally have only included a small subset of the fifty states in the United States for reading clarity and to allow easier demonstration of some of the new JDK 8 Map default methods. private final static Map statesAndCapitals; static { statesAndCapitals = new HashMap<>(); statesAndCapitals.put("Alaska", "Anchorage"); statesAndCapitals.put("California", "Sacramento"); statesAndCapitals.put("Colorado", "Denver"); statesAndCapitals.put("Florida", "Tallahassee"); statesAndCapitals.put("Nevada", "Las Vegas"); statesAndCapitals.put("New Mexico", "Sante Fe"); statesAndCapitals.put("Utah", "Salt Lake City"); statesAndCapitals.put("Wyoming", "Cheyenne"); } Map.getOrDefault(Object, V) Map's new method getOrDefault(Object, V) allows the caller to specify in a single statement to get the value of the map that corresponds to the provided key or else return a provided "default value" if no match is found for the provided key. The next code listing compares how checking for a value matching a provided key in a map or else using a default if no match is found was implemented before JDK 8 and how it can now be implemented with JDK 8. /* * Demonstrate Map.getOrDefault and compare to pre-JDK 8 approach. The JDK 8 * addition of Map.getOrDefault requires fewer lines of code than the * traditional approach and allows the returned value to be assigned to a * "final" variable. */ // pre-JDK 8 approach String capitalGeorgia = statesAndCapitals.get("Georgia"); if (capitalGeorgia == null) { capitalGeorgia = "Unknown"; } // JDK 8 approach final String capitalWisconsin = statesAndCapitals.getOrDefault("Wisconsin", "Unknown"); The Apache Commons class DefaultedMap provides functionality similar to the newMap.getOrDefault(Object, V) method. The Groovy GDK includes a similar method for Groovy,Map.get(Object, Object), but that one's behavior is a bit different because it not only returns the provided default if the "key" is not found, but also adds the key with the default value to the underlying map. Map.putIfAbsent(K, V) Map's new method putIfAbsent(K, V) has Javadoc advertising its default implementation equivalent: The default implementation is equivalent to, for this map: V v = map.get(key); if (v == null) v = map.put(key, value); return v; This is illustrated with another code sample that compares the pre-JDK 8 approach to the JDK 8 approach. /* * Demonstrate Map.putIfAbsent and compare to pre-JDK 8 approach. The JDK 8 * addition of Map.putIfAbsent requires fewer lines of code than the * traditional approach and allows the returned value to be assigned to a * "final" variable. */ // pre-JDK 8 approach String capitalMississippi = statesAndCapitals.get("Mississippi"); if (capitalMississippi == null) { capitalMississippi = statesAndCapitals.put("Mississippi", "Jackson"); } // JDK 8 approach final String capitalNewYork = statesAndCapitals.putIfAbsent("New York", "Albany"); Alternate solutions in the Java space before the addition of this putIfAbsent method are discussed in theStackOverflow thread Java map.get(key) - automatically do put(key) and return if key doesn't exist?. It's worth noting that before JDK 8, the ConcurrentMap interface (extends Map) already provided a putIfAbsent(K, V)method. Map.remove(Object, Object) Map's new remove(Object, Object) method goes beyond the long-available Map.remove(Object) method to remove a map entry only if both the provided key and provided value match an entry in the map (the previously available version only looked for a "key" match to remove). The Javadoc comment for this method explains the how the default method's implementation works in terms of equivalent pre-JDK 8 Java code: The default implementation is equivalent to, for this map: if (map.containsKey(key) && Objects.equals(map.get(key), value)) { map.remove(key); return true; } else return false; A concrete comparison of the new approach to the pre-JDK 8 approach is shown in the next code listing. /* * Demonstrate Map.remove(Object, Object) and compare to pre-JDK 8 approach. * The JDK 8 addition of Map.remove(Object, Object) requires fewer lines of * code than the traditional approach and allows the returned value to be * assigned to a "final" variable. */ // pre-JDK 8 approach boolean removed = false; if ( statesAndCapitals.containsKey("New Mexico") && Objects.equals(statesAndCapitals.get("New Mexico"), "Sante Fe")) { statesAndCapitals.remove("New Mexico", "Sante Fe"); removed = true; } // JDK 8 approach final boolean removedJdk8 = statesAndCapitals.remove("California", "Sacramento"); Map.replace(K, V) The first of the two new Map "replace" methods sets the specified value to be mapped to the specified key only if the specified key already exists with some mapped value. The Javadoc comment explains the Java equivalent of this default method implementation: The default implementation is equivalent to, for this map: if (map.containsKey(key)) { return map.put(key, value); } else return null; The comparison of this new approach to the pre-JDK 8 approach is shown next. /* * Demonstrate Map.replace(K, V) and compare to pre-JDK 8 approach. The JDK 8 * addition of replace(K, V) requires fewer lines of code than the traditional * approach and allows the returned value to be assigned to a "final" * variable. */ // pre-JDK 8 approach String replacedCapitalCity; if (statesAndCapitals.containsKey("Alaska")) { replacedCapitalCity = statesAndCapitals.put("Alaska", "Juneau"); } // JDK 8 approach final String replacedJdk8City = statesAndCapitals.replace("Alaska", "Juneau"); Map.replace(K, V, V) The second newly added Map "replace" method is more narrow in its interpretation of which existing values are replaced. While the method just covered replaces any value in a value available for the specified key in the mapping, this "replace" method that accepts an additional (third) argument will only replace the value of a mapped entry that has both a matching key and a matching value. The Javadoc comment shows the default method's implementation: The default implementation is equivalent to, for this map: if (map.containsKey(key) && Objects.equals(map.get(key), value)) { map.put(key, newValue); return true; } else return false; My comparison of this approach to the pre-JDK 8 approach is shown in the next code listing. /* * Demonstrate Map.replace(K, V, V) and compare to pre-JDK 8 approach. The * JDK 8 addition of replace(K, V, V) requires fewer lines of code than the * traditional approach and allows the returned value to be assigned to a * "final" variable. */ // pre-JDK 8 approach boolean replaced = false; if ( statesAndCapitals.containsKey("Nevada") && Objects.equals(statesAndCapitals.get("Nevada"), "Las Vegas")) { statesAndCapitals.put("Nevada", "Carson City"); replaced = true; } // JDK 8 approach final boolean replacedJdk8 = statesAndCapitals.replace("Nevada", "Las Vegas", "Carson City"); Observations and Conclusion There are several observations to make from this post. The Javadoc methods for these new JDK 8 Map methods are very useful, especially in terms of describing how the new methods behave in terms of pre-JDK 8 code. I discussed these methods' Javadoc in a more general discussion on JDK 8 Javadoc-based API documentation. As the equivalent Java code in these methods' Javadoc comments indicates, these new methods do not generally check for null before accessing map keys and values. Therefore, one can expect the same issues with nulls using these methods as one would find when using "equivalent" code as shown in the Javadoc comments. In fact, the Javadoc comments generally warn about the potential forNullPointerException and issues related to some Map implementations allowing null and some not for keys and values. The new Map methods discussed in this post are "default methods," meaning that implementations of Map "inherit" these implementations automatically. The new Map methods discussed in this post allow for cleaner and more concise code. In most of my examples, they allowed the client code to be converted from multiple state-impacting statements to a single statement that can set a local variable once and for all. The new Map methods covered in this post are not ground-breaking or earth-shattering, but they are conveniences that many Java developers previously implemented more verbose code for, wrote their own similar methods for, or used a third-party library for. JDK 8 brings these standardized methods to the Java masses without need for custom implementation or third-party frameworks. Because default methods are the implementation mechanism, even Map implementations that have been around for quite a while suddenly and automatically have access to these new methods without any code changes to the implementations.

There are many instances where we will have to write custom queries with hibernate. I always hated writing custom queries due to following reasons Hibernate returns List of Object arrays (List getSalaryByDepartment() { Session session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().openSession(); try { List salaryByDepartments = new ArrayList(); for (Object object : contactList) { Object[] result = (Object[]) object; SalaryByDepartment salaryByDepartment = new SalaryByDepartment(); salaryByDepartment.setDeptId((Integer) result[0]); salaryByDepartment.setDepartmentName((String) result[1]); salaryByDepartment.setSalary((Double) result[2]); salaryByDepartments.add(salaryByDepartment); } return salaryByDepartments; } catch (HibernateException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } finally { session.close(); } } There is a better mechanism for writing the custom queries called 'select new' but it is not widely used for some reason. It might be an overkill to write all custom queries using this mechanism, but is good for queries which return more than 2 columns. public List getNewSalaryByDepartment() { Session session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().openSession(); try { List salaryByDept = session.createQuery("select " + "new hsqldb.results.SalaryByDepartment(department.id, department.departmentName, sum(employee.salary)) " + "from Employee employee, Department department " + "where employee.department.id = department.id group by department.id") .list(); return salaryByDept; } catch (HibernateException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } finally { session.close(); } }

If you need to compare the java.io.file.Path object, be aware that Path.endsWith(String) will ONLY match another sub-element of Path object in your original path, not the path name string portion! If you want to match the string name portion, you would need to call the Path.toString() first. For example // Match all jar files. Files.walk(dir).forEach(path -> { if (path.toString().endsWith(".jar")) System.out.println(path); }); With out the "toString()" you will spend many fruitless hours wonder why your program didn't work.

There are many false ideas around about Java 8. Among these is the idea that Java 8 brings closures to Java.

What's New in this Release? Aspose development team is happy to announce the monthly release of Aspose.Words for Java &.NET 14.3.0. Aspose.Words now supports insertion of OLE objects such as another Microsoft Word document or a Microsoft Excel chart. A new public method, InsertOleObject, has been introduced in the DocumentBuilder class. This method can be used to insert an embedded or linked OLE object from a file into a Word document. Aspose.Words’ rendering engine now partially supports EUDC (End-User-Defined-Characters) fonts. Please find below the description of how EUDC fonts works on Windows. In this first implementation, Aspose.Words uses a single EUDC font. When rendering a document to fixed-page formats, this font is searched among the specified font sources by “EUDC” family name. Starting from Aspose.Words 14.3.0, Best Fit position of data labels in pie charts is partially supported. In previous versions labels with best fit position were rendered as if they had the inside end position. Currently we use a modified Open Office algorithm to set the best fit position of data labels. The list of new and improved features in this release are listed below Public API for insertion of OLE objects both linked and embedded Outline, Shadow, Reflection, Glow and Fill text effects for rendering text inside DrawingML shapes EUDC fonts rendering partially supported “PDF Logical Structure” export reworked, significantly improving memory usage Support OLE embedding of documents and files Feature Write an article about how to work with Table of contents in Aspose.Words Add tag support Support BestFit position of Pie chart's data labels. Support style:text-decoration attribute of Paragraph tag. Preserve private characters in EUDC.TTE during rendering to Pdf Support HTML table row borders in HTML import Support text outline effect. Support text fill effect. Support text shadow effect. Support text reflection effect Support text glow effect. Support text effects applied to text in Dml Shape or in SmartArt. Implement reading text effects from rPr in DML. Support inheriting styles from parent objects. Add image compression options for different image types Add a link to the online documentation in the DLLs only release Default run properties lose lang attribute value on DOCX to DOC conversions Padding for image in table is lost when rendering to Pdf Consider using "Don't vertically align cells containing floating objects" compatibility option when exporting to HTML Shape in table's cell is improperly horizontally aligned to center after export to HTML is now fixed Floating shape is now properly vertically positioned after export to HTML Warning : Unkno/wn ProgId value 'Visio.Drawing.11'. This might cause inaccessible OLE embedding Charts (DrawingML) issue fixed and now render correctly in Pdf file Aspose.Words now properly work in Jdeveloper IDE OLE object cannot be edited after re saving the document Diagram connectors are inverted/flipped after conversion from Docx to pdf WordArt letters are condensing issue is resolved Condensed character spacing is lost is fixed Relative hyperlink with Unicode is now properly saved to Pdf Add pre-built Document Explorer JAR to Java release. Aspose.Words does not take in account style set in . Table now looks correctly while converting html to doc. Hyperlinks split into multiple fragments/links in output PDF Horizontal table position is corrected. Document.UpdateFields Does not Update TOC in DOCX Content in the output html is overlapped at many places in Html Different table justify alignment for different compatibilityMode values. CSS selectors now work for , , and elements Chart Legend/Series now render correctly in output Pdf file Data labels with best fit position are rendering at correct places in Chart Offset of the hyperlink text line is off by a few pixels in output Pdf Hyperlinks split into multiple fragments/links in output PDF is fixed Document.UpdateFields is enhanced and update SUM formula field Paragraph's first line indent increases is fixed when exported to HTM Space before a paragraph following a floating element is too large after HTML to DOCX conversion is now fixd Block-level SVG image become inline after HTML to DOCX conversion Problem with vertical paragraph spacing is resolved when importing HTML using InsertHtml method Shape rotation is fixed after conversion from Doc to Pdf Text color is changed after conversion from Docx to WordML/Doc Word Table indentation is now corrected when is placed inside Arrows on the Lines gets distorted when converting to Pdf is now fixed A space character is exported to PDF output between Japanese and Numeric characters is fixed Line Shape from Header is merged with the top border of Table in Body Docx to WordML conversion issue resolved with content control Junk text is rendered in fixed page formats Positions of some DrawingML circles are now preserved during rendering A row and some content is rendering at the bottom of previous page is fixed Header table rows and images are now preserved in PDF List items issue fixed, now line up correctly after conversion from RTF to HTML Conversion from Docm to Doc creates corrupted document now fixed Hyperlink for an icon is now preserved during HTML to PDF conversion Text overlapping is fixed after conversion from Docx to Pdf Text position change is fixed after conversion from Docx to Pdf Other most recent bug fixes are also included in this release Newly added documentation pages and articles Some new tips and articles have now been added into Aspose.Words for .NET documentation that may guide you briefly how to use Aspose.Words for performing different tasks like the followings. How Aspose.Words Uses True Type Fonts How to Extract Images from a Document Overview: Aspose.Words Aspose.Words is a word processing component that enables .NET, Java & Android applications to read, write and modify Word documents without using Microsoft Word. Other useful features include document creation, content and formatting manipulation, mail merge abilities, reporting features, TOC updated/rebuilt, Embedded OOXML, Footnotes rendering and support of DOCX, DOC, WordprocessingML, HTML, XHTML, TXT and PDF formats (requires Aspose.Pdf). It supports both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. You can even use Aspose.Words for .NET to build applications with Mono. More about Aspose.Words Homepage Aspose.Words for .NET Homepage Java Word Library Download Aspose.Words for .NET Download Aspose.Words for Java Demos for Aspose.Words Contact Information Aspose Pty Ltd Suite 163, 79 Longueville Road Lane Cove, NSW, 2066 Australia Aspose - Your File Format Experts [email protected] Phone: 888.277.6734 Fax: 866.810.9465

Before some time I have written a blog post – Converting a C# object into JSON string in that post one of reader, Thomas Levesque commented that mostly people are using JSON.NET a popular high performance JSON for creating for .NET Created by James Newton- King. I agree with him if we are using .NET Framework 4.0 or higher version for earlier version still JavaScriptSerializer is good. So in this post we are going to learn How we can convert C# object into JSON string with JSON.NET framework. What is JSON.NET: JSON.NET is a very high performance framework compared to other serializer for converting C# object into JSON string. It is created by James Newton-Kind. You can find more information about this framework from following link. http://james.newtonking.com/json How to convert C# object into JSON string with JSON.NET framework: For this I am going to use old application that I have used in previous post. Following is a employee class with two properties first name and last name. public class Employee { public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } } I have created same object of “Employee” class as I have created in previous post like below. Employee employee=new Employee {FirstName = "Jalpesh", LastName = "Vadgama"}; Now it’s time to add JSON.NET Nuget package. You install Nuget package via following command. I have installed like below. Now we are done with adding NuGet package. Following is code I have written to convert C# object into JSON string. string jsonString = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(employee); Console.WriteLine(jsonString); Let's run application and following is a output as expected. That’s it. It’s very easy. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more.

In this post, we will take a look at how we can create an object pool in Java. In recent times, JVM performance has been multiplied manifold and so object creation is no longer considered as expensive as it was done earlier. But there are few objects, for which creation of new object still seems to be slight costly as they are not considered as lightweight objects. e.g.: database connection objects, parser objects, thread creation etc. In any application we need to create multiple such objects. Since creation of such objects is costly, it’s a sure hit for the performance of any application. It would be great if we can reuse the same object again and again. Object Pools are used for this purpose. Basically, object pools can be visualized as a storage where we can store such objects so that stored objects can be used and reused dynamically. Object pools also controls the life-cycle of pooled objects. As we understood the requirement, let’s come to real stuff. Fortunately, there are various open source object pooling frameworks available, so we do not need to reinvent the wheel. In this post we will be using apache commons pool to create our own object pool. At the time of writing this post Version 2.2 is the latest, so let us use this. The basic thing we need to create is- 1. A pool to store heavyweight objects (pooled objects). 2. A simple interface, so that client can - a.) Borrow pooled object for its use. b.) Return the borrowed object after its use. Let’s start with Parser Objects. Parsers are normally designed to parse some document like xml files, html files or something else. Creating new xml parser for each xml file (having same structure) is really costly. One would really like to reuse the same (or few in concurrent environment) parser object(s) for xml parsing. In such scenario, we can put some parser objects into pool so that they can be reused as and when needed. Below is a simple parser declaration: package blog.techcypher.parser; /** * Abstract definition of Parser. * * @author abhishek * */ public interface Parser { /** * Parse the element E and set the result back into target object T. * * @param elementToBeParsed * @param result * @throws Exception */ public void parse(E elementToBeParsed, T result) throws Exception; /** * Tells whether this parser is valid or not. This will ensure the we * will never be using an invalid/corrupt parser. * * @return */ public boolean isValid(); /** * Reset parser state back to the original, so that it will be as * good as new parser. * */ public void reset(); } Let’s implement a simple XML Parser over this as below: package blog.techcypher.parser.impl; import blog.techcypher.parser.Parser; /** * Parser for parsing xml documents. * * @author abhishek * * @param * @param */ public class XmlParser implements Parser { private Exception exception; @Override public void parse(E elementToBeParsed, T result) throws Exception { try { System.out.println("[" + Thread.currentThread().getName()+ "]: Parser Instance:" + this); // Do some real parsing stuff. } catch(Exception e) { this.exception = e; e.printStackTrace(System.err); throw e; } } @Override public boolean isValid() { return this.exception == null; } @Override public void reset() { this.exception = null; } } At this point, as we have parser object we should create a pool to store these objects. Here, we will be using GenericObjectPool to store the parse objects. Apache commons pool has already build-in classes for pool implementation. GenericObjectPool can be used to store any object. Each pool can contain same kind of object and they have factory associated with them. GenericObjectPool provides a wide variety of configuration options, including the ability to cap the number of idle or active instances, to evict instances as they sit idle in the pool, etc. If you want to create multiple pools for different kind of objects (e.g. parsers, converters, device connections etc.) then you should use GenericKeyedObjectPool . package blog.techcypher.parser.pool; import org.apache.commons.pool2.PooledObjectFactory; import org.apache.commons.pool2.impl.GenericObjectPool; import org.apache.commons.pool2.impl.GenericObjectPoolConfig; import blog.techcypher.parser.Parser; /** * Pool Implementation for Parser Objects. * It is an implementation of ObjectPool. * * It can be visualized as- * +-------------------------------------------------------------+ * | ParserPool | * +-------------------------------------------------------------+ * | [Parser@1, Parser@2,...., Parser@N] | * +-------------------------------------------------------------+ * * @author abhishek * * @param * @param */ public class ParserPool extends GenericObjectPool>{ /** * Constructor. * * It uses the default configuration for pool provided by * apache-commons-pool2. * * @param factory */ public ParserPool(PooledObjectFactory> factory) { super(factory); } /** * Constructor. * * This can be used to have full control over the pool using configuration * object. * * @param factory * @param config */ public ParserPool(PooledObjectFactory> factory, GenericObjectPoolConfig config) { super(factory, config); } } As we can see, the constructor of pool requires a factory to manage lifecycle of pooled objects. So we need to create a parser factory which can create parser objects. Commons pool provide generic interface for defining a factory(PooledObjectFactory). PooledObjectFactory create and manage PooledObjects . These object wrappers maintain object pooling state, enabling PooledObjectFactory methods to have access to data such as instance creation time or time of last use. A DefaultPooledObject is provided, with natural implementations for pooling state methods. The simplest way to implement a PoolableObjectFactory is to have it extend BasePooledObjectFactory . This factory provides a makeObject() that returns wrap(create()) where create and wrap are abstract. We provide an implementation of create to create the underlying objects that we want to manage in the pool and wrap to wrap created instances in PooledObjects. So, here is our factory implementation for parser objects- package blog.techcypher.parser.pool; import org.apache.commons.pool2.BasePooledObjectFactory; import org.apache.commons.pool2.PooledObject; import org.apache.commons.pool2.impl.DefaultPooledObject; import blog.techcypher.parser.Parser; import blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser; /** * Factory to create parser object(s). * * @author abhishek * * @param * @param */ public class ParserFactory extends BasePooledObjectFactory> { @Override public Parser create() throws Exception { return new XmlParser(); } @Override public PooledObject> wrap(Parser parser) { return new DefaultPooledObject>(parser); } @Override public void passivateObject(PooledObject> parser) throws Exception { parser.getObject().reset(); } @Override public boolean validateObject(PooledObject> parser) { return parser.getObject().isValid(); } } Now, at this point we have successfully created our pool to store parser objects and we have a factory as well to manage the life-cycle of parser objects. You should notice that, we have implemented couple of extra methods- 1. boolean validateObject(PooledObject obj): This is used to validate an object borrowed from the pool or returned to the pool based on configuration. By default, validation remains off. Implementing this ensures that client will always get a valid object from the pool. 2. void passivateObject(PooledObject obj): This is used while returning an object back to pool. In the implementation we can reset the object state, so that the object behaves as good as a new object on another borrow. Since, we have everything in place, let’s create a test to test this pool. Pool clients can – 1. Get object by calling pool.borrowObject() 2. Return the object back to pool by calling pool.returnObject(object) Below is our code to test Parser Pool- package blog.techcypher.parser; import static org.junit.Assert.fail; import java.util.concurrent.ArrayBlockingQueue; import java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService; import java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor; import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit; import java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicInteger; import junit.framework.Assert; import org.apache.commons.pool2.impl.GenericObjectPoolConfig; import org.junit.Before; import org.junit.Test; import blog.techcypher.parser.pool.ParserFactory; import blog.techcypher.parser.pool.ParserPool; /** * Test case to test- * 1. object creation by factory * 2. object borrow from pool. * 3. returning object back to pool. * * @author abhishek * */ public class ParserFactoryTest { private ParserPool pool; private AtomicInteger count = new AtomicInteger(0); @Before public void setUp() throws Exception { GenericObjectPoolConfig config = new GenericObjectPoolConfig(); config.setMaxIdle(1); config.setMaxTotal(1); /*---------------------------------------------------------------------+ |TestOnBorrow=true --> To ensure that we get a valid object from pool | |TestOnReturn=true --> To ensure that valid object is returned to pool | +---------------------------------------------------------------------*/ config.setTestOnBorrow(true); config.setTestOnReturn(true); pool = new ParserPool(new ParserFactory(), config); } @Test public void test() { try { int limit = 10; ExecutorService es = new ThreadPoolExecutor(10, 10, 0L, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS, new ArrayBlockingQueue(limit)); for (int i=0; i parser = null; try { parser = pool.borrowObject(); count.getAndIncrement(); parser.parse(null, null); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(System.err); } finally { if (parser != null) { pool.returnObject(parser); } } } }; es.submit(r); } es.shutdown(); try { es.awaitTermination(1, TimeUnit.MINUTES); } catch (InterruptedException ignored) {} System.out.println("Pool Stats:\n Created:[" + pool.getCreatedCount() + "], Borrowed:[" + pool.getBorrowedCount() + "]"); Assert.assertEquals(limit, count.get()); Assert.assertEquals(count.get(), pool.getBorrowedCount()); Assert.assertEquals(1, pool.getCreatedCount()); } catch (Exception ex) { fail("Exception:" + ex); } } } Result: [pool-1-thread-1]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 [pool-1-thread-2]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 [pool-1-thread-3]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 [pool-1-thread-4]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 [pool-1-thread-5]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 [pool-1-thread-8]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 [pool-1-thread-7]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 [pool-1-thread-9]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 [pool-1-thread-6]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 [pool-1-thread-10]: Parser Instance:blog.techcypher.parser.impl.XmlParser@fcfa52 Pool Stats: Created:[1], Borrowed:[10] You can easily see that single parser object was created and reused dynamically. Commons Pool 2 stands far better in term of performance and scalability over Commons Pool 1. Also, version 2 includes robust instance tracking and pool monitoring. Commons Pool 2 requires JDK 1.6 or above. There are lots of configuration options to control and manage the life-cycle of pooled objects. And so ends our long post… :-) Hope this article helped. Keep learning!

What is a License Manager? License managers are used to enforce license rights, or at least to support the enforcement. When you develop an open source program, there is no much you need to or can do to enforce license rights. The code is there and if anyone just wants to abuse the program there is nothing technical that could stop them. Closed source programs are different. (Are they?) In that case the source code is not available for the client. It is not possible to alter the program so that it circumvents the license enforcement code, and thus there is a real role for license rights enforcement. But this is not true. The truth is that there is no fundamental difference between closed and open source code in this respect. Closed source codes can also be altered. The ultimate “source” for the execution is there after all: the machine code. There are tools that help to analyze and decode the binary to more or less human readable format and thus it is possible to circumvent the license management. It is possible and there is a great source of examples for it. On some sites hosted in some countries you can simply download the cracked version of practically any software. I do not recommend to do that and not only for ethical reasons though. You just never know which of the sites are funded by secret services or criminals (if there is any difference) and you never know if you install spy software on your machine using the cracked version. Once I worked for a company where one of the success measurements of their software was the number of the days after release till the cracked versions appeared on the different sites compared to the same value of the competitor. The smaller the number was for their software the happier they were. Were they crazy? Why were they happy to know that their software was cracked? When the number of the days was only one single they, why did not they consider applying stronger license enforcement measure, like morphing code, hardware key and so on? The answer is the following. This company knows very well that license management is not to prevent the unauthorized use. It can be used that way but it will have two major effects which will ruin your business: Writing license management code you spend your time on non-productive code. License management (this way) works against your customer. Never implement license management against your customer. When your license management solution is too restrictive you may restrict the software use of your customer. When you deliver your code using hardware key you impose inconvenience to your customer. When you bind your license to Ethernet MAC address of the machine the application is running on, again: you work against your customer. Set != Set Face the said truth: there will always be people, who use your software without paying for it. They are not your customers. Do they steal from you? Not necessarily. If there is someone who is not buying your software, he is not your customer. If you know that there is no way they would pay for the software and the decision was in your hands whether you want them to use the software or use that of your competitor what would you choose? I guess you would like your software to be used to get more feedback and more knowledge even in the area of non-customers. People using your software may become your customer more likely than people not using it. This is why big companies sell out educational licenses to universities and other academic institutions. Should we use license management at all in that case? Is license management bad down to ground in all aspects? My answer is that it is not. There is a correct use case for license management, even when the software is open source (but not free, like Atlassian products). To find and understand this use case there is one major thing to understand: The software is for the customer, and any line in the code has to support the customers to reach their business goals. Paying the fee for the software is for the customers. If nobody finances a software the software will die. There is nothing like free lunch. Somebody has to pay for it. To become a customer and pay for the software used is the most straightforward business model and provides the strongest feedback and control for the customer over the vendor to get the features needed. At the same time paying for the software use is not the core business of the customer. Paying for the resources used supports them to reach their business goals is indirect. This is where license management comes into picture. It helps the customer to due their duties. It helps them remember their long term needs. This also means that license management should not prevent functionality. No functionality should stop if a license expires. Not to mention functionality that may prevent access to data that actually belongs to the customer. If you approach license management with this mindset you can see that even open source (but not free) software may need it. License Management Tool: license3j Many years ago I was looking for some license management library and I found that there was none open source. I wanted to create an open source (but not free) application and it required that the license management is also open source. What I found was also overpriced taking into account our budget that was just zero for a part time start-up software (which actually failed business wise miserably, but that is another story). For this reason I created License3jwhich surprisingly became one of the most used library of my OS projects. License3j is very simple in terms of business objects. It uses a simple property file and lets the application check the content of the individual fields. The added value is handling electronic signature and checking the authenticity of the license file. Essentially it is hardly more than a single class file. com.verhas license3j 1.0.4 Feel free to use it if you like.

Welcome to part 4 of the “Be a lazy but a productive android developer” series. If you are lazy android developers for creating row items for ListView/GridView but would want to create an awesome ListView/GridView in easy steps then this article is for you. This series so far: Part 1: We looked at RoboGuice, a dependency injection library by which we can reduce the boiler plate code, save time and there by achieve productivity during Android app development. Part 2: We saw and explored about Genymotion, which is a rocket speed emulator and super-fast emulator as compared to native emulator. And we can use Genymotion while developing apps and can quickly test apps and there by can achieve productivity. Part 3: We understood and explored about JSON Parsing libraries (GSON and Jackson), using which we can increase app performance, we can decrease boilerplate code and there by can optimize productivity. In this Part In this part, we are going to explore 2-3 card UI libraries which are open source and available on GitHub and we can use either of it into our app development to have a quick listview/gridview with awesome card view. What is Card UI and Why Should We Follow Card UI Design? Ever wondered about Google play store UI which is built around cards. Card is nothing but a single row item of ListView or GridView. As depicted below, card can be of various sizes and can be either app card, movie, books, games or app suggestions card or birthday card or even it can be a simple list/grid item too. The main benefit of designing app with card UI is it gives consistent looks throughout the application, doesn’t matter whether it gets loaded in mobile or tablet. Cards Libraries Now, I am sure you are excited to read and explore about cards libraries existed on web. As I said, Google play store UI is built around card, we can build the same card UI either defining our own custom adapter with styles/images or we can achieve this type of card UI directly by using some open-source card libraries. I am sure you are lazy android developer but want to be a productive developer so you would go for using card UI library Regarding card library, it just provides an easy way to display card UIs in your android app. I have found 3 widely used card libraries in android development: Cardslib by Gabriele MariottiGabriele Mariotti – https://github.com/gabrielemariotti/cardslib Cards UI by Aidan Follestad – https://github.com/afollestad/Cards-UI CardsUI by Nadavfima – https://github.com/nadavfima/cardsui-for-android Being a lazy but a productive android developer, so far I have used Cardslib by Gabriele. As far as I have used Cardslib, I would say you don’t need to define a row layout or custom adapter to display simple card list, but yes you would have to design custom xml layout in case if you would want to customize card layout as per your designs and requirements. I would recommend Cardslib by Gabriele because it’s very well documented and is being improved actively. He has been putting a lot of effort to include new stuffs into the library like he recently included a support for preparing staggered grid with cards. How to Use Cardslib? Cardslib is available as a separate library project so you can reference it as a local library. It’s also pushed as a AAR tp Maven Central. Read detailed instructions regarding How to include, build or reference cardlib. Example 1: Simple Card UI Example To give demo, currently I have used eclipse so I have downloaded cardslib library project and will be referencing into our example projects. Let’s develop a simple card view example using 1st library listed above. row_card.xml Java code to set row_card xml layout, set title, header, image, etc. // Create a Card Card card = new Card(this, R.layout.row_card); // Create a CardHeader CardHeader header = new CardHeader(this); header.setTitle("Hello world"); card.setTitle("Simple card demo"); CardThumbnail thumb = new CardThumbnail(this); thumb.setDrawableResource(R.drawable.ic_launcher); card.addCardThumbnail(thumb); // Add Header to card card.addCardHeader(header); // Set card in the cardView CardView cardView = (CardView) findViewById(R.id.carddemo); cardView.setCard(card); Example 2: Card list example activity_list.xml CardListActivity.java package com.technotalkative.cardslibdemo; import it.gmariotti.cardslib.library.internal.Card; import it.gmariotti.cardslib.library.internal.CardArrayAdapter; import it.gmariotti.cardslib.library.internal.CardHeader; import it.gmariotti.cardslib.library.internal.CardThumbnail; import it.gmariotti.cardslib.library.view.CardListView; import java.util.ArrayList; import android.app.Activity; import android.os.Bundle; public class CardListActivity extends Activity { @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.activity_list); int listImages[] = new int[]{R.drawable.angry_1, R.drawable.angry_2, R.drawable.angry_3, R.drawable.angry_4, R.drawable.angry_5}; ArrayList cards = new ArrayList(); for (int i = 0; i<5; i++) { // Create a Card Card card = new Card(this); // Create a CardHeader CardHeader header = new CardHeader(this); // Add Header to card header.setTitle("Angry bird: " + i); card.setTitle("sample title"); card.addCardHeader(header); CardThumbnail thumb = new CardThumbnail(this); thumb.setDrawableResource(listImages[i]); card.addCardThumbnail(thumb); cards.add(card); } CardArrayAdapter mCardArrayAdapter = new CardArrayAdapter(this, cards); CardListView listView = (CardListView) this.findViewById(R.id.myList); if (listView != null) { listView.setAdapter(mCardArrayAdapter); } } } Download Source Code You can download source code of above examples from here: https://github.com/PareshMayani/CardslibDemo. To run this example, first you have to download library project and then reference it into our example. Above were just simple examples, if you explore card library then you would be able to understand usage of it and would be able to reduce boiler plate code by not writing adapter/layout code again and there by would be able optimize productivity. Hope you liked this part of “Lazy android developer: Be productive” series. Till the next part, keep building card UI, card list, card grid and enjoy!

Recently I had to integrate a Node.js based server application with a C# DLL. Our software (a web-app) offers the possibility to execute payments over a POS terminal. This latter one is controllable through a dedicated DLL which exposes interfaces like ExecutePayment(operation, amount) and so on. As I mentioned, there is the Node.js server that somehow exposes the functionality of the POS (and some more) as a REST api. (The choice for using Node.js had specific reasons which I wouldn't want to outline right now). When you start with such an undertaking, then there are different possibilities. One is to use Edge.js which allows you to embed, reference and invoke .Net CLR objects from within your Node.js based applications. Something like this: var hello = require('edge').func({ assemblyFile: 'My.Edge.Samples.dll', typeName: 'Samples.FooBar.MyType', methodName: 'MyMethod' // Func> }); hello('Node.js', function (error, result) { ... }); Edge is a very interesting project and has a lot of potential. In fact, I just tried it quickly with a simple DLL and it worked right away. However, when using it from my Node app within node-webkit it didn't work. I'm not yet sure whether it was related to node-webkit or the POS DLL itself (because it might be COM exposed etc..). However, if you need simple integrations this might work well for you. Process invocation A second option that came to my mind is to design the DLL as a self-contained process and to invoke it using Node.js's process api. Turns out this is quite simple. Just prepare your C# application to read it's invocation arguments s.t. you can do something like.. IntegrationConsole.exe ExecutePayment 1 100 ..to "ExecutePayment" with operation number 1 and an amount of 1€. The C# console application needs to communicate it's return values to the STDOUT (you may use JSON for creating a more structured information exchange protocol format). Once you have this, you can simply execute the process from Node.js and read the according STDOUT: var process = require('child_process'); ... process.exec(execCmd, function (error, stdout, stderr) { var result = stdout; ... writeToResponse(stdout); }); execCmd is holds the instructions required to launch the EXE with the required invocation arguments. In this approach you execute the process, it does its job, returns the response and terminates. If for some reason however, you need to keep the process running for having a longer, kind of more interactive communication between the two components, you can communicate through the STDIN/STDOUT of the process. Your C# console application starts and listens on the STDIN.. static void Main(string[] args) { ... string line; do { line = Console.ReadLine(); try { // do something meaningful with the input // write to STDOUT to respond to the caller } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine(e.Message); } } while (line != null); } On the Node.js side you do not exec your process, but instead you spawn a child process. var spawn = require('child_process').spawn; ... var posProc = spawn('IntegrationConsole.exe', ['ExecutePayment', 1, 100]); For getting the responses, you simply register on the STDOUT of the process... posProc.stdout.once('data', function (data) { // write it back on the response object writeToResponse(data); }); ..and you may also want to listen for when the process dies to eventually perform some cleanup. posProc.on('exit', function (code) { ... }); Writing to the STDIN of the process is simple as well: posProc.stdin.setEncoding ='utf-8'; posProc.stdin.write('...'); In this way you have a more interactive, "stateful communication", where you send a command to the EXE which responds (STDOUT) and based on the response you again react and send some other command (STDIN). Embedding this in the Request/Response pattern To expose everything as a REST api (on Node), you need to pay some attention on the registration of the event handlers on STDOUT. Suppose you do something like app.post('/someEndpoint',function(req, res){ posProc = spawn('IntegrationConsole.exe',['ExecutePayment',1,100]);... posProc.stdout.on('data',function(data){// return the result of this execution// on the response});}), app.post('/someOtherEndpoint',function(req, res){... posProc.stdout.on('data',function(data){// return the result of this execution// on the response});// write to the stdin of the before created child process posProc.stdin.setEncoding ='utf-8'; posProc.stdin.write('...');}); I excluded proper edge case handling like what happens if your process died before etc.. but the key point here is that you cannot register your events by using on(..), as otherwise you'll end up having multiple data event handlers on the stdout. So you can either register and de-register the event by using the removeListener('event name', callback) syntax or use the more handy once registration mechanism (as I did already in my samples at the beginning of the article): posProc.stdout.once('data',function(data){// write it back on the response object writeToResponse(data);});

To convert a byte[] array to a String we can simply use the new String(byte[]) constructor. But if the array contains non-printable bytes we don't get a good representation. In Groovy we can use the method encodeHex() to transform a byte[] array to a hex String value. The byteelements are converted to their hexadecimal equivalents. final byte[] printable = [109, 114, 104, 97, 107, 105] // array with non-printable bytes 6, 27 (ACK, ESC) final byte[] nonprintable = [109, 114, 6, 27, 104, 97, 107, 105] assert new String(printable) == 'mrhaki' assert new String(nonprintable) != 'mr haki' // encodeHex() returns a Writable final Writable printableHex = printable.encodeHex() assert printableHex.toString() == '6d7268616b69' final nonprintableHex = nonprintable.encodeHex().toString() assert nonprintableHex == '6d72061b68616b69' // Convert back assert nonprintableHex.decodeHex() == nonprintable Code written with Groovy 2.2.1

I’m going to start by discussing the Spring WebMVC configuration to compile and run Java without an IDE.