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• Why did Embarcadero make me sign a waiver?

  - by Peter Turner

  Just signed in to the Embarcadero Developer Network and got this: EXPORT CONTROLS ON EMBARCADERO SOFTWARE Your EDN membership and access to Embarcadero Software is subject to your agreement to and compliance with the following terms: -You agree that U.S. export control laws govern your use of the Embarcadero Software. -You are not a citizen, national, or resident of, and are not under control of, the government of Cuba, Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Syria, nor any country to which the United States has embargoed or prohibited export. -You will not provide or export Embarcadero Software, directly or indirectly, to the above mentioned countries nor to citizens, nationals or residents of those countries. -You are not listed on the United States Department of Treasury lists of Specially Designated Nationals, Specially Designated Terrorists, and Specially Designated Narcotic Traffickers, nor are you listed on the United States Department of Commerce Table of Denial Orders. -You will not provide or export the Embarcadero Software, directly or indirectly, to persons on the above mentioned lists. -You will not use the Embarcadero Software for, and will not allow the Embarcadero Software to be used for, any purposes prohibited by United States law, including for the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction. I think it's BS, but what craziness is forcing companies like Embarcadero to hold developers to these very high standards? Also, what is "Embarcadero Software"? Does that mean I can't put a benign videogame on a website that may have a runtime that might be downloaded by a Iranian who love scrabble. Or does "Embarcadero Software" refer to anything I develop using Delphi.

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• What is the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act?

  In 2002 after the wake of the Enron and World Com Financial scandals Senator Paul Sarbanes and Representative Michael Oxley lead the creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This act administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dramatically altered corporate financial practices and data governance. In addition, it also set specific deadlines for compliance. The Sarbanes-Oxley is not a set of standard business rules and does not specify how a company should retain its records; In fact, this act outlines which pieces of data are to be stored as well as the storage duration. The SOX act targets the financial side of companies, but its impacts can be seen within the technology arena as well because it is their responsibility to store all of a company’s electronic records regardless of file type. This act specifies that all records and electronic messages must be saved for no less than five years according to SearchCIO. In addition, consequences for non-compliance are fines, imprisonment, or both. Sarbanes-Oxley Act: Rules that affect the management of Electronic records according to SearchCIO. Allowed practices regarding destruction, alteration, or falsification of records. Retention period for records storage. Best practices indicate that corporations securely store all business records using the same guidelines set for public accountants. Types of business records that need to be stored Business Records  Business Communications Including Electronic Communications References: SOXLaw: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 Retrieved May 2011 from http://www.soxlaw.com/ SearchCIO: What is Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)? Retrieved May 2011 from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/Sarbanes-Oxley-Act

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• How can player actions be "judged morally" in a measurable way?

  - by Sebastien Diot

  While measuring the player "skills" and "effort" is usually easy, adding some "less objective" statistics can give the player supplementary goals, especially in a MUD/RPG context. What I mean is that apart from counting how many orcs were killed, and gems collected, it would be interesting to have something along the line of the traditional Good/Evil, Lawful/Chaotic ranking of paper-based RPG, to add "dimension" to the game. But computers cannot differentiate good/evil effectively (nor can humans in many cases), and if you have a set of "laws" which are precise enough that you can tell exactly when the player breaks them, then it generally makes more sense to actually prevent them from doing that action in the first place. One example could be the creation/destruction axis (if players are at all allowed to create/build things), possibly in the form of the general effect of the player actions on "ecology". So what else is there left that can be effectively measured and would provide a sense of "moral" for the player? The more axis I have to measure, the more goals the player can have, and therefore the longer the game can last. This also gives the players more ways of "differentiating" themselves among hordes of other players of the same "class" and similar "kit".

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for November 29, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud: Advanced I/O Virtualization Architecture for Consolidating High-Performance Workloads This new white paper by Adam Hawley (with contributions from Yoav Eilat) describes in great detail the incorporation into Oracle Exalogic of virtualized InfiniBand I/O interconnects using Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology. Developing Spring Portlet for use inside Weblogic Portal / Webcenter Portal | Murali Veligeti A detailed technical post with supporting downloads from Murali Veligeti. Business SOA: When to shout, the art of constructive destruction Communication skills are essential for architects. Sometimes that means raising your voice. Steve Jones shares some tips for effective communication when the time comes to let it all out. Centralized Transaction Management for ADF Data Control | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director and prolific blogger Andrejus Baranovskis shares instructions and a sample application to illustrate how to implement centralized Commit/Rollback management in an ADF application. Collaborative Police across multiple stakeholders and jurisdictions | Joop Koster Capgemini Oracle Solution Architect Joop Koster raises some interesting IT issues regarding the challenges facing international law enforcement. Architected Systems: "If you don't develop an architecture, you will get one anyway…" "Can you build a system without taking care of architecture?" asks Manuel Ricca. "You certainly can. But inevitably the system will be unbalanced, neglecting the interests of key stakeholders, and problems will soon emerge." Thought for the Day "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. " — Frederick P. Brooks Source: Quotes for Software Engineers

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• Clouds Aroud the World

  - by user12608550

  At the NIST Cloud Computing Workshop this week; representatives from Canada, China, and Japan presented on their cloud computing efforts. Some interesting points made: Canada: Building "Service Canada" cloud for all citizen services, but raised the issue of data location...cloud data must be within Canada border, so they will not focus on public clouds where they don't know or can't control data location. Japan: In response to the massive destruction of the Great East Japan Earthquake, Japan is building nation-wide cloud services to support disaster relief, data recovery, and support for rebuilding new communities. US Ambassador Philip Verveer discussed the need for international cooperation and standards development to enable interoperability of cloud services, keeping in mind cultural and political differences. Additionally, an industry panel reported on cloud standards development, including some actual interoperability testing at http://www.cloudplugfest.org. Much of the first two days of the workshop covered progress and action plans around the 10 High-Priority Requirements to Further USG Agency Cloud Computing Adoption. Thursday's sessions will cover the work of the various NIST Cloud Computing Working Groups on Reference Architecture and Taxonomy Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart the Adoption of Cloud Computing (SAJACC) Cloud Security Standards Roadmap Business Use Cases (see Working Groups of NIST Cloud Computing )

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• Resource Acquisition is Initialization in C#

  - by codeWithoutFear

  Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII) is a pattern I grew to love when working in C++.  It is perfectly suited for resource management such as matching all those pesky new's and delete's.  One of my goals was to limit the explicit deallocation statements I had to write.  Often these statements became victims of run-time control flow changes (i.e. exceptions, unhappy path) or development-time code refactoring. The beauty of RAII is realized by tying your resource creation (acquisition) to the construction (initialization) of a class instance.  Then bind the resource deallocation to the destruction of that instance.  That is well and good in a language with strong destructor semantics like C++, but languages like C# that run on garbage-collecting runtimes don't provide the same instance lifetime guarantees. Here is a class and sample that combines a few features of C# to provide an RAII-like solution: using System; namespace RAII { public class DisposableDelegate : IDisposable { private Action dispose; public DisposableDelegate(Action dispose) { if (dispose == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("dispose"); } this.dispose = dispose; } public void Dispose() { if (this.dispose != null) { Action d = this.dispose; this.dispose = null; d(); } } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.Out.WriteLine("Some resource allocated here."); using (new DisposableDelegate(() => Console.Out.WriteLine("Resource deallocated here."))) { Console.Out.WriteLine("Resource used here."); throw new InvalidOperationException("Test for resource leaks."); } } } } The output of this program is: Some resource allocated here. Resource used here. Unhandled Exception: System.InvalidOperationException: Test for resource leaks. at RAII.Program.Main(String[] args) in c:\Dev\RAII\RAII\Program.cs:line 40 Resource deallocated here. Code without fear! --Don

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• Difference between Singleton implemention using pointer and using static object

  - by Anon

  EDIT: Sorry my question was not clear, why do books/articles prefer implementation#1 over implementation#2? What is the actual advantage of using pointer in implementation of Singleton class vs using a static object? Why do most books prefer this class Singleton { private: static Singleton *p_inst; Singleton(); public: static Singleton * instance() { if (!p_inst) { p_inst = new Singleton(); } return p_inst; } }; over this class Singleton { public: static Singleton& Instance() { static Singleton inst; return inst; } protected: Singleton(); // Prevent construction Singleton(const Singleton&); // Prevent construction by copying Singleton& operator=(const Singleton&); // Prevent assignment ~Singleton(); // Prevent unwanted destruction };

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• Help to choose Alfresco or Nuxeo for DMS

  - by user267073

  Hi! I have requirement to develop DMS(Document Managemen System) with some initial requirements: 1.If possible DMS should be open source 2.Initially DMS should support up to 500 users 3.System should be scalable in sence od users or content 4.Docuemtns/Content should be stored on a file system 5.Document should be able to be marked for later destruction 6.Mandatory to have workflow capabilities 7.Mandatory to have version control capability 8.Nice to have SSO(Single Sign On) with Liferay portal 9.Nice to have posibility to expose some of funccionality via portlets in Liferay 10.Document management should be done via the web interface 11.Nice to have shared drive capability 12.Nice to have events and notifications about add/change content At the moment I am in doubth to choose between Alfresco and Nuxeo. I will appreciate any help to choose between them. Thanks in advance

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• Include Problem with Objective-C++ and OpenGL

  - by Stephen Furlani

  Hello, I feel silly asking this but I've searched for 'include problems' and have only come up with basic stuff. I'm working with an API that includes/imports in their header files (ARGH! HATE ANGER DESTRUCTION). One of these Obj-C files #import "OpenGL/CGLMacros.h" which #define's things like glMatrixMode(...); In my code I need the glMatrixMode(...); from #include "OpenGL/gl.h" but it won't access it! I can't edit the headers from the (poorly) coded API to put the includes in their definition files. What can I do? If the CGLMacros.h file starts out like /* Copyright: (c) 1999 by Apple Computer, Inc., all rights reserved. */ #ifndef _CGLMACRO_H #define _CGLMACRO_H Can I put a #define _CGLMACRO_H before I include the offending API header file? -Stephen

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• Measuring device drivers CPU/IO utilization caused by my program

  - by Lior Kogan

  Sometimes code can utilize device drivers up to the point where the system is unresponsive. Lately I've optimized a WIN32/VC++ code which made the system almost unresponsive. The CPU usage, however, was very low. The reason was 1000's of creations and destruction of GDI objects (pens, brushes, etc.). Once I refactored the code to create all objects only once - the system became responsive again. This leads me to the question: Is there a way to measure CPU/IO usage of device drivers (GPU/disk/etc) for a given program / function / line of code?

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• Temporary files & folders on Windows

  - by GRIGORE-TURBODISEL

  Emulating multithreading by loading a DLL multiple times (it's designed for this). Since LoadLibrary() doesn't really allow it, the DLL copies itself into a temporary file, via GetTempPath() and GetTempFileName(). It's a small file and upon thread destruction it frees the library and deletes the temporary file. Problem now is that the number of threads is configurable (maniacs can pick 50, 100, more) which basically exposes the risk of running unstable, crash and not go through the usual "delete temporary files" routine. Is it okay if I just leave those temporary files to die there? Does the OS usually clean the up by itself? Or should I write an autocleanup routine? If yes, how can I go about saving another temporary file to hold a list with those files, and not hit UAC restrictions or otherwise? Any ideas?

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• Ruby On Rails: Ask for Confirmation When Table Entry Associated With Another Is Destroyed

  - by Train Main

  Hi all, I would like some assistance with the following problem: I have a table of groups that is self-associated with itself, so each group is (optionally) linked to another in a hierarchical fashion. I want to write some code that will somehow check before the destruction of a group entry, if it has any children, and ask the user for confirmation, or whether they wish to delete the child groups as well. I've looked at callbacks, but I don't know how to get the confirmation request to the end user in the view, and then get the response back to the model's callback. Thanks

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• Why is the destructor of the class called twice ?

  - by dicaprio

  Apologies if the question sounds silly, I was following experts in SO and trying some examples myself, and this is one of them. I did try the search option but didn't find an answer for this kind. class A { public: A(){cout<<"A Contruction"<<endl;} ~A(){cout<<"A destruction"<<endl;} }; int main() { vector<A> t; t.push_back(A()); // After this line, when the scope of the object is lost. } Why is the destructor of the class called twice ?

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• Friday Fun: Snow Crusher

  - by Asian Angel

  It has probably been a long week whether you have already returned to work or are finishing up the last of your vacation time. If you are in need of some stress relief, then we have we the perfect game for you. This week you get to be totally fiendish and use a monster size snowball to destroy as many cars as possible at the local snow lodge. Snow Crusher The object of the game is simple…create as large of a monster snowball as you can and then send it down over the side of the mountain to destroy the cars at the snow lodge. You can choose from three different sizes of monster snowballs to create. We chose the “Snowflake Size” for our reign of destruction. Once you have chosen a monster snowball size, all that is left to do is select the control method that works best for you. As soon as you select the control method, your monster snowball creation will automatically begin. Keep in mind that the faster your snowball goes the harder it can become to steer if you make sudden movements… At the top you can watch your progress towards the drop-off point and the green boxes highlighted at the bottom indicate how large of an item (such as trees or boulders) your snowball can roll over and add to the total mass. Snowball speed is shown in the lower right corner. Time to roll! As soon as the first green box is lit up you can start adding small trees to your snowball’s mass. You will want to avoid larger items as you go because they will penalize your score, slow you down, and reduce the size of your snowball! Halfway to the drop-off point and our snowball is now able to grab up larger trees. If you have not hit any large items along the way, your snowball will definitely be moving along at a good rate by now. When you reach the end of the mass building area, your snowball will pop out into the open and get ready to drop off over the side of the mountain. Go snowball go! Yes! Thirteen cars crushed and ready for the scrap yard… If the “Snowflake Size” snowball can do this, just think what the “Avalanche Size” can do with three minutes of time to build up mass! Have fun with those monster snowballs! Play Snow Crusher Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper Enjoy Christmas Beyond the Holiday with Christmas Eve Crisis Parrotfish Extends the Number of Services Accessible in Twitter Previews

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• Correct way to handle path-finding collision matrix

  - by Xander Lamkins

  Here is an example of me utilizing path finding. The red grid represents the grid utilized by my A* library to locate a distance. This picture is only an example, currently it is all calculated on the 1x1 pixel level (pretty darn laggy). I want to make it so that the farther I click, the less accurate it will be (split the map into larger grid pieces). Edit: as mentioned by Eric, this is not a required game mechanic. I am perfectly fine with any method that allows me to make this accurate while still fast. This isn't the really the topic of this question though. The problem I have is, my current library uses a two dimensional grid of integers. The higher the number in a cell, the more resistance for that grid tile. Currently I'm setting all unwalkable spots to Integer Max. Here is an example of what I want: I'm just not sure how I should set up the arrays of integers of the grid. Every time an element is added/removed to/from the game, it's collision details are updated in the table. Here is a picture of what the map looks like on my collision layer: I probably shouldn't be creating new arrays every time I have to do a path find because my game needs to support tons of PF at the same time. Should I have multiple arrays that are all updated when the dynamic elements are updated (a building is built/a building is destroyed). The problem I see with this is that it will probably make the creation and destruction of buildings a little more laggy than I would want because it would be setting the collision grid for each built in accuracy level. I would also have to add more/remove some arrays if I ever in the future changed the map size. Should I generate the new array based on an accuracy value every time I need to PF? The problem I see with this is that it will probably make any form of PF just as laggy because it will have to search through a MapWidth x MapHeight number of cells to shrink it all down. Or is there a better way? I'm certainly not the best at optimizing really anything. I've just started dealing with XNA so I'm not used to having optimization code really doing much of an affect until now... :( If you need code examples, please ask. I'll add it as an edit. EDIT: While this doesn't directly relate to the question, I figure the more information I provide, the better. To keep your units from moving as accurately to the players desired position, I've decided that once the unit PFs over to the less accurate grid piece, it will then PF on a more accurate level to the exact position requested.

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• What is a good strategy for binding view objects to model objects in C++?

  - by B.J.

  Imagine I have a rich data model that is represented by a hierarchy of objects. I also have a view hierarchy with views that can extract required data from model objects and display the data (and allow the user to manipulate the data). Actually, there could be multiple view hierarchies that can represent and manipulate the model (e.g. an overview-detail view and a direct manipulation view). My current approach for this is for the controller layer to store a reference to the underlying model object in the View object. The view object can then get the current data from the model for display, and can send the model object messages to update the data. View objects are effectively observers of the model objects and the model objects broadcast notifications when properties change. This approach allows all the views to update simultaneously when any view changes the model. Implemented carefully, this all works. However, it does require a lot of work to ensure that no view or model objects hold any stale references to model objects. The user can delete model objects or sub-hierarchies of the model at any time. Ensuring that all the view objects that hold references to the model objects that have been deleted is time-consuming and difficult. It feels like the approach I have been taking is not especially clean; while I don't want to have to have explicit code in the controller layer for mediating the communication between the views and the model, it seems like there must be a better (implicit) approach for establishing bindings between the view and the model and between related model objects. In particular, I am looking for an approach (in C++) that understands two key points: There is a many to one relationship between view and model objects If the underlying model object is destroyed, all the dependent view objects must be cleaned up so that no stale references exist While shared_ptr and weak_ptr can be used to manage the lifetimes of the underlying model objects and allows for weak references from the view to the model, they don't provide for notification of the destruction of the underlying object (they do in the sense that the use of a stale weak_ptr allows for notification), but I need an approach that notifies the dependent objects that their weak reference is going away. Can anyone suggest a good strategy to manage this?

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• Reporting on common code smells : A POC

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Over the past few blog entries, I’ve been looking at parsing TSQL scripts in a variety of ways for a variety of tasks.  In my last entry ‘How to prevent ‘Select *’ : The elegant way’, I looked at parsing SQL to report upon uses of SELECT *.  The obvious question leading on from this is, “Great, what about other code smells ?”  Well, using the language service parser to do that was turning out to be a bit of a hard job,  sure I was getting tokens but no real context.  I wasn't even being told when an end of statement had been reached. One of the other parsing options available from Microsoft is exposed in the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.TransactSql.ScriptDom’,  this is ,I believe, installed with the client development tools with SQLServer.  It is much more feature rich than the original parser I had used and breaks a TSQL script into intuitive classes for analysis. So, what sort of smells can I now find using it ?  Well, for an opening gambit quite a nice little list. Use of NOLOCK Set of READ UNCOMMITTED Use of SELECT * Insert without column references Explicit datatype conversion on Sargs Cross server selects Non use of two-part naming convention Table and Query hint usage Changes in set options Use of single line comments Use of ordinal column positions in ORDER BY clause Now, lets not argue the point that “It depends” as smells on some of these, but as an academic exercise it is quite interesting.  The code is available from this link :https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfk32sou4fzl2cw/TSQLDomTest.zip  All the usual disclaimers apply to this code, I cannot be held responsible for anything ranging from mild annoyance through to universe destruction due to the use of this code or examples. The zip file contains a powershell script and my test cases.  The assembly used requires .Net 4 to run, which means that you will need powershell 3 ( though im running through PowerGUI and all works ok ) .  The code searches for all .sql files in the folder hierarchy for the workingpath,  you can override this if you want by simply changing the $Folder variable, and processes each in turn for the smells.  Feedback is not great at the moment, all it does is output to an xml file (Smells.xml) the offset position and a description of the smell found. Right now, I am interested in your feedback.  What do you think ?  Is this (or should it be) more than an academic exercise ?  Can tooling such as this be used as some form of code quality measure ?  Does it Work ? Do you have a case listed above which is not being reported ? Do you have a case that you would love to be reported ? Let me know , please mailto: [email protected]. Thanks

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• Common business drivers that lead to creating and sustaining a project

  Common business drivers that lead to creating and sustaining a project include and are not limited to: cost reduction, increased return on investment (ROI), reduced time to market, increased speed and efficiency, increased security, and increased interoperability. These drivers primarily focus on streamlining and reducing cost to make a company more profitable with less overhead. According to Answers.com cost reduction is defined as reducing costs to improve profitability, and may be implemented when a company is having financial problems or prevent problems. ROI is defined as the amount of value received relative to the amount of money invested according to PayperclickList.com.  With the ever increasing demands on businesses to compete in today’s market, companies are constantly striving to reduce the time it takes for a concept to become a product and be sold within the global marketplace. In business, some people say time is money, so if a project can reduce the time a business process takes it in fact saves the company which is always good for the bottom line. The Social Security Administration states that data security is the protection of data from accidental or intentional but unauthorized modification, destruction. Interoperability is the capability of a system or subsystem to interact with other systems or subsystems. In my personal opinion, these drivers would not really differ for a profit-based organization, compared to a non-profit organization. Both corporate entities strive to reduce cost, and strive to keep operation budgets low. However, the reasoning behind why they want to achieve this does contrast. Typically profit based organizations strive to increase revenue and market share so that the business can grow. Alternatively, not-for-profit businesses are more interested in increasing their reach within communities whether it is to increase annual donations or invest in the lives of others. Success or failure of a project can be determined by one or more of these drivers based on the scope of a project and the company’s priorities associated with each of the drivers. In addition, if a project attempts to incorporate multiple drivers and is only partially successful, then the project might still be considered to be a success due to how close the project was to meeting each of the priorities. Continuous evaluation of the project could lead to a decision to abort a project, because it is expected to fail before completion. Evaluations should be executed after the completion of every software development process stage. Pfleeger notes that software development process stages include: Requirements Analysis and Definition System Design Program Design Program Implementation Unit Testing Integration Testing System Delivery Maintenance Each evaluation at every state should consider all the business drivers included in the scope of a project for how close they are expected to meet expectations. In addition, minimum requirements of acceptance should also be included with the scope of the project and should be reevaluated as the project progresses to ensure that the project makes good economic sense to continue. If the project falls below these benchmarks then the project should be put on hold until it does make more sense or the project should be aborted because it does not meet the business driver requirements.   References Cost Reduction Program. (n.d.). Dictionary of Accounting Terms. Retrieved July 19, 2009, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/cost-reduction-program Government Information Exchange. (n.d.). Government Information Exchange Glossary. Retrieved July 19, 2009, from SSA.gov Web site: http://www.ssa.gov/gix/definitions.html PayPerClickList.com. (n.d.). Glossary Term R - Pay Per Click List. Retrieved July 19, 2009, from PayPerClickList.com Web site: http://www.payperclicklist.com/glossary/termr.html Pfleeger, S & Atlee, J.(2009). Software Engineering: Theory and Practice. Boston:Prentice Hall Veluchamy, Thiyagarajan. (n.d.). Glossary « Thiyagarajan Veluchamy’s Blog. Retrieved July 19, 2009, from Thiyagarajan.WordPress.com Web site: http://thiyagarajan.wordpress.com/glossary/

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• How to Build Services from Legacy Applications

  - by Chris Falter

  The SOA consultants invaded the executive suite at your company or agency, preached the true religion, and converted the unbelievers. Now by divine imperative you must convert your legacy applications into a suite of reusable services.  But as usual, you lack the time and resources that you need in order to develop the services properly.  So you googled or bing’ed, found this blog post, and began crying in gratitude.  Yes, as the title implies, I am going to reveal my easy, 3-step, works-every-time process for converting silos of legacy applications into the inventory of services your CIO has been dreaming about.  So just close your eyes and count to 3 … now open them … and here it is…. Not. While wishful thinking is too often the coin of the IT realm, even the most naive practitioner knows that converting legacy applications into reusable services requires more than a magic wand.  The reason is simple: if your starting point is your legacy applications, then you will simply be bolting a web service technology layer on top of your legacy API.  And that legacy API is built in the image of the silo applications.  Enter the wide gate of the legacy API, follow the broad path of generating service interfaces from existing code, and you will arrive at the siloed enterprise destruction that you thought you were escaping. The Straight and Narrow Path This past week I had the opportunity to learn how the FBI Criminal Justice Information Systems department has been transitioning from silo applications to a service inventory.  Lafe Hutcheson, IT Specialist in the architecture group and fellow attendee at an SOA Architect Certification Workshop, was my guide.  Lafe has survived the chaos of an SOA initiative, so it is not surprising that he was able to return from a US Army deployment to Kabul, Afghanistan with nary a scratch.  According to Lafe, building their service inventory is a three-phase process: Model a business process.  This requires intense collaboration between the IT and business wings of the organization, of course.  The FBI uses IBM Websphere tools to model the process with BPMN. Identify candidate services to facilitate the business process. Convert the BPMN to an executable BPEL orchestration, model and develop the services, and use a BPEL engine to run the process.  The FBI uses ActiveVOS for orchestration services. The 12 Step Program to End Your Legacy API Addiction Thomas Erl has documented a process for building a web service inventory that is quite similar to the FBI process. Erl’s process adds a technology architecture definition phase, which allows for the technology environment to influence the inventory blueprint.  For example, if you are using an enterprise service bus, you will probably not need to build your own utility services for logging or intermediate routing.  Erl also lists a service-oriented analysis phase that highlights the 12-step process of applying the principles of service orientation to modeling your services.  Erl depicts the modeling of a service inventory as an iterative process: model a business process, define the relevant technology architecture, define the service inventory blueprint, analyze the services, then model another business process, rinse and repeat.  (Astute readers will note that Erl’s diagram, restricted to analysis and modeling process, does not include the implementation phase that concludes the FBI service development methodology.) The service-oriented analysis phase is where you find the 12 steps that will free you from your legacy API addiction. In a nutshell, you identify the steps in the process that need services; identify the different types of services (agnostic entity services, service compositions, and utility services) that are required; apply service-orientation principles; and normalize the inventory into cohesive service models. Rather than discuss each of the 12 steps individually, I will close by simply referring my readers to Erl’s explanation.

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• UX question: is better to have "serious delete" or have "trash"

  - by ftrotter

  I am developing an application that allows for a user to manage some individual data points. One of the things that my users will want to do is "delete" but what should that mean? For a web application is it better to present a user with the option to have serious delete or to use a "trash" system? Under "serious delete" (would love to know if there is a better name for this...) you click "delete" and then the user is warned "this is final and tragic action. Once you do this you will not be able to get -insert data point name here- back, even if you are crying..." Then if they click delete... well it truly is gone forever. Under the "trash" model, you never trust that the user really wants to delete... instead you remove the data point from the "main display" and put into a bucket called "the trash". This gets it out of the users way, which is what they usually want, but they can get it back if they make a mistake. Obviously this is the way most operating systems have gone. The advantages of "serious delete" are: Easy to implement Easy to explain to users The disadvantages of "serious delete" are: it can be tragically final sometimes, cats walk on keyboards The advantages of the "trash" system are: user is safe from themselves bulk methods like "delete a bunch at once" make more sense saves support headaches The disadvantages of the "trash" system are": For sensitive data, you create an illusion of destruction users think something is gone, but it is not. Lots of subtle distinctions make implementation more difficult Do you "eventually" delete the contents of the trash? My question is which one is the right design pattern for modern web applications? With enough discussion to justify your answer... Would love to be pointed towards some relevant research. -FT

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• Why does RunDLL32 process exit early on Windows 7?

  - by Vicky

  On Windows XP and Vista, I can run this code: STARTUPINFO si; PROCESS_INFORMATION pi; BOOL bResult = FALSE; ZeroMemory(&pi, sizeof(pi)); ZeroMemory(&si, sizeof(si)); si.cb = sizeof(STARTUPINFO); si.dwFlags = STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW; si.wShowWindow = SW_SHOW; bResult = CreateProcess(NULL, "rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL modem.cpl", NULL, NULL, FALSE, NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS, NULL, NULL, &si, &pi); if (bResult) { WaitForSingleObject(pi.hProcess, INFINITE); CloseHandle(pi.hProcess); CloseHandle(pi.hThread); } and it operates as I would expect, i.e. the WaitForSingleObject does not return until the Modem Control Panel window has been closed by the user. On Windows 7, the same code, WaitForSingleObject returns straight away (with a return code of 0 indicating that the object signalled the requested state). Similarly, if I take it to the command line, on XP and Vista I can run start /wait rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL modem.cpl and it does not return control to the command prompt until the Control Panel window is closed, but on Windows 7 it returns immediately. Is this a change in RunDll32? I know MS made some changes to RunDll32 in Windows 7 for UAC, and it looks from these experiments as though one of those changes might have involved spawning an additional process to display the window, and allowing the originating process to exit. The only thing that makes me think this might not be the case is that using a process explorer that shows the creation and destruction of processes, I do not see anything additional being created beyond the called rundll32 process itself. Any other way I can solve this? I just don't want the function to return until the control panel window is closed.

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• Destroying nested resources in restful way

  - by Alex

  I'm looking for help destroying a nested resource in Merb. My current method seems near correct, but the controller raise an InternalServerError during the destruction of the nested object. Here comes all the details concerning the request, don't hesitate to ask for more :) Thanks, Alex I'm trying to destroy a nested resources using the following route in router.resources :events, Orga::Events do |event| event.resources :locations, Orga::Locations end Which gives in jQuery request (delete_ method is a implementation of $.ajax with "DELETE"): $.delete_("/events/123/locations/456"); In the Location controller side, I've got: def delete(id) @location = Location.get(id) raise NotFound unless @location if @location.destroy redirect url(:orga_locations) else raise InternalServerError end end And the log: merb : worker (port 4000) ~ Routed to: {"format"=>nil, "event_id"=>"123", "action"=>"destroy", "id"=>"456", "controller"=>"letsmotiv/locations"} merb : worker (port 4000) ~ Params: {"format"=>nil, "event_id"=>"123", "action"=>"destroy", "id"=>"456", "controller"=>"letsmotiv/locations"} ~ (0.000025) SELECT `id`, `class_type`, `name`, `prefix`, `type`, `capacity`, `handicap`, `export_name` FROM `entities` WHERE (`class_type` IN ('Location') AND `id` = 456) ORDER BY `id` LIMIT 1 ~ (0.000014) SELECT `id`, `streetname`, `phone`, `lat`, `lng`, `country_region_city_id`, `location_id`, `organisation_id` FROM `country_region_city_addresses` WHERE `location_id` = 456 ORDER BY `id` LIMIT 1 merb : worker (port 4000) ~ Merb::ControllerExceptions::InternalServerError - (Merb::ControllerExceptions::InternalServerError)

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• Ninject InThreadScope Binding

  - by e36M3

  I have a Windows service that contains a file watcher that raises events when a file arrives. When an event is raised I will be using Ninject to create business layer objects that inside of them have a reference to an Entity Framework context which is also injected via Ninject. In my web applications I always used InRequestScope for the context, that way within one request all business layer objects work with the same Entity Framework context. In my current Windows service scenario, would it be sufficient to switch the Entity Framework context binding to a InThreadScope binding? In theory when an event handler in the service triggers it's executed under some thread, then if another file arrives simultaneously it will be executing under a different thread. Therefore both events will not be sharing an Entity Framework context, in essence just like two different http requests on the web. One thing that bothers me is the destruction of these thread scoped objects, when you look at the Ninject wiki: .InThreadScope() - One instance of the type will be created per thread. .InRequestScope() - One instance of the type will be created per web request, and will be destroyed when the request ends. Based on this I understand that InRequestScope objects will be destroyed (garbage collected?) when (or at some point after) the request ends. This says nothing however on how InThreadScope objects are destroyed. To get back to my example, when the file watcher event handler method is completed, the thread goes away (back to the thread pool?) what happens to the InThreadScope-d objects that were injected? EDIT: One thing is clear now, that when using InThreadScope() it will not destroy your object when the handler for the filewatcher exits. I was able to reproduce this by dropping many files in the folder and eventually I got the same thread id which resulted in the same exact Entity Framework context as before, so it's definitely not sufficient for my applications. In this case a file that came in 5 minutes later could be using a stale context that was assigned to the same thread before.

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• Managing resource closure in a servlet container

  - by Steven Schlansker

  I'm using Tomcat as a servlet container, and have many WARs deployed. Many of the WARs share common base classes, which are replicated in each context due to the different classloaders, etc. How can I ensure resource cleanup on context destruction, without hooking each and every web.xml file to add context listeners? Ideally, I'd like something along the lines of class MyResourceHolder implements SomeListenerInterface { private SomeResource resource; { SomeContextThingie.registerDestructionListener(this); } public void onDestroy() { resource.close(); } } I could put something in each web.xml, but since there are potentially many WARs and only ones that actually initialize the resource need to clean it up, it seems more natural to register for cleanup when the resource is initialized rather than duplicating a lot of XML configuration and then maybe cleaning up. (In this particular case, I'm initiating an orderly shutdown of a SQL connection pool. But I see this being useful in many other situations as well...) I'm sure there's some blisteringly obvious solution out there, but my Google-fu is failing me right now. Thanks!

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• 4.0/WCF: Best approach for bi-idirectional message bus?

  - by TomTom

  Just a technology update, now that .NET 4.0 is out. I write an application that communicates to the server through what is basically a message bus (instead of method calls). This is based on the internal architecture of the application (which is multi threaded, passing the messages around). There are a limited number of messages to go from the client to the server, quite a lot more from the server to the client. Most of those can be handled via a separate specialized mechanism, but at the end we talk of possibly 10-100 small messages per second going from the server to the client. The client is supposed to operate under "internet conditions". THis means possibly home end users behind standard NAT devices (i.e. typical DSL routers) - a firewalled secure and thus "open" network can not be assumed. I want to have as little latency and as little overhad for the communication as possible. What is the technologally best way to handle the message bus callback? I Have no problem regularly calling to the server for message delivery if something needs to be sent... ...but what are my options to handle the messagtes from the server to the client? WsDualHttp does work how? Especially under a NAT scenario? Just as a note: polling is most likely out - the main problem here is that I would have a significant overhead OR a significant delay, both aren ot really wanted. Technically I would love some sort of streaming appraoch, where the server can write messags to a stream while he generates them and they get sent to the client as they come. Not esure this is doable with WCF, though (if not, I may acutally decide to handle the whole message part outside of WCF and just do control / login / setup / destruction via WCF).

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