New Tools and Technologies

Some of the new Web application development stuff to keep an eye on:

• Stripes is similar to Struts, but it goes way beyond it.

• Cewolf for embedded charts. Based on JFree chart library, however haven’t been maintained/updated in a while

• JPA for persistence JPA is an ORM standard which can be implemented by ORM technology like Hibernate, OpenJPA etc. There are even some plugin projects that enable you to use hibernate or jpa with very little configuration.

• Display for HTML tables.

• Wicket It is a component oriented framework. It allows you to write your web application in plain old Java code, you can use POJOs as the model for all components and don’t need to mess around with huge XML configuration files.

• Spring MVC The configuration may only pay you if we are writing a huge application. However, the configuration can be minimized by annotations.

• Grails There is very little configuration to do, no XML and you’re up and running with a full database application in a very less time. However, it hides a lot from you, so when things go south it can be very time consuming to find the problem.

• Spring Acegi security plugin.

• GWT Java to Java Script cross-compiler.

• EXT-JS

What is REST?

The term REST was introduced in the form of a thesis written by Roy Fielding in the year 2000. We will go over REST in a little abstract manner by going over the four properties as per RESTFul Web Services :

• Addressability- It lets the application to expose infinite number of URI’s for every piece of information it might conceive.
• Statelessness- It means that every HTTP request happens in complete isolation which means that the client needs to include all the necessary information for the server to fulfill the request. Statelessness is what makes the application scalable, as it can be easily distributed across load-balanced servers, and also easily cacheable.
  Related to this, there is an important distinction between application state (lives on the client) and resource state (lives on the server).
• Connectedness-It means that the resources links to each other, document contains links to other resources.
• A uniform interface-It means that there are four basic methods for doing four most common operations:

HTTP GET to retrieve the representation of a resource.
HTTP POST to create a new resource.
HTTP PUT to modify an existing resource.
HTTP DELETE to delete an existing resource.

A look at MYSQL database engine

There is a notion that MySql never was like a real Database since the last few versions. MySql did not support the foreign keys until recently when it was made possible through the InnoDB engine. InnoDB engine has been gaining popularity over the default MyIsam mainly because of its support for transactions. Current belief is that MyIsam is the fastest for read access and InnoDb is better only when the transactions are required. Also, if there are many modifications of the data, it is believed that InnoDB works faster because it uses row locking unlike MyIsam’s table locking. Although, the data updation finishes fast enough before another process can perform its operation. However, there is a lot of decision making involved in deciding which storage engine to use. Many a times it makes perfect sense to use different engines within a single application. The other factor that goes into consideration is the memory requirement as InnoDB loads the entire table into memory for processing. MyIsam loads only the MyIsam index into memory for processing table data which makes it better suited for server that do not have lot of memory allocated or that aren’t dedicated database servers.

Acquition of the year

Sun Microsystems, considered as one of the largest contributor to Open Source software with offerings such as Solaris, GNU/Linux, NetBeans, Java and few others. MYSQL, the world’s most popular open source database and the leading choice of Web 2.0 sites like You Tube, Flickr, Face Book, Wikipedia, del.icio.us and many more. Few months back MYSQL suffered from the same fate as most of the other successful open source companies. As Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz puts it we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. This definitely is good news for MYSQL and it could lead to possible adoption of MYSQL by small companies due to Sun’s enterprise support, MYSQL customers will get the Open Solaris and ZFS file system and most importantly it will have access to the technical and the sales relations which is simply huge.But only time will tell whether it proved to be a profitable acquisition for Sun or not. Some of the apparent pitfalls are MYSQL uses INNODB as its storage engine which has been acquired by Oracle, Sun’s relationship with Oracle, MYSQL’s revenue is only half the cost of acquition, cultural differences with MYSQL being small and agile and Sun being big and mature, and above all Sun’s awful record with acquisitions.Nevertheless, the deal definitely strengthens open source.

Ruby-101

This post is a placeholder for the Ruby Programming Course – FORPC101-4 assignments. You can read it here