Ruby on Rails

After long hesitation, I tried installing Ruby on Rails and to wet my hands with some Rapid Web application development with Rails. As noted in various web articles and documents on web – installation and configuration is very smooth.

1. Download the Ruby installer for Windows from here. I had downloaded version 1.8.6.25
2. Once Ruby is installed, we can use gem to download & install rails framework.

gem install rails –include-dependencies

This works.  I am not sure what is gem yet.  I understand its some sort of packager and installer for ruby platform.  But not sure how it works yet.  Once rails available on my ruby platform, I just need to use some simple commands to create working web application in mins.

Looks very interesting at first look.

Conference for Java, Enterprise Architecture and SOA in India

SDA India magazine and JAX magazine announced an Indian edition of their conferences at Bengalooru, India starting 28th May 2007.

There are three conferences

• JAX India 2007
• Enterprise Architecture Conference (EACon) India 2007
• Eclipse Forum India 2007

The last date for submitting papers is 6th Feb 2007 (for all the three conferences)

Online resources to learn Spring Framework

Spring frameworkhad evolved into primetime Java Enterprise application development framework over last two years. Though we are using Spring framework from early releases, I am sure that I haven’t mastered all the “aspects” of this framework. Here is my collections of some simple, but useful online material which can be good starting point in learning this framework.

Online Resources:

• Introduction to the Spring Framework by Rod Johnson – The Serverside.com article
• PDF version – chapter 1 of Rod’s book
• The Complete Spring Tutorial – by Farihah Noushene
• The Spring Framework – Java Boutique tutorial by Benoy Jose
• Developing a Spring Framework MVC application step-by-step by Thomas Risberg
• Spring framework Reference Documentation
• An introduction to Spring Framework – an presentation by Rob Lambert

IBM developer works article series:

• The Spring series – Part 1 – Introduction to the spring framework
• The Spring series – Part 2 : When Hibernate meets Spring
• The Spring series – part 3: Swing into Spring MVC
• The Spring series, part 4: 1-2-3 messaging with Spring JMS

Technorati Tags: Springframework

Javascript – SortedTable examples

This webpage demonstrates sorted table operations with elegant Javascript code.
Good reference for any web developer.

Technorati Tags: Javascript

Browsing with different browsers

Though an adherent fan of Firefox, I never hesitant in trying out other browsers. Actually it all started with my professional requirement for testing web applications with multiple browsers. Currently I use Firefox 1.5.0.1 (my default browser), Flock 0.5+, IE 7.0.5296.0 and Opera 9.0 Technology preview 2.

MSN Messenger World’s Best App Contest

The winners of MSN Messenger’s Worlds Best App Contest were announced now here.

For those uninitiated, World’s Best App contest was run by Microsoft from September through Dec 2005. This was to promote and inspire developer community towards MSN Messenger SDK and other MSN services. The applications were categorized into Game & Non-Game.

There are some very interesting ideas in Non-Game categories which could be implemented in any collaboration environment like MSN.

Factbites – another Search tool

Factbites is another search tool with specialized focus area. Search with this engine gives better results on specific subject or event.

Search engine for searching web based discussion forums

Omgili beta is one of the tool specialised in searching web based discussion forums. The service offers special commands to search for information on a discussion thread’s different aspects such as topic (intopic) and reply (inreply).

Tutorial Search Engine

With tens of hundreds of online tutorials and other training materials, it requires some specialized tools to search / find relevant information.

Pixel2life is a tutorial search engine. The service has a database of more than 15,000 tutorials on different computing related subjects such as JavaScript, Perl, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and so on. Pixel2life is quite dynamic and to help you easily track the latest additions to its index, the service features a RSS feed also.

Java Runtime Environments

In today’s scenario, every Java applications come with its own copy of Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Amoung many reasons for supplying own copy of JRE, the main one is version compatability and to reduce runtime issues and debug time :-/. And every machine would be crowded with numerous copies JRE (sometimes multiple copies of same version).

I think in java world no one cares now about how many JREs installed on single machine. And taking Java as a platform, all these applications are bundled with their own platform for running it. So where is platform independance ? If the same thing had happend with Microsoft .Net platform, I could imagine people would be ready to beat them up with Standards flag.

I was looking out some simple way to identify installed JREs on my machine and come across a tool called JRView – a freeware utility which lists all installed JREs for windows environment. But many of these applications never register their JRE with windows registry. With latest version of Eclipse – 3.2 M4 (I guess its there from version 3.0 and above), there is an option to search available JREs on the system and when I tried there were 23 JREs on my machine of 4 different versions.

Why can’t there be a specific location for each operating systems to install JREs? And these applications just need to check those location if required version is available if not get that version from specified vendor’s website.