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• Cocos2d: Tongue effect like in Munch Time

  - by Joey Green

  I'm wanting to do a tongue effect for my character like the one in Munch Time( shown in pic ). The player does some action and his tongue attaches to the nearest platform. I'm thinking this is simply a get distance to platform and keep player at that distance as he moves back and forth giving him the swinging effect. For the drawing, I'm wanting the same effect where the tongue sprite is the skinniest in the middle of the distance between the character and platform. I know how to do this in a shader( I'm using cocos2d v2 btw ), but I'm wondering if there is some built-in functionality to allow me to do this. First, is this the right approach using distance? Second, is their an easy way to do the tongue sprite effect without a shader? Third, I'm wanting to have the player spring up at will in the direction of the platform. I'm using Box2D. Would there be a way to do this using force's or would it be easier to write my own code?

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• Getting into driver development for linux [closed]

  - by user1103966

  Right now, I've been learning about writing device-drivers for linux 3.2 kernel for about 2 months. So far I have been able program simple char drivers that only read and write to a fictitious dev structure like a file, but now I'm moving to more advance concepts. The new material I've learned about includes I/O port manipulation, memory management, and interrupts. I feel that I have a basic understanding of overall driver operation but, there is still so much that I don't know. My question is this, given that I have the basic theory of how to write a dev-driver for a piece of hardware ... how long would it take to actually develop the skills of writing actual software that companies would want to employ? I plan on getting involved in an open-source project and building a portfolio. Also what type of beginner drivers could I write for hardware that would best help me develop my skills? I was thinking that taking on a project where I design my own key logger would easy and a good assignment to help me understand how IO ports and interrupts are used. I may want to eventually specialize in writing software for video cards or network devices though these devices seem beyond my understanding at the moment. Thanks for any help

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• AceCypher is an Addictive Cypher Slide Puzzle Game

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  Are you ready for a game that will test your logical thinking skills while providing hours of fun? Then you may want to have a look at this awesome cypher slide puzzler! AceCypher is great puzzle game for those times when you only have a few minutes to play or want a fun way to pass the time while relaxing. The overall premise and style of game play for AceCypher is simple. You move individual rows (left, right) or columns (up, down) one space at a time in order to shift the positions of numbers on the game board through ’round-a-bout’ trading. The goal is to make the four numbers in the red square match the code shown in the upper right corner (including positions). Sounds simple so far, right? But the challenge comes from the random boards you will be given to work with…some will not be too hard to solve while others will tax your brain (and patience!) quite well.     

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• Which tools you use for development in your company?…Please be exact [closed]

  - by predrag.music

  If you are a professional php/(my/postgre/?)sql/? developer and working in a professional team ... I would like to know which tools you use for development in your company. I do not care which tool is better or worse, but "which tools you use", if it is not a TOP SECRET :) For example, these are just some of the tools i/we use (first those used most (in general)): Pen, paper lots of cofee, cola ... let me think ... mmmm ... yeah more cofee :) All kinds of books (a lots of books) OS: Win / MacOS X Server: Hosted (CentOS )/ At work Mac OS X Dev server: XAMPP / MAMP / LAMP Editor: Notepad++ IDE: Netbeans / Zend Studio / Eclipse Version Control System: Mercurial / SVN FTP: Filezilla mostly / ... Passwords: KeePass js / ajax: jQuery / pure js / jQuery UI Framework:CI / Zend / pure php Database: MySQL / Other ORM: Framework layer db (Not an ORM I know but...) / Doctrine (2) / no ORM Debugging: Xdebug (PHP) / firebug (ajax/js/html/css/...) / framework profiler (stuff) / ... (x) Dreaming: About... Thinking: Not about chaos in ? direction .... n Anything else that comes to mind n+1 Zilion other stuff i know but i can't remember ... 8 some other stuff i (don't) remember i forgot, give up, delete, lost, said to myself never again, i haven't had time stuff, have on computer stuff but can't find or don't even know i have it on my computer at least 2-3 or more times, stuff I said to myself i'll check later and never checked again for all sort of "perfectly justified" reasons (time, memory, wife :), whatever,...), ... what is the reason i'm asking this?:) 8 and beyond looking forward to see a lot of answers ?

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• Python web frameworks comparisons

  - by stupidLearner

  I recently asked a question on SO about Python web frameworks: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4909306/python-web-frameworks-vs-java-web-frameworks-how-is-web-development-in-python-do I want to learn one just for fun but it also has to be able to help me deliver a proper working application. I am looking for a framework with lots of features, powerful, mature, with large community, good documentation, books etc. I need something that will help me be more productive in developing my app and not waste time figuring out how to do a certain thing in the framework or how to write workaround around the limitations of the framework. I was thinking one of the following: django, zope, turbogears, pylons. Off course the war is raging out there and there are other alternatives but seems Django is at the top... or is it just hype? I am interested in pros and cons of each. What was the best feature you think the framework has? What is the thing it lacks? What could have been done differently. Help me chose one to learn for starters.

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• How to advocate Stack Overflow at work

  - by Gordon

  I am thinking of doing a short presentation at work about using Stack Overflow as a resource for your day job. What is the experience doing this? Would you deem it a valid resource to tell you colleagues about or is it similar to telling them about Google as a resource? Is there a better way of doing it? I was leaning toward asking questions side of Stack Overflow rather than answering them to avoid you-shouldn't-be-doing-this-on-work-time argument. Just as a follow up. Originally I didn't want to make the question to specific to my own case. My presentation will only be a quick four minute talk, which I will repeat over an hour to different groups. I may ask a question before the talk on Stack Overflow and refer to it during the presentation. Hopefully I will get some activity during the hour. I am also going to talk briefly about some of the other Stack Exchange sites that would fit the audience as they are not all developers. I think Super User, Server Fault and Programmers should work well. I will not be doing the presentation for another couple of months as it has be rescheduled, but I will update on how I got on.

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• How are events in games handled?

  - by Alex

  In may games that I have played, I have seen events being triggered, such as when you walk into a certain land area while holding a specific object, it will trigger a special creature to spawn. I was wondering, how do games deal with events such as this? Not in a specific game, but in general among games. The first thought I had was that each place has a hard-coded set of events that it will call when something happens there. However, that would be too inefficient to maintain, as when something new is added, that would require modification of every part of the game that would potentially cause the event to be called. Next up, I had the idea of maybe how GUI programming works. In all of the GUI programming I've done, you create a component and a callback function, or a listener. Then, when the user interacts when the button, the callback function is called, allowing you to do something with it. So, I was thinking that in terms of a game, when a land area gets loaded the game loops over a list of all events, creating instances of them and calling public methods to bind them to the current scene. The events themselves then handle what scene it is, and if it is a scene that pertains to the event, will call the public method of the scene to bind the event to an action. Then, when the action takes place, the scene would call all events that are bound to that action. However, I'm sure that's not how games would operate either, as that would require a lot of creating of events all the time. So how to video games handle events, are either of those methods correct, or is it something completely different?

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• Representation of data in application versus database

  - by user1815201

  I'm going to make an application that will be given data to put in a database. The data will for the most part be the same, but the way it is formatted will vary a lot (could be in anything from text files to .xls to .doc). I'm not a very experienced developer, but I can see some potential issues and I want to minimize them. First off I have decided to use the DAO pattern, so that I can easily support new file formats or file suddenly formatted in different ways. What I really wonder about though, is how I should manage the data itself within my application. I'm thinking that the database DAO should have models representing each table of the database with the same relations between them, to make the uploading process easy. But should the filesystem DAO's have to use the same models? I can imaging that when the database changes, the change will suddenly propagate throughout the entire system, all DAOs and models alike. And that is obviously a bad thing. I'm a little bit tired and out of time. Will update with what ever questions you have. Thanks!

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• SEO for Country & Language Specific content.

  - by kecebongsoft

  Currently I am creating a website which has a common topic for an article, but it's going to be different content for each country, and also, each of that content will be provided in several languages. And this mechanism exists in most of the parts in the website. For example, I have an article about tax. This article has to be different for each country, for example china. And tax content for china should be written in china AND english language (for non china-speaker). What is the best URL pattern to handle this? What I've been thinking is, using a sub folder (/country-code/language-code/) such as: www.example.com/cn/cn/tax www.example.com/cn/en/tax Or using top level domain such as: www.example.cn/cn/tax www.example.cn/en/tax Or subdomain such as cn.example.com/cn/tax cn.example.com/en/tax I think I will not prefer the last option since I might need to use subdomain for other purpose. Which left only subfolder and TLDN. I've read some articles saying that TLDN is good for localized content (language-specific content), but in my case, my TLDN will also has english contents (for non local speaker) which is specific only to that particular country (also the purpose of this is to let people from other country easily search it through google). What is the best pattern to pick and why?.

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• XNA Required information to represent 2D Sprite graphically

  - by Fire-Dragon-DoL

  I was thinking about dividing my game engine into 2 threads: render thread and update thread (I can't come up on how to divide update thread from physic thread at the moment). That said, I have to duplicate all Sprite informations, what do I really need to represents a 2D Sprite graphically? Here are my ideas (I'll mark with ? things that I'm not sure): Vector2 Position float Rotation ? Vector2 Pivot ? Rectangle TextureRectangle Texture2D Texture Vector2 ImageOrigin ? (is it tracked somewhere else?) If you have any suggestion about using different types for datas, it's appreciated Last part of the question: isn't this a lot of data to copy in a buffer?what should I really copy in the buffer?I'm following this tutorial: http://www.sgtconker.com/2009/11/article-multi-threading-your-xna/3/ Thanks UPDATE 1: Newer values at the moment: Vector2 Position float Rotation Vector2 Pivot Rectangle TextureRectangle Texture2D Texture Color Color byte Facing (can be left or right, I'll do it with an enum) I re-read the tutorial, what I was doing wrong is not that I need to pass all those values, I need to pass only changed values as messages. UPDATE 2: Vector2 Position float Rotation Vector2 Pivot Rectangle TextureRectangle Texture2D Texture Color Color bool Flip uint DrawOrder Vector2 Scale bool Visible ? Mhhh, should Visibile be included?

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• Writing cross-platforms Types, Interfaces and Classes/Methods in C++

  - by user827992

  I'm looking for the best solution to write cross-platform software, aka code that I write and that I have to interface with different libraries and platforms each time. What I consider the easiest part, correct me if I'm wrong, is the definition of new types, all I have to do is to write an hpp file with a list of typedefs, I can keep the same names for each new type across the different platforms so my codebase can be shared without any problem. typedefs also helps me to redefine a better scope for my types in my code. I will probably end up having something like this: include |-windows | |-types.hpp |-linux | |-types.hpp |-mac |-types.hpp For the interfaces I'm thinking about the same solution used for the types, a series of hpp files, probably I will write all the interfaces only once since they rely on the types and all "cross-platform portability" is ensured by the work done on the types. include | |-interfaces.hpp | |-windows | |-types.hpp |-linux | |-types.hpp |-mac | |-types.hpp For classes and methods I do not have a real answer, I would like to avoid 2 things: the explicit use of pointers the use of templates I want to avoid the use of the pointers because they can make the code less readable for someone and I want to avoid templates just because if I write them, I can't separate the interface from the definition. What is the best option to hide the use of the pointers? I would also like some words about macros and how to implement some OS-specifics calls and definitions.

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• Part 3: Customization Strategy or how long does it take

  - by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

  The previous part in this blog should have made us aware, that many procedures are required to manage all these steps. To review your status let me ask you a question:What is your Customization Strategy?Your answer might be something like, 'customization strategy, well, we have standards and we let requirement documents approve'.Let me ask you another question:How long does it take to redeploy all your customizations into a fresh installation?In 90% of all installations the answer to this question would be: we can't!Although no one would have to do it (hopefully), just thinking about it and recognizing that we have today too many manual steps involved, different procedures and sometimes (undocumented) manual steps to complete a customization installation. And ... in general too many customizations.Why is working with customizations often so complicated and time consuming?Here are the key reasons as I have identified them in my projects:Customization standards defined, but not maintainedDifferent knowledge on developer side (results getting an individual developer touch)No need to automate deployment (not forced by client)Different documentation styles, not easy to hand over to someone elseDifferent development concepts, difficult for the maintenanceJust the minimum present for testing, often positive testing onlyDeviations from naming conventions accepted, although definedComplicated procedures, therefore sometimes partially ignoredAnd last but not least, hand made version control (still)If you would have to 'redeploy all your customizations' you would have to Follow all your own standards and best practiceTrack deviations and define corrective tasksAutomate as much as possible, minimize manual tasksDo not allow any change coming in without version controlUtilize products to support you in deploymentMinimize hand made scripts and extensive documentationReview regularly used techniques to guarantee that all are in line with the current release and also easy maintainableCreate solution libraries and force the team to contribute and reuseDefine quality activities and execute themDefine a procedure to release customizationsI know, it is easy to write down, but much harder to manage. Will provide some guidelines in my next blog.Volker

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• Sharing authentication methods across API and web app

  - by Snixtor

  I'm wanting to share an authentication implementation across a web application, and web API. The web application will be ASP.NET (mostly MVC 4), the API will be mostly ASP.NET WEB API, though I anticipate it will also have a few custom modules or handlers. I want to: Share as much authentication implementation between the app and API as possible. Have the web application behave like forms authentication (attractive log-in page, logout option, redirect to / from login page when a request requires authentication / authorisation). Have API callers use something closer to standard HTTP (401 - Unauthorized, not 302 - Redirect). Provide client and server side logout mechanisms that don't require a change of password (so HTTP basic is out, since clients typically cache their credentials). The way I'm thinking of implementing this is using plain old ASP.NET forms authentication for the web application, and pushing another module into the stack (much like MADAM - Mixed Authentication Disposition ASP.NET Module). This module will look for some HTTP header (implementation specific) which indicates "caller is API". If the header "caller is API" is set, then the service will respond differently than standard ASP.NET forms authentication, it will: 401 instead of 302 on a request lacking authentication. Look for username + pass in a custom "Login" HTTP header, and return a FormsAuthentication ticket in a custom "FormsAuth" header. Look for FormsAuthentication ticket in a custom "FormsAuth" header. My question(s) are: Is there a framework for ASP.NET that already covers this scenario? Are there any glaring holes in this proposed implementation? My primary fear is a security risk that I can't see, but I'm similarly concerned that there may be something about such an implementation that will make it overly restrictive or clumsy to work with.

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• Teaching myself, as a physicist, to become a better programmer

  - by user787267

  I've always liked physics, and I've always liked coding, so when I got the offer for a PhD position doing numerical physics (details are not relevant, it's mostly parallel programming for a cluster) at a university, it was a no-brainer for me. However, as most physicists, I'm self taught. I don't have broad background knowledge about how to code in an object oriented way, or the name of that specific algorithm that optimizes the search in some kD tree. Since all my work so far has been more concerned about the physics and the scientific results, I undoubtedly have some bad habits - more so because my coding is my own, and not really teamwork. I have mostly used C since it is very straightforward and "what you write is what you get" - no need for fancy abstractions. However, I have recently switched to C++ since I'd like to learn more about the power that comes with abstraction, and it's pretty C-like (syntax-wise at least). How do I teach myself to code in a good, abstract way like a graduate in computer science? I know my code is efficient, but I want it to be elegant as well, and readable. Keep in mind that I don't have time to read several 1000-page tomes about abstract programming. I need to spend time on actual, physics related research (my supervisor would laugh at me if he knew I spent time thinking about how to program elegantly). How do I assess if my work is also good from a programmer's perspective?

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• how do I write a functional specification quickly and efficiently

  - by giddy

  So I just read some fabulous articles by Joel on specs here. (Was written in 2000!!) I read all 4 parts, but Im looking for some methodical approaches to writing my specs. Im the only lonely dev, working on this fairly complicated app (or family of apps) for a very well known finance company. I've never made something this serious, I started out writing something like a bad spec, an overview of some sorts, and it has wasted a LOT of my time. Ive also made 3 mockup-kinda-thingies for my client so I have a good understanding of what they want. Also released a preview (a throw away working app with the most basic workflow), and Ive only written and tested some of the very core/base systems. I think the mistake Ive been making so far is not writing a detailed spec, so Im getting to it now. So the whole thing comprises of An MVC website (for admins & data viewing) 2 Silverlight modules (For 2 specific tasks) 1 Desktop Application Im totally short on time, resources and need to get this done quick, also, need to make sure these guys read it up equally quick and painlessly. So how do I go about it, Im looking for any tips, any real world stuff, how do you guys usually do it? Do you make a mock screenie of every dialog/form/page? Im thinking of making a dummy asp.net web forms project, then filling in html files in folders and making it look like my mvc url structure. Then having a section in the spec for the website and write up a page for every URL Ive got with a screenie. For my win forms app, Ive made somewhat of a demo Win Form project, would I then put in a dialog or stucture everything as I would in the real app and then screen shot it?

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• Security vulnerability and nda's [closed]

  - by Chris

  I want to propose a situation and gain insight from the communities thoughts. A customer, call them Customer X has a contract with a vendor, Vendor Y to provide an application and services. Customer X discovers a serious authentication vulnerability in Vendor Y's software. Vendor Y and Customer X has a discussion. Vendor Y acknowledges/confirms flaw. Vendor Y confirms they will put effort to fix. Customer X requests Vendor Y to inform all customers impacted by this. Vendor agrees. Fast forward 2 months, and the flaw has not been fixed. Patches were applied to mitigate but the flaw still exists. However, no customers were informed of issue. At this point customer X contacts Vendor Y to determine the status and understand why customer's were not informed. The vendor nicely reminds the customer they are under an NDA and are still working on the issue. A few questions/discussion pieces out of this. By discussing a software flaw with a vendor, does this imply you have agreed to any type of NDA disclosure? Additionally, what rights as does Customer X have to inform other customers of this vulnerability if vendor does not appear willing to comply? I (the op) am under the impression that when this situation occurs, you are supposed to notify vendor of issue, provide them with ample time to respond and if no response you are able to do what you wish with the information. I am thinking back to the MIT/subway incident where they contacted transit authorities, transit authorities didn't respond in a timely fashion so the students disclosed the information publicly on their own. Few things to note about this: I am not the customer in above situation, also lets assume for purposes of keeping discussion inline that customer X has no intentions of disclosing information, they are merely concerned and interested in making sure other customers are aware until it is fixed so they do not expierence a major security breach. (More information can be supplied if needed to add context to question. )

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• What are my options for sharing music between Windows & Ubuntu on the same network?

  - by jgbelacqua

  We have a few Windows(XP & 7) and Ubuntu machines in the house sharing a wireless connection, and want to share music between them. If possible, I would like to be able to serve music from both Windows and Ubuntu (but it doesn't have to be the same time). I don't know much about sharing folders or streaming, but I'm guessing both would be options (that is, using a local client to access a shared song or a local client to access a shared stream). I want to be able to share the music between the systems as simply as possible. Bonus points (but not requirements) for cross-platform -- same application on both Windows and Ubuntu? available on startup (via daemon or autostart or whatnot) open source More info: All systems have dynamic addresses (DHCP) supplied from the ISP-supplied wireless router. There are several Gigabytes of music on one Windows XP box and one Ubuntu 10.10 The music is not well-sorted (I'm thinking this might have an impact on UI usability). Only has to be available internally (private address space behind the wireless router) bandwidth is not a problem We don't have (legitimate) admin access to the wireless router

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• Programming as a minor

  - by Tomas Cokis

  Hello Everyone! I've never asked a question here at programmers, and for reasons which will become obvious later I've never answered one here, but I do poke around in short bursts. Anyway, I'm 15 right now, and I've been programming in C++ for 4 years, just working on my own projects that are aim so high as to never be finished. I've been working on a single project for the last year, and every 3 months, I add a new system into it. It might be a value tabling directory enabled log system, or a render system, or a class to load up xml files, whatever it is, I don't mind too much that the overall project (a 3d engine) isn't ever going to get finished, I just get some satisfaction from getting what I have done building and running. I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, although I suspect I'll go into some form of engineering, but I was interested in knowing if I do choose to go into a career as a developer, what kind of material I could look at to push myself up and get myself experience that might help my career later. I'm not talking about books in particular, I'm more interested in subjects areas that will get me access to good job opportunities, or that will give me a hand-up if I do computer science and software related courses at uni. One of the things I was thinking of doing was designing some of the logic gate components of a small computer - which I started briefly over the holidays, working out integer addition, subtraction and multiplication. That kind of stuff interests me, but is it really useful - or more useful then just more programming? But anyway, Any advice? Should I continue on my perpetual 3d engine? Are there any other projects or particular accomplishments that would help my education? Perhaps I should mention that I live in Perth, Australia, so local software companies are likely to be more scarce then usual.

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• How can I support objects larger than a single tile in a 2D tile engine?

  - by Yheeky

  I´m currently working on a 2D Engine containing an isometric tile map. It´s running quite well but I'm not sure if I´ve chosen the best approach for that kind of engine. To give you an idea what I´m thinking about right now, let's have a look at a basic object for a tile map and its objects: public class TileMap { public List<MapRow> Rows = new List<MapRow>(); public int MapWidth = 50; public int MapHeight = 50; } public class MapRow { public List<MapCell> Columns = new List<MapCell>(); } public class MapCell { public int TileID { get; set; } } Having those objects it's just possible to assign a tile to a single MapCell. What I want my engine to support is like having groups of MapCells since I would like to add objects to my tile map (e.g. a house with a size of 2x2 tiles). How should I do that? Should I edit my MapCell object that it may has a reference to other related tiles and how can I find an object while clicking on single MapCells? Or should I do another approach using a global container with all objects in it?

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• Coding Dynamic Events?

  - by Joey Green

  I have no idea what the title of this question should be so bare with me. My game has turns. On a turn a player does something and this can result in a random number of explosions that occur at different times. I know when the explosions are done. I need to know when ALL are done and then do some other action. Also, each explosion is the same amount of time, say 3 seconds.. Right now I'm thinking of using a counter to hold how many explosions are happening. Then once the explosion is finished decrement this counter. Once the counter is zero, do my action. This idea is inspired by objective-c memory management btw. Anyways, does this sound like a good approach or would there be another way. An alternative might be to figure out the explosion who happened last and let it be responsible for calling this subsequent action. I'm asking mostly, because I haven't done this before and am trying to figure out if there are bugs that may occur that I'm not foreseeing.

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• Representing and executing simple rules - framework or custom?

  - by qtips

  I am creating a system where users will be able to subscribe to events, and get notified when the event has occured. Example of events can be phone call durations and costs, phone data traffic notations, and even stock rate changes. Example of events: customer 13532 completed a call with duration 11:45 min and cost $0.4 stock rate for Google decreased with 0.01% Customers can subscribe to events using some simple rules e.g. When stock rate of Google decreases more than 0.5% When the cost of a call of my subscription is over $1 Now, as the set of different rules is currently predefined, I can easily create a custom implemention that applies rules to an event. But if the set of rules could be much larger, and if we also allow for custom rules (e.g. when stock rate of Google decreses more than 0.5% AND stock rate of Apple increases with 0.5%), the system should be able to adapt. I am therefore thinking of a system that can interpret rules using a simple grammer and then apply them. After som research I found that there exists rule-based engines that can be used, but I am unsure as they seem too complicated and may be a little overkill for my situation. Is there a Java framework suited for this area? Should we use framework, a rule engine, or should we create something custom? What are the pros and cons?

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• Internet Explorer 9 Preview 2 link + webcasts for developers

  - by Eric Nelson

  At Web Directions last week in London (10th and 11th June 2010) I promised several folks I would put up a blog post to more information on IE 9.0. True to my word (albeit a little later than I had hoped), here is what I was thinking of: Install First up, Install Preview 2 and try out the demos I was showing at the conference. Remember that IE9 Preview installs side by side with IE8/7 etc. It is not a beta nor is it intended to be a full browser. It is a … preview :-)   Including good old SVG-oids :-) Learn And then check out the following webcasts which were recorded in March this year at MIX: In-Depth Look At Internet Explorer 9 Presenter:  Ted Johnson & John Hrvatin VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL28 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV High Performance Best Practices For Web Sites Presenter: Jason Weber VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL29 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV HTML5: Cross Browser Best Practices Presenter: Tony Ross VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL27 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV Internet Explorer Developer Tools Presenter: Jon Seitel VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/FT51 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV SVG: The Past, Present And Future of Vector Graphics For The Web Presenter: Patrick Dengler, Doug Schepers VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX30 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV Day 2 Keynote containing IE9 Presenter: Dean Hachamovitch VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/KEY02 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV

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• Policy Administration is the Top 2011 IT Priority for Insurers

  - by helen.pitts(at)oracle.com

  The current issue of Insurance Networking News includes an interesting column by Novarica's Matt Josefowicz.  Recent research by the firm revealed that policy administration replacement or extension is the most common strategic IT project for insurers this year.  The article goes on to note that insurers are keenly focused on the business capabilities that can be delivered once the system is in production as well as the ability to leverage agile development methodologies and true business/IT collaboration during implementation. The results are not too surprising given that policy administration is a mission-critical system for life and annuity insurers.  As Josefowicz notes, "Core systems are called core for a reason--they are at the heart of the insurer's ability to function.  Replacing them is not to be done lightly, but failing to replace them can mean diminishing the ability to compete or function effectively as a company." Insurers can no longer rely on inflexible policy administration systems that impede their ability to rapidly configure and bring to innovative new products, add riders, support changing business processes and take advantage of market opportunities.  The ability to leverage the policy administration systems to better service customers and distribution channels by providing real-time access to policy information throughout the policy lifecycle is also critical to sustain loyalty and further fuel growth.Insurers can benefit from a modern, adaptive policy administration system, like Oracle Insurance Policy Administration for Life and Annuity.  You can learn more about the industry's most highly advanced, rules-based system, which is unmatched for its highly flexible, rules-based configurability, performance and extensibility, as well as global market industry trends by viewing a complimentary, on-demand Webcast, Adapt, Transform and Grow:  Accelerate Speed to Market with Adaptive Insurance Policy Administration.Data conversions can be a daunting process for many insurers when deciding to modernize, in particular when consolidating from multiple, disparate legacy policy administration systems to a single new platform.  Migrating from a legacy system requires a well-thought out approach that builds on the industry's best thinking from previous modernization efforts and takes data migration off the critical path by leveraging proven methodology and tools to capitalize on the new system's capabilities.  We'll discuss more about this approach in a future Oracle Insurance blog.Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance's life and annuities solutions.

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• Adopting Technologies for the Sake of Technologies

  - by shiju

  Unlike other engineering industries, the software engineering industry is really lacking maturity. The lack of maturity can see in different aspects of entire software development life cycle. I think other engineering industries are well organised and structured with common, proven engineering practices. The software engineering industry is greatly a diverse industry with different operating systems, and variety of development platforms, programming languages, frameworks and tools. Now these days, people are going behind the hypes and intellectual thoughts without understanding their core business problems and adopting technologies and practices for the sake of technologies and practices and simply becoming a “poster child” of technologies and practices. Understanding the core business problem and providing best, solid solution with a platform neutral approach, will give you more business values and ROI, instead of blindly adopting technologies and tailor-made your applications for the sake of technologies and practices. People have been simply migrating their solutions in favour of new technologies and different versions of frameworks without any business need. The “Pepsi Challenge” in the Software Development  Pepsi Challenge marketing campaign of the 1980s was a popular and very interesting marketing promotion in which people taste one cup of Pepsi and another cup with Coca Cola. In the taste test, more than 50% of people were preferred Pepsi  over Coca Cola. The success story behind the Pepsi was more sweetness contains in the Pepsi cola. They have simply added more sugar and more people preferred more sweet flavour. You can’t simply identify the better one after sipping one cup of cola based on the sweetness which contains. These things have been happening in the software industry for choosing development frameworks and technologies. People have been simply choosing frameworks based on the initial sugary feeling without understanding its core strengths and weakness. The sugary framework might be more harmful when you develop real-world systems. There is not any silver bullet for solving all kind of problems and frameworks and tools do have strengths and weakness. So it would be better to understand their strength and weakness. And please keep in mind that you have to develop real apps to understand the real capabilities and weakness of a framework. Evaluating a technology based on few blog posts will harm your projects and these bloggers might be lacking real-world experience with the framework. The Problem with Align a Development Practice with Tools Recently I have observed a discussion in a group where one guy asked suggestions for practicing Continuous Delivery (CD) as part of the agile based application engineering. Then the discussion quickly went to using and choosing a Continuous Integration (CI) tool and different people suggested different Continuous Integration (CI) tools for simply practicing Continuous Delivery. If you have worked with core agile engineering practices, you could clearly know that the real essence of agile is neither choosing a tool nor choosing a process. By simply choosing CI tool from a particular vendor will not ensure that you are delivering an evolving software based on customer feedback. You have to understand the real essence of a engineering practice and choose a right tool for practicing it instead of simply focus on a particular tool for a practicing an development practice. If you want to adopt a practice, you need a solid understanding on it with its real essence where tools are just helping us for better automation. Adopting New Technologies for the Sake of Technologies The another problem is that developers have been a tendency to adopt new technologies and simply migrating their existing apps to new technologies. It is okay if your existing system is having problem  with a technology stack or or maintainability challenge with existing solution, and moving to new technology for solving the current problems. We have been adopting new technologies for solving new challenges like solving the scalability challenges when the application or user bases is growing unpredictably. Please keep in mind that all new technologies will become old after working with it for few years. The below Facebook status update of Janakiraman, expresses the attitude of a typical customer. For an example, Node.js is becoming a hottest buzzword in the software industry and many developers are trying to adopt Node.js for their apps. The important thing is that Node.js is a minimalist framework that does some great things for some problems, but it’s not a silver bullet. I have been also working with Node.js which is good for some problems, but really bad for choosing it for all kind of problems. By adopting new technologies for new projects is good if we could get real business values from it because newer framework would solve some existing well known problems and provide better solutions where it can incorporate good solutions for the latest challenges . But adopting a new technology for the sake of new technology is really bad idea. Another example is JavaScript is getting lot of attention so that lot of developers are developing heavy JavaScript centric web apps. First, they will adopt a client-side JavaScript MV* framework from AngularJS, Ember, Backbone etc, and develop a Single Page App(SPA) where they are repeating the mistakes we did in the past with server-side. The mistakes we did in the server-side is transforming to client-side. The problem is that people are just adopting new technologies, but not improving their solutions. I predict that many Single Page App will suck in the future. We need a hybrid approach where we should be able to leverage both server-side and client-side for developing next-generation web apps. The another problem is that if you like a particular framework, use it for all kind of apps. In the past, I know some Silverlight passionate guys were tried to use that framework for all kind of apps including larger line of business apps. And these days developers are migrating their existing Silverlight apps in favour of HTML5 buzzword. So the real question is, what is the business values we are getting from these apps when we are developing it for the sake of a particular technology instead of business need. The another problem is that our solutions consultants are trying to provide unnecessary solutions for the sake of a particular technology or for a hype. For an example, Big Data solutions are great for solving the problem of three Vs : volume, velocity and variety. But trying to put this for every application will make problems. Let’s say, there is a small web site running with limited budget and saying that we need a recommendation engine for the web site with a Hadoop based solution with a 16 node cluster, would be really horrible. If we really need a Hadoop based solution, got for it, but trying to put this for all application would be a big disaster. It would be great if could understand the core business problems first, and later choose a right framework for providing solutions for the actual business problem, instead of trying to provide so many solutions. The Problem with Tied Up to a Platform Vendor Some organizations and teams are tied up with a particular platform vendor where they don’t want to use any product other than their preferred or existing platform vendor. They will accept any product provided by the vendor regardless of its capability. This will lets you some benefits regards with integration and collaboration of different products provided by the same vendor, but it will loose your opportunity to provide better solution for your business problems. For a real world sample scenario, lot of companies have been using SAP for their ERP solutions. When they are thinking about mobility or thinking about developing hybrid mobile apps, they can easily find out a framework from SAP. SAP provides a framework for HTML 5 based UI development named SAPUI5. If you are simply adopting that framework only based for the preference of existing platform vendor, you might be loose different opportunities for providing better solution. Initially you might enjoy the sugary feeling provided by the platform vendor, but you have to think about developing apps which should be capable for solving future challenges. I am not saying that any framework is not good and I believe that all frameworks are good over another one for solving at least one problem. My point is that we should not tied up with any specific platform vendor unless your organization is having resource availability problems. Being Polyglot for Providing Right Solutions The modern software engineering industry is greatly diverse with different tools and platforms. Lot of open source frameworks and new programming languages have been releasing to the developer community, where choosing the right platform without any biased opinion, is really a difficult task. But it would really great if we could develop an attitude with platform neutral mindset and being a polyglot developer for providing better solutions based on the actual business problems. IMHO, we should learn a new programming language and a new framework every year. This will improve the quality of our developer capabilities and also improve the quality of our primary programming language skills. Being polyglot for individual developers and organizational teams will give you greater opportunity to your developer experience and also for your applications. Organizations can analyse their business problem without tied with any technology and later they can provide solutions by choosing different platform and tools. Summary    In this blog post, what I was trying to say that we should not tied up or biased with any development platform, technology, vendor or programming language and we should not adopt technologies and practices for the sake of technologies. If we are adopting a technology or a practice for the sake of it, we are simply becoming a “poster child” of the technology and practice. We should not become a poster child of other people’s intellectual thoughts and theories, instead of it we should become solutions developers and solutions consultants where we should be able to provide better solutions for the business problems. Being a polyglot developer is a good idea for improving your developer skills which lets you provide better solutions for the business problems. The most important thing is that we should become platform neutral developers where our passion should be for providing brilliant solutions. It would be great if we could provide minimalist, pragmatic business solutions. You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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• Webcast: Leveraging Mobile And Social Commerce To Deliver A Complete Customer Experience

  - by Michael Hylton

    Mobile and social media are emerging as new channels for customers to interact and transact with brands. Mobile users demand experiences that are relevant and engaging and are designed with the capabilities and constraints of devices in mind. Just having a mobile app or mobile-specific website is not a long-term strategy. Brands must invest in an optimized experience, especially as mobile becomes critical to an overall digital commerce strategy.Debating the merits of using Facebook or not is missing the point when it comes to social media. True innovators are thinking beyond the social channel and are building programs that leverage Facebook data to drive conversions and engagement both on and off Facebook.  Learn how to be more strategic about mobile and social commerce in this informative editorial webcast.Attend this webcast and you will learn: How to leverage mobile and social touchpoints in digital commerce Why having a Facebook page or a mobile app is not enough The benefits of a consistent, personalized and relevant customer experience Strategies for integrating mobile and social into an overall digital commerce strategy Featured Speakers: Peter Sheldon, Senior Analyst, eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals, Forrester Research Brenna Johnson, Product Manager, Oracle Commerce Click here to register.

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