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  • Capgemini Global Business Process Management Report

    - by JuergenKress
    Welcome to the Capgemini Global Business Process Management (BPM) Report. This report is an exploration of key trends in BPM as seen by CXOs across a broad selection of sectors and geographies. BPM is perhaps at a tipping point - it’s certainly at an exciting stage in its evolution. As both an engineer and an Operational Research practitioner in my early career, and subsequently as a consultant, I have seen BPM through its development over the last 26 years. BPM has its roots in management practices such as Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering & Model Based Development; but the advent of the new generation of sophisticated modelling and process execution technologies has greatly enhanced BPM’s power to truly transform businesses. This has created one of the most rapidly growing and attractive market sectors for both services and technology. We see BPM as a critical management discipline that when executed against clear, cross organizational business objectives, can deliver exceptional value to that organization. However, we also see that the potential for BPM is not well understood. Our decision to conduct this global survey stemmed from discussions with our clients. We sought to gain a better impression of their understanding of BPM, how they measure its value, and how far it is prioritized within their Business and Technology Transformation efforts. This research confirms our belief that BPM needs to be a jointly owned Business and IT discipline. It also demonstrates that it is starting to gain significant traction in the market and investments are starting to pay dividends to the early adopters. At Capgemini we are being asked by our clients to help them simplify and improve their business models and the technology that supports them and we are already seeing BPM become an integral and key part of this proposition. Business Process Management is becoming ever more relevant to both large and small organizations in the current economic climate. At a time when many different market sectors are facing slow revenue growth, customer churn and increased pressures on costs, BPM becomes a critical weapon in the battle for efficiency and effectiveness in processes. Furthermore, in a challenging and changing business environment that is characterized by uncertainty, it allows organizations to adapt, be more agile and fleet of foot. Capgemini is seeing strong demand for BPM services in markets such as the USA, the UK, the Netherlands and France; and there are clear signs of increased interest in other geographies such as, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy and Australia. In sector terms, the financial services industry has led the way in BPM adoption over the recent past, driven by increased focus on customer- centricity and regulatory compliance. Other sectors, public sector, utilities, telco, retail and manufacturing are now not only catching up, but are starting o use BPM in new ways to create new business models to serve customers and outsmart the competition. The research findings also show however that this is a complex landscape, and we are not seeing adoption of BPM in a clear and consistent way. This report also looks at some of the barriers to adoption, with organizational silos being a major obstacle. Waters are further muddied by fragmented budgets, lack of clear governance and ownership and internal politics. The objective of our investment in this research project was to shed some light on these elements with a view to assisting organizations to create strategies that avoid or at least mitigate some of these barriers to success. Management of change in such endea vours is a key part in enabling the appropriate alignment of business and technology to support their transformation efforts. I hope that you find this report of benefit in the further adoption of Business Process Management. Get the full report here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: Capgemini,bpm report,bpm market,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Antenna Aligner Part 4: Role'ing in the deep

    - by Chris George
    Since last time I've been trying to sort out the general workflow of the app. It's fundamentally not hard, there is a list of transmitters, you select a transmitter and it shows the compass view. Having done quite a bit of ajax/asp.net/html in the past, I immediately started off by creating two divs within my 'page', one for the list, one for the compass. Then using the onClick event in the list, this will switch the display attribute on the divs. This seemed to work, but did lead to some dodgy transitional redrawing artefacts which I was not happy with. So after some Googling I realised I was doing it all wrong! JQuery mobile has the concept of giving an object in html a data-role. By giving a div the attribute data-role="page" it is then treated as a separate page on the mobile device. Within the code, this is referenced like a html anchor in the form #mypage. Using this system, page transitions such as fade or slide are automatically applied which adds to the whole authenticity of the app! Here is a simple example: . <a href="#'compasspage">compass</a> . <div data-role="page" id="compasspage" data-add-back-btn="true"> But I don't want just a static link, I want to dynamically create my list, and get each list elements to switch to the compass page with the right information. So here is the jquery that I used to dynamically inject new <li> rows into the <ul> block. $('ul').append($('<li/>', {    //here appendin `<li>`     'data-role': "list-divider" }).append($('<a/>', {    //here appending `<a>` into `<li>`     'href': '#compasspage',     'data-transition': 'none',     'onclick': 'selectTx(' + i + ')',     'html': buttonHtml }))); $('ul').listview('refresh'); This is called within a for loop so the first 5 appropriate transmitters are used. There are several things of interest to note here. Firstly, I could not find a more elegant way to tell the target page which transmitter I've clicked on, so I have used the onclick event as well as the href attribute. The onclick event fires 'selectTx' which simply sets a global member variable to the specific index number I've clicked on. Yes it's not nice, but it works. Secondly, the data-transition attribute is set to 'none'. I wanted the transition between the pages to be a whooshy slidey effect. However this worked going to the compass page, but returning to the list page gave some undesirable visual artefacts (flickering, redrawing etc.). So I decided to remove the transitions all together, which was a shame. Thirdly, rather than embedding loads of html into the append command, I removed this out into a variable 'buttonHtml'. Doing this really tidied up my code. Until next time!

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  • Cleaner ClientID's with ASP.NET 4.0

    - by amaniar
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE HI /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} A common complain we have had when using ASP.NET web forms is the inability to control the ID attributes being rendered in the HTML markup when using server controls. Our Interface Engineers want to be able to predict the ID’s of controls thereby having more control over their client side code for selecting/manipulating elements by ID or using CSS to target them. While playing with the just released VS2010 and .NET 4.0 I discovered some real cool improvements. One of them is the ability to now have full control over the ID being rendered for server controls. ASP.NET 4.0 controls now have a new ClientIDMode property which gives the developer complete control over the ID’s being rendered making it easy to write JavaScript and CSS against the rendered html. By default the ClientIDMode is set to Predictable which results in clean and predictable ID’s by concatenating the ID’s of the Parent and child controls. So the following markup: <asp:Content ID="ParentContainer" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContentPlaceHolder" runat="server">     <asp:Label runat="server" ID="MyLabel">My Label</asp:Label> </asp:Content>                                                                                                                                                             Will render:   <span id="ParentContainer_MyLabel">My Label</span> Instead of something like this: (current) <span id="ct100_ParentContainer_MyLabel">My Label</span> Other modes include AutoID (renders ID’s like it currently does in .NET 3.5), Static (renders the ID exactly as specified in the code) and Inherit (defers the mode to the parent control). So now I can write my jQuery selector as: $(“ParentContainer_MyLabel”).text(“My new Text”); Instead of: $(‘<%=this. MyLabel.ClientID%>’).text(“My new Text”); Scott Mitchell has a great article about this new feature: http://bit.ly/ailEJ2 Am excited about this and some other improvements. Many thanks to the ASP.NET team for Listening!

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  • Looking into CSS3 Multiple backgrounds

    - by nikolaosk
    In this post I will be looking into a great feature in CSS3 called multiple backgrounds.With CSS3 ourselves as web designers we can specify multiple background images for box elements, using nothing more than a simple comma-separated list. This is a very nice feature that can be useful in many websites.In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here.Before I go on with the actual demo I will use the (http://www.caniuse.com) to see the support for CSS 3 Multiple backgrounds from the latest versions of modern browsers.Please have a look in this link All modern browsers support this feature. I am typing this very simple HTML 5 markup with an internal CSS style.<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en">  <head>    <title>Sold items</title>        <style>                #box{        border:1px solid #afafaf;        width:260px;        height:290px;        background-image:url(shirt.png), url(sold.jpg);        background-position: center bottom, right top;        background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat;    </style>    </head>  <body>    <header>                <h1>CSS3 Multiple backgrounds</h1>    </header>           <div id="box">              </div>        <footer>        <p>All Rights Reserved</p>      </footer>     </body>  </html>  Let me explain what I do here, multiple background images are specified using a comma-separated list of values for the background-image property.A comma separated list is also used for the other background properties such as background-repeat, background-position .So in the next three lines of CSS code         background-image:url(shirt.png), url(sold.jpg);        background-position: center bottom, right top;        background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat; we have 2 images placed in the div element. The first is placed center bottom in the div element and the second is placed at right top position inside the div element.Both images do not get repeated.I view the page in IE 10 and all the latest versions of Opera,Chrome and Firefox.Have a look at the picture below. Hope it helps!!!!

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  • Trouble rotating viewplatform in Java3D [closed]

    - by user29163
    I have just started with Java3D programming. I thought I had built up some basic intuition about how the scene graph works, but something that should work, does not work. I made a simple program for rotating a pyramid around the y-axis. This was done just by adding a RotationInterpolator R to the TransformGroup above the pyramid. Then I thought hey, can I now remove the RotationInterpolator from this TransformGroup, then add it to the TransformGroup above my ViewPlatform leaf. This should work if I have understood how things work. Adding the RotationInterpolator to this TransformGroup, should make the children of this TransformGroup rotate, and the ViewingPlatform is a child of the TransformGroup. Any ideas on where my reasoning is flawed? Here is the code for setting up the universe, and the view branchgroup. import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; import javax.media.j3d.*; import javax.vecmath.*; public class UniverseBuilder { // User-specified canvas Canvas3D canvas; // Scene graph elements to which the user may want access VirtualUniverse universe; Locale locale; TransformGroup vpTrans; View view; public UniverseBuilder(Canvas3D c) { this.canvas = c; // Establish a virtual universe that has a single // hi-res Locale universe = new VirtualUniverse(); locale = new Locale(universe); // Create a PhysicalBody and PhysicalEnvironment object PhysicalBody body = new PhysicalBody(); PhysicalEnvironment environment = new PhysicalEnvironment(); // Create a View and attach the Canvas3D and the physical // body and environment to the view. view = new View(); view.addCanvas3D(c); view.setPhysicalBody(body); view.setPhysicalEnvironment(environment); // Create a BranchGroup node for the view platform BranchGroup vpRoot = new BranchGroup(); // Create a ViewPlatform object, and its associated // TransformGroup object, and attach it to the root of the // subgraph. Attach the view to the view platform. Transform3D t = new Transform3D(); Transform3D s = new Transform3D(); t.set(new Vector3f(0.0f, 0.0f, 10.0f)); t.rotX(-Math.PI/4); s.set(new Vector3f(0.0f, 0.0f, 10.0f)); //forandre verdier her for å endre viewing position t.mul(s); ViewPlatform vp = new ViewPlatform(); vpTrans = new TransformGroup(t); vpTrans.setCapability(TransformGroup.ALLOW_TRANSFORM_WRITE); // Rotator stuff Transform3D yAxis = new Transform3D(); //yAxis.rotY(Math.PI/2); Alpha rotationAlpha = new Alpha( -1, Alpha.INCREASING_ENABLE, 0, 0,4000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0); RotationInterpolator rotator = new RotationInterpolator( rotationAlpha, vpTrans, yAxis, 0.0f, (float) Math.PI*2.0f); RotationInterpolator rotator2 = new RotationInterpolator( rotationAlpha, vpTrans); BoundingSphere bounds = new BoundingSphere(new Point3d(0.0,0.0,0.0), 1000.0); rotator.setSchedulingBounds(bounds); vpTrans.addChild(rotator); vpTrans.addChild(vp); vpRoot.addChild(vpTrans); view.attachViewPlatform(vp); // Attach the branch graph to the universe, via the // Locale. The scene graph is now live! locale.addBranchGraph(vpRoot); } public void addBranchGraph(BranchGroup bg) { locale.addBranchGraph(bg); } }

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  • concurrency::extent<N> from amp.h

    - by Daniel Moth
    Overview We saw in a previous post how index<N> represents a point in N-dimensional space and in this post we'll see how to define the N-dimensional space itself. With C++ AMP, an N-dimensional space can be specified with the template class extent<N> where you define the size of each dimension. From a look and feel perspective, you'd expect the programmatic interface of a point type and size type to be similar (even though the concepts are different). Indeed, exactly like index<N>, extent<N> is essentially a coordinate vector of N integers ordered from most- to least- significant, BUT each integer represents the size for that dimension (and hence cannot be negative). So, if you read the description of index, you won't be surprised with the below description of extent<N> There is the rank field returning the value of N you passed as the template parameter. You can construct one extent from another (via the copy constructor or the assignment operator), you can construct it by passing an integer array, or via convenience constructor overloads for 1- 2- and 3- dimension extents. Note that the parameterless constructor creates an extent of the specified rank with all bounds initialized to 0. You can access the components of the extent through the subscript operator (passing it an integer). You can perform some arithmetic operations between extent objects through operator overloading, i.e. ==, !=, +=, -=, +, -. There are operator overloads so that you can perform operations between an extent and an integer: -- (pre- and post- decrement), ++ (pre- and post- increment), %=, *=, /=, +=, –= and, finally, there are additional overloads for plus and minus (+,-) between extent<N> and index<N> objects, returning a new extent object as the result. In addition to the usual suspects, extent offers a contains function that tests if an index is within the bounds of the extent (assuming an origin of zero). It also has a size function that returns the total linear size of this extent<N> in units of elements. Example code extent<2> e(3, 4); _ASSERT(e.rank == 2); _ASSERT(e.size() == 3 * 4); e += 3; e[1] += 6; e = e + index<2>(3,-4); _ASSERT(e == extent<2>(9, 9)); _ASSERT( e.contains(index<2>(8, 8))); _ASSERT(!e.contains(index<2>(8, 9))); grid<N> Our upcoming pre-release bits also have a similar type to extent, grid<N>. The way you create a grid is by passing it an extent, e.g. extent<3> e(4,2,6); grid<3> g(e); I am not going to dive deeper into grid, suffice for now to think of grid<N> simply as an alias for the extent<N> object, that you create when you encounter a function that expects a grid object instead of an extent object. Usage The extent class on its own simply defines the size of the N-dimensional space. We'll see in future posts that when you create containers (arrays) and wrappers (array_views) for your data, it is an extent<N> object that you'll need to use to create those (and use an index<N> object to index into them). We'll also see that it is a grid<N> object that you pass to the new parallel_for_each function that I'll cover in the next post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • std::vector::size with glDrawElements crashes?

    - by NoobScratcher
    ( win32 / OpenGL 3.3 / GLSL 330 ) I decided after a long time of trying to do a graphical user interface using just opengl graphics to go back to a gui toolkit and so in the process have had to port alot of my code to win32. But I have a problem with my glDrawElement function. my program compiles and runs fine until it gets to glDrawElements then crashes.. which is rather annoying right. so I was trying to figure out why and I found out its std::vector::size member not returning the correct amount of faces in the unsigned interger vector eg, "vector<unsigned int>faces; " so when I use cout << faces.size() << endl; I got 68 elements???? instead of 24 as you can see here in this .obj file: # Blender v2.61 (sub 0) OBJ File: '' # www.blender.org v 1.000000 -1.000000 -1.000000 v 1.000000 -1.000000 1.000000 v -1.000000 -1.000000 1.000000 v -1.000000 -1.000000 -1.000000 v 1.000000 1.000000 -0.999999 v 0.999999 1.000000 1.000001 v -1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 v -1.000000 1.000000 -1.000000 s off f 1 2 3 4 f 5 8 7 6 f 1 5 6 2 f 2 6 7 3 <--- 24 Faces not 68? f 3 7 8 4 f 5 1 4 8 I'm using a parser I created to get the faces/vertexes in my .obj file: char modelbuffer [20000]; int MAX_BUFF = 20000; unsigned int face[3]; FILE * pfile; pfile = fopen(szFileName, "rw"); while(fgets(modelbuffer, MAX_BUFF, pfile) != NULL) { if('v') { Point p; sscanf(modelbuffer, "v %f %f %f", &p.x, &p.y, &p.z); points.push_back(p); cout << " p.x = " << p.x << " p.y = " << p.y << " p.z = " << p.x << endl; } if('f') { sscanf(modelbuffer, "f %d %d %d %d", &face[0], &face[1], &face[2], &face[3]); cout << "face[0] = " << face[0] << " face[1] = " << face[1] << " face[2] = " << face[2] << " face[3] = " << face[3] << "\n"; faces.push_back(face[0] - 1); faces.push_back(face[1] - 1); faces.push_back(face[2] - 1); faces.push_back(face[3] - 1); cout << face[0] - 1 << face[1] - 1 << face[2] - 1 << face[3] - 1 << endl; } } using this struct to store the x,y,z positions also this vector was used with Point: vector<Point>points; struct Point { float x, y, z; }; If someone could tell me why its not working and how to fix it that would be awesome I also provide a pastebin to the full source code if you want a closer look. http://pastebin.com/gznYLVw7

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  • The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Request Phase

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    Originally posted by John Brunswick. For each project, regardless of size, it is critical to understand the required ownership, business purpose, prerequisite education / resources needed to execute and success criteria around it. Without doing this, there is no way to get a handle on the content life-cyle, resulting in a mass of orphaned material. This lowers the quality of end user experiences.     The good news is that by using a simple process in this request phase - we will not have to revisit this phase unless something drastic changes in the project. For each of the elements mentioned above in this stage, the why, how (technically focused) and impact are outlined with the intent of providing the most value to a small team. 1. Ownership Why - Without ownership information it will not be possible to track and manage any of the content and take advantage of many features of enterprise content management technology. To hedge against this, we need to ensure that both a individual and their group or department within the organization are associated with the content. How - Apply metadata that indicates the owner and department or group that has responsibility for the content. Impact - It is possible to keep the content system optimized by running native reports against the meta-data and acting on them based on what has been outlined for success criteria. This will maximize end user experience, as content will be faster to locate and more relevant to the user by virtue of working through a smaller collection. 2. Business Purpose Why - This simple step will weed out requests that have tepid justification, as users will most likely not spend the effort to request resources if they do not have a real need. How - Use a simple online form to collect and workflow the request to management native to the content system. Impact - Minimizes the amount user generated content that is of low value to the organization. 3. Prerequisite Education Resources Needed Why - If a project cannot be properly staffed the probability of its success is going to be low. By outlining the resources needed - in both skill set and duration - it will cause the requesting party to think critically about the commitment needed to complete their project and what gap must be closed with regard to education of those resources. How - In the simple request form outlined above, resources and a commitment to fulfilling any needed education should be included with a brief acceptance clause that outlines the requesting party's commitment. Impact - This stage acts as a formal commitment to ensuring that resources are able to execute on the vision for the project. 4. Success Criteria Why - Similar to the business purpose, this is a key element in helping to determine if the project and its respective content should continue to exist if it does not meet its intended goal. How - Set a review point for the project content that will check the progress against the originally outlined success criteria and then determine the fate of the content. This can even include logic that will tell the content system to remove items that have not been opened by any users in X amount of time. Impact - This ensures that projects and their contents do not live past their useful lifespans. Just as with orphaned content, non-relevant information will slow user's access to relevant materials for the jobs. Request Phase Summary With a simple form that outlines the ownership of a project and its content, business purpose, education and resources, along with success criteria, we can ensure that an enterprise content management system will stay clean and relevant to end users - allowing it to deliver the most value possible. The key here is to make it straightforward to make the request and let the content management technology manage as much as possible through metadata, retention policies and workflow. Doing these basic steps will allow project content to get off to a great start in the enterprise! Stay tuned for the next installment - the "Create Phase" - covering security access and workflow involved in content creation, enabling a practical layer of governance over our enterprise content repository.

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  • Framework for Everything - Where to begin? [Longer post]

    - by SquaredSoft
    Back story of this question, feel free to skip down for the specific question Hello, I've been very interested in the idea of abstract programming the last few years. I've made about 30 attempts at creating a piece of software that is capable of almost anything you throw at it. I've undertook some attempts at this that have taken upwards of a year, while getting close, never releasing it beyond my compiler. This has been something I've always tried wrapping my head around, and something is always missing. With the title, I'm sure you're assuming, "Yes of course you noob! You can't account for everything!" To which I have to reply, "Why not?" To give you some background into what I'm talking about, this all started with doing maybe a shade of gray hat SEO software. I found myself constantly having to create similar, but slightly different sets of code. I've gone through as many iterations of way to communicate on http as the universe has particles. "How many times am I going to have to write this multi-threaded class?" is something I found myself asking a lot. Sure, I could create a class library, and just work with that, but I always felt I could optimize what I had, which often was a large undertaking and typically involved frequent use of the CRTL+A keyboard shortcut, mixed with the delete button. It dawned on me that it was time to invest in a plugin system. This would allow me to simply add snippets of code. as time went on, and I could subversion stuff out, and distribute small chunks of code, rather than something that encompasses only a specific function or design. This comes with its own complexity, of course, and by the time I had finished the software scope for this addition, it hit me that I would want to add to everything in the software, not just a new http method, or automation code for a specific website. Great, we're getting more abstract. However, the software that I have in my mind comes down to a quite a few questions regarding its execution. I have to have some parameters to what I am going to do. After writing what the perfect software would do in my mind, I came up with this as a list of requirements: Should be able to use networking A "Macro" or "Expression system" which would allow people to do something like : =First(=ParseToList(=GetUrl("http://www.google.com?q=helloworld!"), Template.Google)) Multithreaded Able to add UI elements through some type of XML -- People can make their own addons etc. Can use third party API through the plugins, such as Microsoft CRM, Exchange, etc. This would allow the software to essentially be used for everything. Really, any task you wish to automate, in a simple way. Making the UI was as also extremely hard. How do you do all of this? Its very difficult. So my question: With so many attempts at this, I'm out of ideas how to successfully complete this. I have a very specific idea in my mind, but I keep failing to execute it. I'm a self taught programmer. I've been doing it for years, and work professionally in it, but I've never encountered something that would be as complex and in-depth as a system which essentially does everything. Where would you start? What are the best practices for design? How can I avoid constantly having to go back and optimize my software. What can I do to generalize this and draw everything out to completion. These are things I struggle with. P.s., I'm using c# as my main language. I feel like in this example, I might be hitting the outer limit of the language, although, I don't know if that is the case, or if I'm just a bad programmer. Thanks for your time.

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  • The long road to bug-free software

    - by Tony Davis
    The past decade has seen a burgeoning interest in functional programming languages such as Haskell or, in the Microsoft world, F#. Though still on the periphery of mainstream programming, functional programming concepts are gradually seeping into the imperative C# language (for example, Lambda expressions have their root in functional programming). One of the more interesting concepts from functional programming languages is the use of formal methods, the lofty ideal behind which is bug-free software. The idea is that we write a specification that describes exactly how our function (say) should behave. We then prove that our function conforms to it, and in doing so have proved beyond any doubt that it is free from bugs. All programmers already use one form of specification, specifically their programming language's type system. If a value has a specific type then, in a type-safe language, the compiler guarantees that value cannot be an instance of a different type. Many extensions to existing type systems, such as generics in Java and .NET, extend the range of programs that can be type-checked. Unfortunately, type systems can only prevent some bugs. To take a classic problem of retrieving an index value from an array, since the type system doesn't specify the length of the array, the compiler has no way of knowing that a request for the "value of index 4" from an array of only two elements is "unsafe". We restore safety via exception handling, but the ideal type system will prevent us from doing anything that is unsafe in the first place and this is where we start to borrow ideas from a language such as Haskell, with its concept of "dependent types". If the type of an array includes its length, we can ensure that any index accesses into the array are valid. The problem is that we now need to carry around the length of arrays and the values of indices throughout our code so that it can be type-checked. In general, writing the specification to prove a positive property, even for a problem very amenable to specification, such as a simple sorting algorithm, turns out to be very hard and the specification will be different for every program. Extend this to writing a specification for, say, Microsoft Word and we can see that the specification would end up being no simpler, and therefore no less buggy, than the implementation. Fortunately, it is easier to write a specification that proves that a program doesn't have certain, specific and undesirable properties, such as infinite loops or accesses to the wrong bit of memory. If we can write the specifications to prove that a program is immune to such problems, we could reuse them in many places. The problem is the lack of specification "provers" that can do this without a lot of manual intervention (i.e. hints from the programmer). All this might feel a very long way off, but computing power and our understanding of the theory of "provers" advances quickly, and Microsoft is doing some of it already. Via their Terminator research project they have started to prove that their device drivers will always terminate, and in so doing have suddenly eliminated a vast range of possible bugs. This is a huge step forward from saying, "we've tested it lots and it seems fine". What do you think? What might be good targets for specification and verification? SQL could be one: the cost of a bug in SQL Server is quite high given how many important systems rely on it, so there's a good incentive to eliminate bugs, even at high initial cost. [Many thanks to Mike Williamson for guidance and useful conversations during the writing of this piece] Cheers, Tony.

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  • Class design issue

    - by user2865206
    I'm new to OOP and a lot of times I become stumped in situations similar to this example: Task: Generate an XML document that contains information about a person. Assume the information is readily available in a database. Here is an example of the structure: <Person> <Name>John Doe</Name> <Age>21</Age> <Address> <Street>100 Main St.</Street> <City>Sylvania</City> <State>OH</State> </Address> <Relatives> <Parents> <Mother> <Name>Jane Doe</Name> </Mother> <Father> <Name>John Doe Sr.</Name> </Father> </Parents> <Siblings> <Brother> <Name>Jeff Doe</Name> </Brother> <Brother> <Name>Steven Doe</Name> </Brother> </Siblings> </Relatives> </Person> Ok lets create a class for each tag (ie: Person, Name, Age, Address) Lets assume each class is only responsible for itself and the elements directly contained Each class will know (have defined by default) the classes that are directly contained within them Each class will have a process() function that will add itself and its childeren to the XML document we are creating When a child is drawn, as in the previous line, we will have them call process() as well Now we are in a recursive loop where each object draws their childeren until all are drawn But what if only some of the tags need to be drawn, and the rest are optional? Some are optional based on if the data exists (if we have it, we must draw it), and some are optional based on the preferences of the user generating the document How do we make sure each object has the data it needs to draw itself and it's childeren? We can pass down a massive array through every object, but that seems shitty doesnt it? We could have each object query the database for it, but thats a lot of queries, and how does it know what it's query is? What if we want to get rid of a tag later? There is no way to reference them. I've been thinking about this for 20 hours now. I feel like I am misunderstanding a design principle or am just approaching this all wrong. How would you go about programming something like this? I suppose this problem could apply to any senario where there are classes that create other classes, but the classes created need information to run. How do I get the information to them in a way that doesn't seem fucky? Thanks for all of your time, this has been kicking my ass.

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  • Admin Panel like Custom Framework

    - by bhuvin
    I want to Create a Framework , like Admin panel , which can rule almost all the aspects of what is shown on the frontend. For an (most basic) example: If suppose the links which are to be shown in a navigation area is passed from the server, with the order and the url , etc. The whole aim is to save the time on the tedious tasks. You can just start creating menus and start assigning pages to it. Give a url, actual files which are to be rendered (in case of static files.), in case of dynamic files, giving the file accordingly. And all this is fully server side manageable using different portlets, sort of things. So basic Roadmap is having : Areas like: Header Area - Which can contain logos, links etc. Navigation Area - Which can contains links and submenus. Content Area - Now this is where the tricky part is that that it has zones like: left, center & right. It contains Order in which it has to be displayed. So, when someday we want to change the way the articles appear on the page, we can do so easily, without any deployments. Now these zones can have n number of internal elements, like the word cloud, or the advertisement area. Footer Area: Again similar as Header Area. Currently there is a preexisting custom framework, which uses XSLT files for pulling out data from the server side. And it has the above capabilities. For example: If there's a grid it will be having a <table> tag embedded in the XSLT file. Now whatever might be the source of the data, we serialize this as XML and give it to the XSLT file and the html is derived from this and is appended to the layer in a page. The problem with this approach is: The XSLT conversion is occurring on the server side, so the server is responsible for getting the data, running XSLT transform, and append the html generated to the layer div. So, according to me, firstly this isn't the server's concern to do so. Secondly for larger applications this might be slower. Debugging isn't possible for XSLT transformation. So, whenever we face problems with data its always a bit of a trial & error method. Maintaining it is a bit of an eerie job i.e. styling changes, and other stuff. Adding dynamic values. Like JavaScript can't actually be very easily used in this. Secondly, we can't use JQuery or any other libraries with this since this is all occurring on the server. For now what I have thought about is using Templating - Javascript - JSON combination in place of XSLT, this will be offloaded to the client and the rendering will take place accordingly. This could solve the above problems and also could add mobile support for the same. Only problem which I could think of is that: It is much work and adding new portlets on the go needs to be looked into. What could be the alternatives for this? What kind of problems are there with the JavaScript approach? What are the different ways to implement the same? Are there any existing frameworks for similar usage?

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  • Confused about modifying the sprint backlog during a sprint

    - by Maltiriel
    I've been reading a lot about scrum lately, and I've found what seem to me to be conflicting information about whether or not it's ok to change the sprint backlog during a sprint. The Wikipedia article on scrum says it's not ok, and various other articles say this as well. Also my Software Development professor taught the same thing during an overview of scrum. However, I read Scrum and XP from the Trenches and that describes a section for unplanned items on the taskboard. So then I looked up the Scrum Guide and it says that during the sprint "No changes are made that would affect the Sprint Goal" and in the discussion of the Sprint Goal "If the work turns out to be different than the Development Team expected, then they collaborate with the Product Owner to negotiate the scope of Sprint Backlog within the Sprint." It goes on to say in the discussion of the Sprint Backlog: The Sprint Backlog is a plan with enough detail that changes in progress can be understood in the Daily Scrum. The Development Team modifies Sprint Backlog throughout the Sprint, and the Sprint Backlog emerges during the Sprint. This emergence occurs as the Development Team works through the plan and learns more about the work needed to achieve the Sprint Goal. As new work is required, the Development Team adds it to the Sprint Backlog. As work is performed or completed, the estimated remaining work is updated. When elements of the plan are deemed unnecessary, they are removed. Only the Development Team can change its Sprint Backlog during a Sprint. The Sprint Backlog is a highly visible, real-time picture of the work that the Development Team plans to accomplish during the Sprint, and it belongs solely to the Development Team. So at this point I'm altogether confused. Thinking about it, it makes more sense to me to take the second approach. The individual, specific items in the backlog don't seem to me to be the most important thing, but rather the sprint goal, so not changing the sprint goal but being able to change the backlog makes sense. For instance if both the product owner and the team thought they were on the same page about a story, but as the sprint progressed they figured out there was a misunderstanding, it seems like it makes sense to change the tasks that make up that story accordingly. Or if there was some story or task that was forgotten about, but is required to reach the sprint goal, I would think it would be best to add the story or task to the backlog during the sprint. However, there are a lot of people who seem quite adamant that any change to the sprint backlog is not ok. Am I misunderstanding that position somehow? Are those folks defining the sprint backlog differently somehow? My understanding of the sprint backlog is that it consists of both the stories and the tasks they're broken down into. Anyway I would really appreciate input on this issue. I'm trying to figure out both what the idealistic scrum approach is to changing the sprint backlog during a sprint, and whether people who use scrum successfully for development allow changing the sprint backlog during a sprint.

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  • Getting Started with Cloud Computing

    - by juanlarios
    You’ve likely heard about how Office 365 and Windows Intune are great applications to get you started with Cloud Computing. Many of you emailed me asking for more info on what Cloud Computing is, including the distinction between "Public Cloud" and "Private Cloud". I want to address these questions and help you get started. Let's begin with a brief set of definitions and some places to find more info; however, an excellent place where you can always learn more about Cloud Computing is the Microsoft Virtual Academy. Public Cloud computing means that the infrastructure to run and manage the applications users are taking advantage of is run by someone else and not you. In other words, you do not buy the hardware or software to run your email or other services being used in your organization – that is done by someone else. Users simply connect to these services from their computers and you pay a monthly subscription fee for each user that is taking advantage of the service. Examples of Public Cloud services include Office 365, Windows Intune, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Hotmail, and others. Private Cloud computing generally means that the hardware and software to run services used by your organization is run on your premises, with the ability for business groups to self-provision the services they need based on rules established by the IT department. Generally, Private Cloud implementations today are found in larger organizations but they are also viable for small and medium-sized businesses since they generally allow an automation of services and reduction in IT workloads when properly implemented. Having the right management tools, like System Center 2012, to implement and operate Private Cloud is important in order to be successful. So – how do you get started? The first step is to determine what makes the most sense to your organization. The nice thing is that you do not need to pick Public or Private Cloud – you can use elements of both where it makes sense for your business – the choice is yours. When you are ready to try and purchase Public Cloud technologies, the Microsoft Volume Licensing web site is a good place to find links to each of the online services. In particular, if you are interested in a trial for each service, you can visit the following pages: Office 365, CRM Online, Windows Intune, and Windows Azure. For Private Cloud technologies, start with some of the courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy and then download and install the Microsoft Private Cloud technologies including Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 in your own environment and take it for a spin. Also, keep up to date with the Canadian IT Pro blog to learn about events Microsoft is delivering such as the IT Virtualization Boot Camps and more to get you started with these technologies hands on. Finally, I want to ask for your help to allow the team at Microsoft to continue to provide you what you need. Twice a year through something we call "The Global Relationship Study" – they reach out and contact you to see how they're doing and what Microsoft could do better. If you get an email from "Microsoft Feedback" with the subject line "Help Microsoft Focus on Customers and Partners" between March 5th and April 13th, please take a little time to tell them what you think. Cloud Computing Resources: Microsoft Server and Cloud Computing site – information on Microsoft's overall cloud strategy and products. Microsoft Virtual Academy – for free online training to help improve your IT skillset. Office 365 Trial/Info page – get more information or try it out for yourself. Office 365 Videos – see how businesses like yours have used Office 365 to transition to the cloud. Windows Intune Trial/Info – get more information or try it out for yourself. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online page – information on trying and licensing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Additional Resources You May Find Useful: Springboard Series Your destination for technical resources, free tools and expert guidance to ease the deployment and management of your Windows-based client infrastructure. TechNet Evaluation Center Try some of our latest Microsoft products for free, Like System Center 2012 Pre-Release Products, and evaluate them before you buy. AlignIT Manager Tech Talk Series A monthly streamed video series with a range of topics for both infrastructure and development managers. Ask questions and participate real-time or watch the on-demand recording. Tech·Days Online Discover what's next in technology and innovation with Tech·Days session recordings, hands-on labs and Tech·Days TV.

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  • Migrating VB6 to HTML5 is not a fiction - Customer success story

    - by Webgui
    All of you VB developers in the present or past would probably find it hard to believe that the old VB code can be migrated and modernized into the latest .NET based HTML5 without having to rewrite the application. But we have been working on such tools for the past couple of years and already have several real world applications that were fully 'transposed' from VB6. The solution is called Instant CloudMove and its main tool is called the TranspositionStudio. It is a unique solution that relies on the concept of transposition. Transposition comes from mathematics and music and refers to exchanging elements while everything else remains the same or moving an element as is from one environment to another. This means that we are taking the source code and put it in a modern technological environment with relatively few adjustments.The concept is based on a set of Mapping Expressions which are basically links between an element in the source environment and one in the target environment that has the same functionality. About 95% of the code is usually mapped out-of-the-box and the rest is handled with easy-to-use mapping tools designed for Visual Studio developers providing them with a familiar environment and concepts for completing the mapping and allowing them to extend and customize existing mapping expressions. The solution is also based on a circular workflow that enables developers to make any changes as required until the result is satisfying.As opposed to existing migration solutions that offer automation are usually a “black box” to the user, the transposition concept enables full visibility, flexibility and control over the code and process at all times allowing to also add/change functionalities or upgrade the UI within the process and tools.This is exactly the case with our customer’s aging VB6 PMS (Property Management System) which needed a technological update as well as a design refresh. The decision was to move the VB6 application which had about 1 million lines of code into the latest web technology. Since the application was initially written 13 years ago and had many upgrades since the code must be very patchy and includes unused sections. As a result, the company Mihshuv Group considered rewriting the entire application in Java since it already had the knowledge. Rewrite would allow starting with a clean slate and designing functionality, database architecture, UI without any constraints. On the other hand, rewrite entitles a long and detailed specification work as well as a thorough QA and this translates into a long project with high risk and costs.So the company looked for a migration solution as an alternative; the research lead to Gizmox and after examining the technology it was decided to perform a hybrid project which would include an automatic transposition of the core of the VB6 application (200,000 lines of code) while they redesigning the UI, adding new functionality, deleting unused code and rewriting about 140 reports with Crystal Reports will be done manually using Visual WebGui development tools.The migration part of the project was completed in 65 days by 3 developers from Mihshuv Group guided by Gizmox migration experts while the rewrite and UI upgrade tasks took about the same. So in only a few months period Mihshuv Group generated an up-to-date product, written in the latest Web technology with modern, friendly UI and improved functionality. Guest selection screen of the original VB6 PMS Guest selection screen on the new web–based PMS Compared to the initial plan to rewrite the entire application in Java, the hybrid migration/rewrite approach taken by Mihshuv Group using Gizmox technology proved as a great decision. In terms of time and cost there were substantial savings; from a project that was priced for at least a year (without taking into account the huge risk and uncertainty) it became a few months project only. More about this and other customer stories can be found here

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  • Using Content Analytics for More Effective Engagement

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    Using Content Analytics for More Effective Engagement: Turning High-Volume Content into Templates for Success By Mitchell Palski, Oracle WebCenter Sales Consultant Many organizations use Oracle WebCenter Portal to develop these basic types of portals: Intranet portals used for collaboration, employee self-service, and company communication Extranet portals used by customers and partners for self-service and support Team collaboration portals that allow users to share documents and content, track activity, and engage in discussions Portals are intended to provide a personalized, single point of interaction with web-based applications and information. The user experiences that a Portal is capable of displaying should be relevant to an individual user or class of users (a group or role). The components of a Portal that would vary based on a user’s identity include: Web content such as images, news articles, and on-screen instruction Social tools such as threaded discussions, polls/surveys, and blogs Document management tools to upload, download, and edit files Web applications that present data visualizations and data entry modules These collections of content, tools, and applications make up valuable workspaces. The challenge that a development team may have is defining which combinations are the most effective for its users. No one wants to create and manage a workspace that goes un-used or (even worse) that is used but is ineffective. Oracle WebCenter Portal provides you with the capabilities to not only rapidly develop variations of portals, but also identify which portals are the most effective and should be re-used throughout an enterprise. Capturing Portal AnalyticsOracle WebCenter Portal provides an analytics service that allows administrators and business users to track and analyze portal usage. These analytics are captured in the form of: Usage tracking metrics Behavior tracking User Profile Correlation The out-of-the-box task reports that come with Oracle WebCenter Portal include: WebCenter Portal Traffic Page Traffic Login Metrics Portlet Traffic Portlet Response Time Portlet Instance Traffic Portlet Instance Response Time Search Metrics Document Metrics Wiki Metrics Blog Metrics Discussion Metrics Portal Traffic Portal Response Time By determining the usage and behavior tracking metrics that are associated with specific user profiles (including groups and roles), your administrators will be able to identify the components of your solution that are the most valuable.  Your first step as an administrator should be to identify the specific pages and/or components are used the most frequently. Next, determine the user(s) or user-group(s) that are accessing those high-use elements of a portal. It is also important to determine patterns in high-usage and see if they correlate to a specific schedule. One of the goals of any development team (especially those that are following Agile methodologies) should be to develop reusable web components to minimize redundant development. Oracle WebCenter Portal provides you the tools to capture the successful workspaces that have already been developed and identified so that they can be reused for similar user demographics. Re-using Successful PortalsWhen creating a new Portal in Oracle WebCenter, developers have the option to base that portal on a template that includes: Pre-seeded data such as pages, tools, user roles, and look-and-feel assets Specific sub-sets of page-layouts, tools, and other resources to standardize what is added to a Portal’s pages Any custom components that your team creates during development cycles Once you have identified a successful workspace and its most valuable components, leverage Oracle WebCenter’s ability to turn that custom portal into a portal template. By creating a template from your already successful portal, you are empowering your enterprise by providing a starting point for future initiatives. Your new projects, new teams, and new web pages can benefit from lessons learned and adjustments that have already been made to optimize user experiences instead of starting from scratch. ***For a complete explanation of how to work with Portal Templates, be sure to read the Fusion Middleware documentation available online.

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  • Should I expose IObservable<T> on my interfaces?

    - by Alex
    My colleague and I have dispute. We are writing a .NET application that processes massive amounts of data. It receives data elements, groups subsets of them into blocks according to some criterion and processes those blocks. Let's say we have data items of type Foo arriving some source (from the network, for example) one by one. We wish to gather subsets of related objects of type Foo, construct an object of type Bar from each such subset and process objects of type Bar. One of us suggested the following design. Its main theme is exposing IObservable objects directly from the interfaces of our components. // ********* Interfaces ********** interface IFooSource { // this is the event-stream of objects of type Foo IObservable<Foo> FooArrivals { get; } } interface IBarSource { // this is the event-stream of objects of type Bar IObservable<Bar> BarArrivals { get; } } / ********* Implementations ********* class FooSource : IFooSource { // Here we put logic that receives Foo objects from the network and publishes them to the FooArrivals event stream. } class FooSubsetsToBarConverter : IBarSource { IFooSource fooSource; IObservable<Bar> BarArrivals { get { // Do some fancy Rx operators on fooSource.FooArrivals, like Buffer, Window, Join and others and return IObservable<Bar> } } } // this class will subscribe to the bar source and do processing class BarsProcessor { BarsProcessor(IBarSource barSource); void Subscribe(); } // ******************* Main ************************ class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { var fooSource = FooSourceFactory.Create(); var barsProcessor = BarsProcessorFactory.Create(fooSource) // this will create FooSubsetToBarConverter and BarsProcessor barsProcessor.Subscribe(); fooSource.Run(); // this enters a loop of listening for Foo objects from the network and notifying about their arrival. } } The other suggested another design that its main theme is using our own publisher/subscriber interfaces and using Rx inside the implementations only when needed. //********** interfaces ********* interface IPublisher<T> { void Subscribe(ISubscriber<T> subscriber); } interface ISubscriber<T> { Action<T> Callback { get; } } //********** implementations ********* class FooSource : IPublisher<Foo> { public void Subscribe(ISubscriber<Foo> subscriber) { /* ... */ } // here we put logic that receives Foo objects from some source (the network?) publishes them to the registered subscribers } class FooSubsetsToBarConverter : ISubscriber<Foo>, IPublisher<Bar> { void Callback(Foo foo) { // here we put logic that aggregates Foo objects and publishes Bars when we have received a subset of Foos that match our criteria // maybe we use Rx here internally. } public void Subscribe(ISubscriber<Bar> subscriber) { /* ... */ } } class BarsProcessor : ISubscriber<Bar> { void Callback(Bar bar) { // here we put code that processes Bar objects } } //********** program ********* class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { var fooSource = fooSourceFactory.Create(); var barsProcessor = barsProcessorFactory.Create(fooSource) // this will create BarsProcessor and perform all the necessary subscriptions fooSource.Run(); // this enters a loop of listening for Foo objects from the network and notifying about their arrival. } } Which one do you think is better? Exposing IObservable and making our components create new event streams from Rx operators, or defining our own publisher/subscriber interfaces and using Rx internally if needed? Here are some things to consider about the designs: In the first design the consumer of our interfaces has the whole power of Rx at his/her fingertips and can perform any Rx operators. One of us claims this is an advantage and the other claims that this is a drawback. The second design allows us to use any publisher/subscriber architecture under the hood. The first design ties us to Rx. If we wish to use the power of Rx, it requires more work in the second design because we need to translate the custom publisher/subscriber implementation to Rx and back. It requires writing glue code for every class that wishes to do some event processing.

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  • The long road to bug-free software

    - by Tony Davis
    The past decade has seen a burgeoning interest in functional programming languages such as Haskell or, in the Microsoft world, F#. Though still on the periphery of mainstream programming, functional programming concepts are gradually seeping into the imperative C# language (for example, Lambda expressions have their root in functional programming). One of the more interesting concepts from functional programming languages is the use of formal methods, the lofty ideal behind which is bug-free software. The idea is that we write a specification that describes exactly how our function (say) should behave. We then prove that our function conforms to it, and in doing so have proved beyond any doubt that it is free from bugs. All programmers already use one form of specification, specifically their programming language's type system. If a value has a specific type then, in a type-safe language, the compiler guarantees that value cannot be an instance of a different type. Many extensions to existing type systems, such as generics in Java and .NET, extend the range of programs that can be type-checked. Unfortunately, type systems can only prevent some bugs. To take a classic problem of retrieving an index value from an array, since the type system doesn't specify the length of the array, the compiler has no way of knowing that a request for the "value of index 4" from an array of only two elements is "unsafe". We restore safety via exception handling, but the ideal type system will prevent us from doing anything that is unsafe in the first place and this is where we start to borrow ideas from a language such as Haskell, with its concept of "dependent types". If the type of an array includes its length, we can ensure that any index accesses into the array are valid. The problem is that we now need to carry around the length of arrays and the values of indices throughout our code so that it can be type-checked. In general, writing the specification to prove a positive property, even for a problem very amenable to specification, such as a simple sorting algorithm, turns out to be very hard and the specification will be different for every program. Extend this to writing a specification for, say, Microsoft Word and we can see that the specification would end up being no simpler, and therefore no less buggy, than the implementation. Fortunately, it is easier to write a specification that proves that a program doesn't have certain, specific and undesirable properties, such as infinite loops or accesses to the wrong bit of memory. If we can write the specifications to prove that a program is immune to such problems, we could reuse them in many places. The problem is the lack of specification "provers" that can do this without a lot of manual intervention (i.e. hints from the programmer). All this might feel a very long way off, but computing power and our understanding of the theory of "provers" advances quickly, and Microsoft is doing some of it already. Via their Terminator research project they have started to prove that their device drivers will always terminate, and in so doing have suddenly eliminated a vast range of possible bugs. This is a huge step forward from saying, "we've tested it lots and it seems fine". What do you think? What might be good targets for specification and verification? SQL could be one: the cost of a bug in SQL Server is quite high given how many important systems rely on it, so there's a good incentive to eliminate bugs, even at high initial cost. [Many thanks to Mike Williamson for guidance and useful conversations during the writing of this piece] Cheers, Tony.

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  • Is there any kind of established architecture for browser based games?

    - by black_puppydog
    I am beginning the development of a broser based game in which players take certain actions at any point in time. Big parts of gameplay will be happening in real life and just have to be entered into the system. I believe a good kind of comparison might be a platform for managing fantasy football, although I have virtually no experience playing that, so please correct me if I am mistaken here. The point is that some events happen in the program (i.e. on the server, out of reach for the players) like pulling new results from some datasource, starting of a new round by a game master and such. Other events happen in real life (two players closing a deal on the transfer of some team member or whatnot - again: have never played fantasy football) and have to be entered into the system. The first part is pretty easy since the game masters will be "staff" and thus can be trusted to a certain degree to not mess with the system. But the second part bothers me quite a lot, especially since the actions may involve multiple steps and interactions with different players, like registering a deal with the system that then has to be approved by the other party or denied and passed on to a game master to decide. I would of course like to separate the game logic as far as possible from the presentation and basic form validation but am unsure how to do this in a clean fashion. Of course I could (and will) put some effort into making my own architectural decisions and prototype different ideas. But I am bound to make some stupid mistakes at some point, so I would like to avoid some of that by getting a little "book smart" beforehand. So the question is: Is there any kind of architectural works that I can read up on? Papers, blogs, maybe design documents or even source code? Writing this down this seems more like a business application with business rules, workflows and such... Any good entry points for that? EDIT: After reading the first answers I am under the impression of having made a mistake when including the "MMO" part into the title. The game will not be all fancy (i.e. 3D or such) on the client side and the logic will completely exist on the server. That is, apart from basic form validation for the user which will also be mirrored on the server side. So the target toolset will be HTML5, JavaScript, probably JQuery(UI). My question is more related to the software architecture/design of a system that enforces certain rules. Separation of ruleset and presentation One problem I am having is that I want to separate the game rules from the presentation. The first step would be to make an own module for the game "engine" that only exposes an interface that allows all actions to be taken in a clean way. If an action fails with regard to some pre/post condition, the engine throws an exception which is then presented to the user like "you cannot sell something you do not own" or "after that you would end up in a situation which is not a valid game state." The problem here is that I would like to be able to not even present invalid action in the first place or grey out the corresponding UI elements. Changing and tweaking the ruleset Another big thing is the ruleset. It will probably evolve over time and most definitely must be tweaked. What's more, it should be possible (to a certain extent) to build a ruleset that fits a specific game round, i.e. choosing different kinds of behaviours in different aspects of the game. This would do something like "we play it with extension A today but we throw out extension B." For me, this screams "Architectural/Design pattern" but I have no idea on who might have published on something like this, not even what to google for.

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  • How to get the height of an image and apply that height to a div? [migrated]

    - by Mick79
    I am building a mobile web app and I'm using jquerytools slider on it. i want te slider to show (in proper ratio) across all mobile devices so width of the images is 100% and height is auto in css. However as all the elements are floated and jquerytools slider requires the position be set to absolute, the containing div (#header) doesn't stretch to fit the content. I am trying to use jquery to get the height of the height of the img and apply that height to the header.... however I am having no luck. CSS: #header{ width:100%; position:relative; z-index: 20; /* box-shadow: 0 0 10px white; */ overflow: auto; } .scrollable { position:relative; overflow:hidden; width: 100%; height: 100%; /* box-shadow: 0 0 20px purple; */ /* height:198px; */ z-index: 20; overflow: auto; } .scrollable .items { /* this cannot be too large */ width:1000%; position:absolute; clear:both; /* box-shadow: 0 0 30px green; */ } .items div { float:left; width:10%; height:100%; } /* single scrollable item */ .scrollable img { /* float:left; */ width:100%; height: auto; /* height:198px; */ } /* active item */ .scrollable .active { border:2px solid #000; position:relative; cursor:default; } HTML <div id=header><!-- root element for scrollable --> <div class="scrollable" id="scrollable"> <!-- root element for the items --> <div class="items"> <div> <img src="img/img2.jpg" /> </div> <div> <img src="img/img1.jpg" /> </div> <div> <img src="img/img3.jpg" /> </div> <div> <img src="img/img4.jpg" /> </div> <div> <img src="img/img6.jpg" /> </div> </div><!-- items --> </div><!-- scrollable --> </div><!-- header -->

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  • How to be Agile when new work keeps affecting completed work?

    - by jdln
    The project I'm working on is to re-skin an existing website. The functionally will stay the same, its just the styles that are changing. The HTML is not changing, I'm only modifying the CSS files. The site is pretty complex. There are dozens of pages. Users can be logged in and have a number of different roles. Depending on their role the content of the page and what pages they are allowed to see varys. We're using GIT and Github. I'm trying to write CSS that works as components. So when the same form elements, headings, etc appear on multiple pages they are already styled and are consistent. Most of time this is working well. Sadly the format and class names in the HTML are at times messy and unpredictable. When I fix something on one page it can break another. The job is also harder as no one knows exactly all the variations that are possible due to the user roles. As such I'm continuously finding new variations as I go along. I'm making headway by putting a lot of comments in my CSS. If I need to remove a CSS rule Ill comment it out so I can still see it with the chrome dev tools, and ill put a comment in the CSS saying why I removed it and for what page this was done. This means that if on another page I'm about to add add the rule to fix a different problem, there is more of a chance I will see how this would break the first page. This allows me to either find a different solution that will work for both pages, or I can make the override page specific. This has been working quite well for me. If I had complete free reign and the only deadline was to finish the project by the end then this method would be fine. However my manager is trying to mitigate risk by breaking the work into areas to be completed per sprint. This is counter to how I have been approaching things as something like my typography styles will affect all other pages on the site. The other issue is that the different stakeholders want to sign off each section as I go along. However once I've finished a section it may change if I change CSS that affects it and also affects a new section I'm working on. I've asked that the stakeholders have a quick unofficial sign off in stages (eg per sprint), and have the final official sign off at the end of the project, but this is being met with resistance. I do understand why it would be higher risk to do this, but the only way to guarantee that a signed off section will not change is to make ALL future changes page specific. In addition to this I'm being told that all work that I push to the Git repo should be ready to go live, and as such should not contain any code comments. This is risky for me as I wont know until I've finished the site if I will ever benefit from these comments or not. Has anyone else been in a similar situation and managed to find a compromise that worked for my development approach and also the desires of management and stakeholders to have a more Agile approach? A more Agile workflow works great when you can break the work into components and know that once something is done it wont be affected by future work. However the nature of this project makes this hard to achieve.

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  • Indesign Import XML into Automatic Page generation, data merge

    - by taudep
    I've created some InDesign Pages that I want to use as templates. I've created an XML file with all the appropriate data. I want to merge the XML data with the InDesign page and have a few hundred pages automatically generated. I've been reading online and working with InDesign's "Import XML" features without any luck. The documentation has been pretty poor for me. And Google searches haven't returned much fruitful. Edit: I'm updating this to now include my present steps 1) I create a Master Page of my template 2) I add a bunch of text frames where I want the imported data from the XML file to be places 3) I open the "Tags" window and Import and XML file 4) I mark my text frames in the Master Document with the appropriate tags 5) I then add a lot of pages (like 200) to the document 6) Then I use "Import XML" to try and get the data brought in and filled across all 200 pages. This is where I fail. So there's something I'm missing. It might be that InDesign doesn't work as I'm expecting... Anyone have any good tips for mail-merge like functionality with an XML document and auto-generation of InDesign pages? BTW, here's an example of Adobe's great documentation for merging repeated XML elements. There's gotta be more...InDesign CS4 Docs: XML-Importing XML-Working with Repeating Data EDIT: Here's some of the sample XML, notice the ITEM will repeat. I've also truncated the data in the "desc" tag: <output> <item> <user_name>taude</user_name> <date>2009-02-21</date> <title>Wishful Thinking</title> <desc>Skiing up in Vermont on a beautiful day. This photo of</desc> <thumbnail>http://www.blipfoto.com/thumbs/5371/2009/big/color/96104200949a162672e1996.15963073.jpeg</thumbnail> </item> <item> <user_name>taude</user_name> <date>2009-02-22</date> <title>Skiing Self Portrait</title> <desc>I was inspired by ML's self-portrait while </desc> <thumbnail>http://www.blipfoto.com/thumbs/5371/2009/big/color/36547696749a2c5782308e0.91477014.jpeg</thumbnail> </item> </output> Here's what my imported XML looks like with the InDesign Structure

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  • windows firewall broken on server 2008

    - by Chloraphil
    This evening I tried to rdp into my server 2008 box and was unable to. After poking around some I discovered that something is awry with my Windows Firewall. I did install 5 windows updates remotely earlier today but rolled those back in an attempt to see if that fixed the problem but had no luck. Symptoms: cannot rdp to machine (including from itself) cannot ping machine cannot connect to file share on machine error message when attempting to open "windows firewall with advanced security" snap-in (there was an error opening the windows firewall with advanced security snap-in ... The Windows Firewall with Advanced Security snap-in failed to load. Restart the windows firewall service on the computer that you are managing. Error code: 0x6D9. When I opened the "user-friendly" Windows Firewall it failed to load most of the gui elements, meaning, the title bar with close, minimize, and maximize buttons is present, the rest of the window has a white background with a yellow rectangle with rounded corners and a yellow triangle w/ an exclamation point is in the upper right. hope that made sense "Windows Firewall" does not appear in the list of services I ran a virus scan that found nothing. How do I fix the firewall and hopefully restore the ability to rdp? EDIT: Added at fission's request: c:\sc query mpsdrv SERVICE_NAME: mpsdrv TYPE : 1 KERNEL_DRIVER STATE : 4 RUNNING (STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, IGNORES_SHUTDOWN) WIN32_EXIT_CODE : 0 (0x0) SERVICE_EXIT_CODE : 0 (0x0) CHECKPOINT : 0x0 WAIT_HINT : 0x0 c:\sc query mpssvc SERVICE_NAME: mpssvc TYPE : 20 WIN32_SHARE_PROCESS STATE : 1 STOPPED WIN32_EXIT_CODE : 1068 (0x42c) SERVICE_EXIT_CODE : 0 (0x0) CHECKPOINT : 0x0 WAIT_HINT : 0x0 Those two registry keys do exist: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\mpsdrv & HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MpsSvc ! The problem seems to be with the Base Filtering Engine, when I try to start it I get the following error: Windows could not start the Base Filtering Engine service on MYCOMPUTER. Error 15100: The resource loader failed to find MUI file. EDIT2: I ran sfc /scannow and i found about 100 occurrences of "[SR] Cannot repair member file"... including several related to the firewall (ex: [l:32{16}]"Firewall.cpl.mui" of Networking-MPSSVC.Resources...). One of them mentioned wordpad.exe, which I tried to open, and it failed. I found here mentions of mounting the install.wim on the install media to copy the affected files over. I am downloading the appropriate AIK and will continue tomorrow evening.

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  • Indesign Import XML into Automatic Page generation, data merge

    - by taudep
    I've created some InDesign Pages that I want to use as templates. I've created an XML file with all the appropriate data. I want to merge the XML data with the InDesign page and have a few hundred pages automatically generated. I've been reading online and working with InDesign's "Import XML" features without any luck. The documentation has been pretty poor for me. And Google searches haven't returned much fruitful. Here are my present steps: I create a Master Page of my template I add a bunch of text frames where I want the imported data from the XML file to be places I open the "Tags" window and Import and XML file I mark my text frames in the Master Document with the appropriate tags I then add a lot of pages (like 200) to the document Then I use "Import XML" to try and get the data brought in and filled across all 200 pages. This is where I fail. There's something I'm missing. It might be that InDesign doesn't work as I'm expecting... Does anyone have any good tips for mail-merge like functionality with an XML document and auto-generation of InDesign pages? By the way, here's an example of Adobe's great documentation for merging repeated XML elements. There's got to be more... InDesign CS4 Docs: XML-Importing XML-Working with Repeating Data Here's some of the sample XML, notice the ITEM will repeat. I've also truncated the data in the "desc" tag: <output> <item> <user_name>taude</user_name> <date>2009-02-21</date> <title>Wishful Thinking</title> <desc>Skiing up in Vermont on a beautiful day. This photo of</desc> <thumbnail>http://www.blipfoto.com/thumbs/5371/2009/big/color/96104200949a162672e1996.15963073.jpeg</thumbnail> </item> <item> <user_name>taude</user_name> <date>2009-02-22</date> <title>Skiing Self Portrait</title> <desc>I was inspired by ML's self-portrait while </desc> <thumbnail>http://www.blipfoto.com/thumbs/5371/2009/big/color/36547696749a2c5782308e0.91477014.jpeg</thumbnail> </item> </output> Here's what my imported XML looks like with the InDesign Structure:

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  • IIS Strategies for Accessing Secured Network Resources

    - by ErikE
    Problem: A user connects to a service on a machine, such as an IIS web site or a SQL Server database. The site or the database need to gain access to network resources such as file shares (the most common) or a database on a different server. Permission is denied. This is because the user the service is running under doesn't have network permissions in the first place, or if it does, it doesn't have rights to access the remote resource. I keep running into this problem over and over again and am tired of not having a really solid way of handling it. Here are some workarounds I'm aware of: Run IIS as a custom-created domain user who is granted high permissions If permissions are granted one file share at a time, then every time I want to read from a new share, I would have to ask a network admin to add it for me. Eventually, with many web sites reading from many shares, it is going to get really complicated. If permissions are just opened up wide for the user to access any file shares in our domain, then this seems like an unnecessary security surface area to present. This also applies to all the sites running on IIS, rather than just the selected site or virtual directory that needs the access, a further surface area problem. Still use the IUSR account but give it network permissions and set up the same user name on the remote resource (not a domain user, a local user) This also has its problems. For example, there's a file share I am using that I have full rights to for sharing, but I can't log in to the machine. So I have to find the right admin and ask him to do it for me. Any time something has to change, it's another request to an admin. Allow IIS users to connect as anonymous, but set the account used for anonymous access to a high-privilege one This is even worse than giving the IIS IUSR full privileges, because it means my web site can't use any kind of security in the first place. Connect using Kerberos, then delegate This sounds good in principle but has all sorts of problems. First of all, if you're using virtual web sites where the domain name you connect to the site with is not the base machine name (as we do frequently), then you have to set up a Service Principal Name on the webserver using Microsoft's SetSPN utility. It's complicated and apparently prone to errors. Also, you have to ask your network/domain admin to change security policy for both the web server and the domain account so they are "trusted for delegation." If you don't get everything perfectly right, suddenly your intended Kerberos authentication is NTLM instead, and you can only impersonate rather than delegate, and thus no reaching out over the network as the user. Also, this method can be problematic because sometimes you need the web site or database to have permissions that the connecting user doesn't have. Create a service or COM+ application that fetches the resource for the web site Services and COM+ packages are run with their own set of credentials. Running as a high-privilege user is okay since they can do their own security and deny requests that are not legitimate, putting control in the hands of the application developer instead of the network admin. Problems: I am using a COM+ package that does exactly this on Windows Server 2000 to deliver highly sensitive images to a secured web application. I tried moving the web site to Windows Server 2003 and was suddenly denied permission to instantiate the COM+ object, very likely registry permissions. I trolled around quite a bit and did not solve the problem, partly because I was reluctant to give the IUSR account full registry permissions. That seems like the same bad practice as just running IIS as a high-privilege user. Note: This is actually really simple. In a programming language of your choice, you create a class with a function that returns an instance of the object you want (an ADODB.Connection, for example), and build a dll, which you register as a COM+ object. In your web server-side code, you create an instance of the class and use the function, and since it is running under a different security context, calls to network resources work. Map drive letters to shares This could theoretically work, but in my mind it's not really a good long-term strategy. Even though mappings can be created with specific credentials, and this can be done by others than a network admin, this also is going to mean that there are either way too many shared drives (small granularity) or too much permission is granted to entire file servers (large granularity). Also, I haven't figured out how to map a drive so that the IUSR gets the drives. Mapping a drive is for the current user, I don't know the IUSR account password to log in as it and create the mappings. Move the resources local to the web server/database There are times when I've done this, especially with Access databases. Does the database have to live out on the file share? Sometimes, it was just easiest to move the database to the web server or to the SQL database server (so the linked server to it would work). But I don't think this is a great all-around solution, either. And it won't work when the resource is a service rather than a file. Move the service to the final web server/database I suppose I could run a web server on my SQL Server database, so the web site can connect to it using impersonation and make me happy. But do we really want random extra web servers on our database servers just so this is possible? No. Virtual directories in IIS I know that virtual directories can help make remote resources look as though they are local, and this supports using custom credentials for each virtual directory. I haven't been able to come up with, yet, how this would solve the problem for system calls. Users could reach file shares directly, but this won't help, say, classic ASP code access resources. I could use a URL instead of a file path to read remote data files in a web page, but this isn't going to help me make a connection to an Access database, a SQL server database, or any other resource that uses a connection library rather than being able to just read all the bytes and work with them. I wish there was some kind of "service tunnel" that I could create. Think about how a VPN makes remote resources look like they are local. With a richer aliasing mechanism, perhaps code-based, why couldn't even database connections occur under a defined security context? Why not a special Windows component that lets you specify, per user, what resources are available and what alternate credentials are used for the connection? File shares, databases, web sites, you name it. I guess I'm almost talking about a specialized local proxy server. Anyway, so there's my list. I may update it if I think of more. Does anyone have any ideas for me? My current problem today is, yet again, I need a web site to connect to an Access database on a file share. Here we go again...

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