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• Adopting Technologies for the Sake of Technologies

  - by shiju

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

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• Help me get my 3D camera to look like the ones in RTS

  - by rFactor

  I am a newbie in 3D game development and I am trying to make a real-time strategy game. I am struggling with the camera currently as I am unable to make it look like they do in RTS games. Here is my Camera.cs class using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; namespace BB { public class Camera : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GameComponent { public Matrix view; public Matrix projection; protected Game game; KeyboardState currentKeyboardState; Vector3 cameraPosition = new Vector3(600.0f, 0.0f, 600.0f); Vector3 cameraForward = new Vector3(0, -0.4472136f, -0.8944272f); BoundingFrustum cameraFrustum = new BoundingFrustum(Matrix.Identity); // Light direction Vector3 lightDir = new Vector3(-0.3333333f, 0.6666667f, 0.6666667f); public Camera(Game game) : base(game) { this.game = game; } public override void Initialize() { this.view = Matrix.CreateLookAt(this.cameraPosition, this.cameraPosition + this.cameraForward, Vector3.Up); this.projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(MathHelper.PiOver4, this.game.renderer.aspectRatio, 1, 10000); base.Initialize(); } /* Handles the user input * @ param GameTime gameTime */ private void HandleInput(GameTime gameTime) { float time = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds; currentKeyboardState = Keyboard.GetState(); } void UpdateCamera(GameTime gameTime) { float time = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds; // Check for input to rotate the camera. float pitch = 0.0f; float turn = 0.0f; if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)) pitch += time * 0.001f; if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Down)) pitch -= time * 0.001f; if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)) turn += time * 0.001f; if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Right)) turn -= time * 0.001f; Vector3 cameraRight = Vector3.Cross(Vector3.Up, cameraForward); Vector3 flatFront = Vector3.Cross(cameraRight, Vector3.Up); Matrix pitchMatrix = Matrix.CreateFromAxisAngle(cameraRight, pitch); Matrix turnMatrix = Matrix.CreateFromAxisAngle(Vector3.Up, turn); Vector3 tiltedFront = Vector3.TransformNormal(cameraForward, pitchMatrix * turnMatrix); // Check angle so we cant flip over if (Vector3.Dot(tiltedFront, flatFront) > 0.001f) { cameraForward = Vector3.Normalize(tiltedFront); } // Check for input to move the camera around. if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.W)) cameraPosition += cameraForward * time * 0.4f; if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.S)) cameraPosition -= cameraForward * time * 0.4f; if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.A)) cameraPosition += cameraRight * time * 0.4f; if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.D)) cameraPosition -= cameraRight * time * 0.4f; if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.R)) { cameraPosition = new Vector3(0, 50, 50); cameraForward = new Vector3(0, 0, -1); } cameraForward.Normalize(); // Create the new view matrix view = Matrix.CreateLookAt(cameraPosition, cameraPosition + cameraForward, Vector3.Up); // Set the new frustum value cameraFrustum.Matrix = view * projection; } public override void Update(Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GameTime gameTime) { HandleInput(gameTime); UpdateCamera(gameTime); } } } The problem is that the initial view is looking in a horizontal direction. I would like to have an RTS like top down view (but with a slight pitch). Can you help me out?

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• Abstracting entity caching in XNA

  - by Grofit

  I am in a situation where I am writing a framework in XNA and there will be quite a lot of static (ish) content which wont render that often. Now I am trying to take the same sort of approach I would use when doing non game development, where I don't even think about caching until I have finished my application and realise there is a performance problem and then implement a layer of caching over whatever needs it, but wrap it up so nothing is aware its happening. However in XNA the way we would usually cache would be drawing our objects to a texture and invalidating after a change occurs. So if you assume an interface like so: public interface IGameComponent { void Update(TimeSpan elapsedTime); void Render(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice); } public class ContainerComponent : IGameComponent { public IList<IGameComponent> ChildComponents { get; private set; } // Assume constructor public void Update(TimeSpan elapsedTime) { // Update anything that needs it } public void Render(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { foreach(var component in ChildComponents) { // draw every component } } } Then I was under the assumption that we just draw everything directly to the screen, then when performance becomes an issue we just add a new implementation of the above like so: public class CacheableContainerComponent : IGameComponent { private Texture2D cachedOutput; private bool hasChanged; public IList<IGameComponent> ChildComponents { get; private set; } // Assume constructor public void Update(TimeSpan elapsedTime) { // Update anything that needs it // set hasChanged to true if required } public void Render(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { if(hasChanged) { CacheComponents(graphicsDevice); } // Draw cached output } private void CacheComponents(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { // Clean up existing cache if needed var cachedOutput = new RenderTarget2D(...); graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(renderTarget); foreach(var component in ChildComponents) { // draw every component } graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); } } Now in this example you could inherit, but your Update may become a bit tricky then without changing your base class to alert you if you had changed, but it is up to each scenario to choose if its inheritance/implementation or composition. Also the above implementation will re-cache within the rendering cycle, which may cause performance stutters but its just an example of the scenario... Ignoring those facts as you can see that in this example you could use a cache-able component or a non cache-able one, the rest of the framework needs not know. The problem here is that if lets say this component is drawn mid way through the game rendering, other items will already be within the default drawing buffer, so me doing this would discard them, unless I set it to be persisted, which I hear is a big no no on the Xbox. So is there a way to have my cake and eat it here? One simple solution to this is make an ICacheable interface which exposes a cache method, but then to make any use of this interface you would need the rest of the framework to be cache aware, and check if it can cache, and to then do so. Which then means you are polluting and changing your main implementations to account for and deal with this cache... I am also employing Dependency Injection for alot of high level components so these new cache-able objects would be spat out from that, meaning no where in the actual game would they know they are caching... if that makes sense. Just incase anyone asked how I expected to keep it cache aware when I would need to new up a cachable entity.

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• How would I handle input with a Game Component?

  - by Aufziehvogel

  I am currently having problems from finding my way into the component-oriented XNA design. I read an overview over the general design pattern and googled a lot of XNA examples. However, they seem to be right on the opposite site. In the general design pattern, an object (my current player) is passed to InputComponent::update(Player). This means the class will know what to do and how this will affect the game (e.g. move person vs. scroll text in a menu). Yet, in XNA GameComponent::update(GameTime) is called automatically without a reference to the current player. The only XNA examples I found built some sort of higher-level Keyboard engine into the game component like this: class InputComponent: GameComponent { public void keyReleased(Keys); public void keyPressed(Keys); public bool keyDown(Keys); public void override update(GameTime gameTime) { // compare previous state with current state and // determine if released, pressed, down or nothing } } Some others went a bit further making it possible to use a Service Locator by a design like this: interface IInputComponent { public void downwardsMovement(Keys); public void upwardsMovement(Keys); public bool pausedGame(Keys); // determine which keys pressed and what that means // can be done for different inputs in different implementations public void override update(GameTime); } Yet, then I am wondering if it is possible to design an input class to resolve all possible situations. Like in a menu a mouse click can mean "click that button", but in game play it can mean "shoot that weapon". So if I am using such a modular design with game components for input, how much logic is to be put into the InputComponent / KeyboardComponent / GamepadComponent and where is the rest handled? What I had in mind, when I heard about Game Components and Service Locator in XNA was something like this: use Game Components to run the InputHandler automatically in the loop use Service Locator to be able to switch input at runtime (i.e. let player choose if he wants to use a gamepad or a keyboard; or which shall be player 1 and which player 2). However, now I cannot see how this can be done. First code example does not seem flexible enough, as on a game pad you could require some combination of buttons for something that is possible on keyboard with only one button or with the mouse) The second code example seems really hard to implement, because the InputComponent has to know in which context we are currently. Moreover, you could imagine your application to be multi-layered and let the key-stroke go through all layers to the bottom-layer which requires a different behaviour than the InputComponent would have guessed from the top-layer. The general design pattern with passing the Player to update() does not have a representation in XNA and I also cannot see how and where to decide which class should be passed to update(). At most time of course the player, but sometimes there could be menu items you have to or can click I see that the question in general is already dealt with here, but probably from a more elobate point-of-view. At least, I am not smart enough in game development to understand it. I am searching for a rather code-based example directly for XNA. And the answer there leaves (a noob like) me still alone in how the object that should receive the detected event is chosen. Like if I have a key-up event, should it go to the text box or to the player?

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• Detect multitouch (two fingers touch) on a sprite to apply pinch zoom behaviour

  - by Tahreem

  I am using andengine, want to move, zoom and rotate multiple sprites individually on a scene. I have achieved "move" but for pinch zoom i am unable to get the event to two fingers' touch. Below is the code: public class Main extends SimpleBaseGameActivity { private Camera camera; private BitmapTextureAtlas mBitmapTextureAtlas; private ITextureRegion mFaceTextureRegion; private ITextureRegion mFaceTextureRegion2; Sprite face2; private static final int CAMERA_WIDTH = 800; private static final int CAMERA_HEIGHT = 480; @Override public EngineOptions onCreateEngineOptions() { camera = new Camera(0, 0, CAMERA_WIDTH, CAMERA_HEIGHT); EngineOptions engineOptions = new EngineOptions(true, ScreenOrientation.LANDSCAPE_FIXED, new RatioResolutionPolicy( CAMERA_WIDTH, CAMERA_HEIGHT), camera); return engineOptions; } @Override protected void onCreateResources() { BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory.setAssetBasePath("gfx/"); this.mBitmapTextureAtlas = new BitmapTextureAtlas( this.getTextureManager(), 1024, 1600, TextureOptions.NEAREST); BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory.createTiledFromAsset(this.mBitmapTextureAtlas, // this, "ui_ball_1.png", 0, 0, 1, 1), // this.getVertexBufferObjectManager()); this.mFaceTextureRegion = BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory .createFromAsset(this.mBitmapTextureAtlas, this, "ui_ball_1.png", 0, 0); this.mFaceTextureRegion2 = BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory .createFromAsset(this.mBitmapTextureAtlas, this, "ui_ball_1.png", 0, 0); this.mBitmapTextureAtlas.load(); this.mEngine.getTextureManager().loadTexture(this.mBitmapTextureAtlas); } @Override protected Scene onCreateScene() { this.mEngine.registerUpdateHandler(new FPSLogger()); final Scene scene = new Scene(); scene.setBackground(new Background(0.09804f, 0.6274f, 0.8784f)); final float centerX = (CAMERA_WIDTH - this.mFaceTextureRegion .getWidth()) / 2; final float centerY = (CAMERA_HEIGHT - this.mFaceTextureRegion .getHeight()) / 2; final Sprite face = new Sprite(centerX, centerY, this.mFaceTextureRegion, this.getVertexBufferObjectManager()) { @Override public boolean onAreaTouched(final TouchEvent pSceneTouchEvent, final float pTouchAreaLocalX, final float pTouchAreaLocalY) { this.setPosition(pSceneTouchEvent.getX() - this.getWidth() / 2, pSceneTouchEvent.getY() - this.getHeight() / 2); return true; } }; face.setScale(2); scene.attachChild(face); scene.registerTouchArea(face); face2 = new Sprite(200, 200, this.mFaceTextureRegion2, this.getVertexBufferObjectManager()) { @Override public boolean onAreaTouched(final TouchEvent pSceneTouchEvent, final float pTouchAreaLocalX, final float pTouchAreaLocalY) { switch(pSceneTouchEvent.getAction()){ case TouchEvent.ACTION_DOWN: int count = pSceneTouchEvent.getMotionEvent().getPointerCount() ; for(int i= 0; i <count; i++) { int id = pSceneTouchEvent.getMotionEvent().getPointerId(i); } break; case TouchEvent.ACTION_MOVE: this.setPosition(pSceneTouchEvent.getX() -this.getWidth() / 2, pSceneTouchEvent.getY()-this.getHeight() / 2); break; case TouchEvent.ACTION_UP: break; } return true; } }; face2.setScale(2); scene.attachChild(face2); scene.registerTouchArea(face2); scene.setTouchAreaBindingOnActionDownEnabled(true); return scene; } } This line int count = pSceneTouchEvent.getMotionEvent().getPointerCount() ; should set 2 to the count variable if i touch the sprite with to fingers, then i can apply zooming functionality (setScale method) on the sprite by getting the distance between the coordinates of two fingers. Can anyone help me? why it does not detect two fingers? and without this how can i zoom the sprite on pinch of two fingers? I am very new to game development, any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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• My 2D collision code does not work as expected. How do I fix it?

  - by farmdve

  I have a simple 2D game with a tile-based map. I am new to game development, I followed the LazyFoo tutorials on SDL. The tiles are in a bmp file, but each tile inside it corresponds to an internal number of the type of tile(color, or wall). The game is simple, but the code is a lot so I can only post snippets. // Player moved out of the map if((player.box.x < 0)) player.box.x += GetVelocity(player, 0); if((player.box.y < 0)) player.box.y += GetVelocity(player, 1); if((player.box.x > (LEVEL_WIDTH - DOT_WIDTH))) player.box.x -= GetVelocity(player, 0); if((player.box.y > (LEVEL_HEIGHT - DOT_HEIGHT))) player.box.y -= GetVelocity(player, 1); // Now that we are here, we check for collisions if(touches_wall(player.box)) { if(player.box.x < player.prev_x) { player.box.x += GetVelocity(player, 0); } if(player.box.x > player.prev_x) { player.box.x -= GetVelocity(player, 0); } if(player.box.y < player.prev_y) { player.box.y += GetVelocity(player, 1); } if(player.box.y > player.prev_y) { player.box.y -= GetVelocity(player, 1); } } player.prev_x = player.box.x; player.prev_y = player.box.y; Let me explain, player is a structure with the following contents typedef struct { Rectangle box; //Player position on a map(tile or whatever). int prev_x, prev_y; // Previous positions int key_press[3]; // Stores which key was pressed/released. Limited to three keys. E.g Left,right and perhaps jump if possible in 2D int velX, velY; // Velocity for X and Y coordinate. //Health int health; bool main_character; uint32_t jump_ticks; } Player; And Rectangle is just a typedef of SDL_Rect. GetVelocity is a function that according to the second argument, returns the velocity for the X or Y axis. This code I have basically works, however inside the if(touches_wall(player.box)) if statement, I have 4 more. These 4 if statements are responsible for detecting collision on all 4 sides(up,down,left,right). However, they also act as a block for any other movement. Example: I move down the object and collide with the wall, as I continue to move down and still collide with the wall, I wish to move left or right, which is indeed possible(not to mention in 3D games), but remember the 4 if statements? They are preventing me from moving anywhere. The original code on the LazyFoo Productions website has no problems, but it was written in C++, so I had to rewrite most of it to work, which is probably where the problem comes from. I also use a different method of moving, than the one in the examples. Of course, that was just an example. I wish to be able to move no matter at which wall I collide. Before this bit of code, I had another one that had more logic in there, but it was flawed.

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• Best approach to depth streaming via existing codec

  - by Kevin

  I'm working on a development system (and game) intended for games set mostly in static third-person views. We produce our scenery by CG and photographic techniques. Our background art is rendered off-line by a production-grade renderer. To allow the runtime imagery to properly interact with the background art, I wrote a program to convert from depth output by Mental Ray into a texture, and a pixel shader to draw a quad such that the Z data comes from the texture. This technique is working out very well, but now we've decided that some of the camera angle changes between scenes should be animated. The animation itself is straightforward to produce from our CG models. We intend to encode it to some HD video codec such as H.264. The problem is that in order to maintain our runtime imagery on the screen, the depth buffer will need to be loaded for each video frame. Due to the bandwidth, the video's depth data will need to be compressed efficiently. I've looked into methods for performing temporal compression of depth info and found an interesting research paper here: http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/publications/depth-streaming.pdf The method establishes a mapping between 16-bit depth values and YCbCr values. The mapping is tuned to the properties of existing video codecs in order to maximize precision of the decoded depths after the YCbCr has undergone video compression. It allows an existing, unmodified video codec to be used on the backend. I'm looking at how to pull this off with the least possible work. (This design change was unplanned.) Our game engine itself is native C++, presently for Win32 and DirectX, although we've worked hard to keep platform dependence segregated because we intend other ports. We don't have motion video facilities in the engine yet but will ultimately need that anyway for cinematics. I was planning on using some off-the-shelf motion video solution we can plug into our engine, and haven't chosen one yet. This new added requirement makes selecting one harder since, among other things, we'll now need to bypass colourspace conversion on one of the streams, and also will need to be playing two streams simultaneously in lockstep, on top of in some cases audio on one of them (for the cinematics). I'm also wondering if it's possible (or even useful) to do the conversion from YCbCr to depth in a pixel shader, or if it's better to just do it in CPU and separately load the resulting depth values into a locked tex. The conversion unfortunately does involve branching logic per-pixel. (There are more naive mappings that don't need branching, but they produce inferior results.) It could be reduced to a table lookup but the table would be 32MB. Programming is second-nature to me but I'm not that experienced with pix shaders and have zero knowledge of off-the-shelf video solutions. I'd therefore be interested in advice from others who may have dealt more with depth streaming, pixel shaders, and/or off-the-shelf codecs, regarding how feasible the proposed application is and what off-the-shelf video systems out there would best get along with this usage case.

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• Are you cashing in on the MVP complimentary subscriptions ?

  - by Tarun Arora

  The two most asked questions in the Microsoft technology communities around the Microsoft MVP program are, 1. How do I become a Microsoft MVP? 2. What benefits do I get as an MVP? The answer to the first question has been well answered here. In this blog post, I’ll try and answer the second question.           Please find a comprehensive list of Not for Resale personal subscriptions of various products that Microsoft MVP’s are eligible for Product Description Details JetBrains Resharper, dotTrace, dotCover & WebStorm  https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/buy/mvp.html RedGate Sql server development, database administration, .net development, azure development (merged with Cerebrata), mySQL development, Oracle development http://www.red-gate.com/community/mvp-program Pluralsight Pluralsight on demand training http://blog.pluralsight.com/2011/02/28/pluralsight-for-mvp/ Cerebrata Cloud storage studio and Azure Diagnostic Manager (part of redgate now) https://www.cerebrata.com/Offers/mvp.aspx Telerik Telerik Ultimate collection & Telerik TeamPulse http://blogs.telerik.com/blogs/posts/11-03-01/telerik-gift-for-microsoft-mvps.aspx Developer Express DevEx controls http://www.devexpress.com/Home/Community/mvp.xml InnerWorking 600 hours of .net training catalogue http://www.innerworkings.com/mvp Typemock Typemock Isolator, Typemock Isolator for Sharepoint developers, Typemock Isolator for web developers, TestDriven.NET http://www.typemock.com/mvp SpeakFlow A suite of tools for creating, managing, and delivering non-linear presentations http://www.speakflow.com/ TechSmith Camtasia Studio, SnagIt, screen cast http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html Altova Altova XML spy http://www.altova.com/xml-editor/ Visual SVN VisualSVN Subversion integration plug-in for Visual Studio http://www.visualsvn.com/visualsvn/purchase/mvp/ PreEmptive Solution Professional PreEmptive Analytics, Dotfuscator http://www.preemptive.com/landing/mvp Armadillo Armadillo Adaptive Bug Prevention http://www.armadilloverdrive.com/ IS Decisions NFR license to Userlock, RemoteExec, FileAudit & WinReporter http://www.isdecisions.com/download/mvp-mct-program.htm Idera SQL tools http://www.idera.com/Content/Home.aspx West Wind Help Builder Help builder solution http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2005/Mar/09/Are-you-a-Microsoft-MVP-Get-a-FREE-copy-of-West-Wind-Html-Help-Builder Bamboo Sharepoint tools http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/partner-advantage-program/archive/2008/08/01/partner-advantage-program-mvp.aspx Nitriq Nitriq code analysis http://blog.nitriq.com/FreeLicensesForMicrosoftMVPs.aspx ByteScout Components, Libraries and Developer Tools http://bytescout.com/buy/purchase_nfr_for_mvp.html YourKit Java and .net Profiler http://yourkit.com/.net/profiler/index.jsp Aspose .NET components http://www.aspose.com/corporate/community/2012_05_08_nfr-licenses-for-community-leaders.aspx Apart from google bing fu; stackoverflow and breathtech were a great help in compiling the above list. If you know of any other benefits, offers or complimentary subscriptions on offer for MVPs not cover in the list above, please add to the comment thread and I’ll have it updated in the list. Enjoy

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• Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session. Credit: I want to give special thanks to Aaron Bjork from Microsoft who provided me with most of my material He is a Scrum and Power Point genius. Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010 Synopsis Visual Studio ALM (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a team to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process. For TFS 2010 Microsoft is heavily investing in Scrum and has already started moving some teams across to using it. Martin will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even asses your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. Come and see Martin Hinshelwood, Visual Studio ALM MVP and Solution Architect from SSW show you: How to successfully gather requirements with User stories How to plan a project using TFS 2010 and Scrum How to work with a product backlog in TFS 2010 The right way to plan a sprint with TFS 2010 Tracking your progress The right way to use work items What you can use from the built in reporting as well as the Project portals available on from the SharePoint dashboard The important reports to give your Product Owner / Project Manager Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by teams. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help managers better support the software development processes. During this session we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and how this fits into Scrum using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server. If you want to know more about how to do Scrum with TFS then there is a new course that has been created in collaboration with Microsoft and Scrum.org that is going to be the official course for working with TFS 2010. SSW has Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools. Ken Schwaber and and Sam Guckenheimer: Professional Scrum Development Technorati Tags: Scrum,VS ALM,VS 2010,TFS 2010

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• Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session. Credit: I want to give special thanks to Aaron Bjork from Microsoft who provided me with most of my material He is a Scrum and Power Point genius. Updated 9th May 2010 – I have now presented at both of these sessions  and posted about it. Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010 Synopsis Visual Studio ALM (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a team to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process. For TFS 2010 Microsoft is heavily investing in Scrum and has already started moving some teams across to using it. Martin will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even asses your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Come and see Martin Hinshelwood, Visual Studio ALM MVP and Solution Architect from SSW show you: How to successfully gather requirements with User stories How to plan a project using TFS 2010 and Scrum How to work with a product backlog in TFS 2010 The right way to plan a sprint with TFS 2010 Tracking your progress The right way to use work items What you can use from the built in reporting as well as the Project portals available on from the SharePoint dashboard The important reports to give your Product Owner / Project Manager Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by teams. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help managers better support the software development processes. During this session we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and how this fits into Scrum using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server. If you want to know more about how to do Scrum with TFS then there is a new course that has been created in collaboration with Microsoft and Scrum.org that is going to be the official course for working with TFS 2010. SSW has Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools. Ken Schwaber and and Sam Guckenheimer: Professional Scrum Development Technorati Tags: Scrum,VS ALM,VS 2010,TFS 2010

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin &ndash; #3 &ndash; Make Evolvability inevitable

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/04/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin-ndash-3-ndash-make-evolvability-inevitable.aspxThe easier something to measure the more likely it will be produced. Deviations between what is and what should be can be readily detected. That´s what automated acceptance tests are for. That´s what sprint reviews in Scrum are for. It´s no small wonder our software looks like it looks. It has all the traits whose conformance with requirements can easily be measured. And it´s lacking traits which cannot easily be measured. Evolvability (or Changeability) is such a trait. If an operation is correct, if an operation if fast enough, that can be checked very easily. But whether Evolvability is high or low, that cannot be checked by taking a measure or two. Evolvability might correlate with certain traits, e.g. number of lines of code (LOC) per function or Cyclomatic Complexity or test coverage. But there is no threshold value signalling “evolvability too low”; also Evolvability is hardly tangible for the customer. Nevertheless Evolvability is of great importance - at least in the long run. You can get away without much of it for a short time. Eventually, though, it´s needed like any other requirement. Or even more. Because without Evolvability no other requirement can be implemented. Evolvability is the foundation on which all else is build. Such fundamental importance is in stark contrast with its immeasurability. To compensate this, Evolvability must be put at the very center of software development. It must become the hub around everything else revolves. Since we cannot measure Evolvability, though, we cannot start watching it more. Instead we need to establish practices to keep it high (enough) at all times. Chefs have known that for long. That´s why everybody in a restaurant kitchen is constantly seeing after cleanliness. Hygiene is important as is to have clean tools at standardized locations. Only then the health of the patrons can be guaranteed and production efficiency is constantly high. Still a kitchen´s level of cleanliness is easier to measure than software Evolvability. That´s why important practices like reviews, pair programming, or TDD are not enough, I guess. What we need to keep Evolvability in focus and high is… to continually evolve. Change must not be something to avoid but too embrace. To me that means the whole change cycle from requirement analysis to delivery needs to be gone through more often. Scrum´s sprints of 4, 2 even 1 week are too long. Kanban´s flow of user stories across is too unreliable; it takes as long as it takes. Instead we should fix the cycle time at 2 days max. I call that Spinning. No increment must take longer than from this morning until tomorrow evening to finish. Then it should be acceptance checked by the customer (or his/her representative, e.g. a Product Owner). For me there are several resasons for such a fixed and short cycle time for each increment: Clear expectations Absolute estimates (“This will take X days to complete.”) are near impossible in software development as explained previously. Too much unplanned research and engineering work lurk in every feature. And then pervasive interruptions of work by peers and management. However, the smaller the scope the better our absolute estimates become. That´s because we understand better what really are the requirements and what the solution should look like. But maybe more importantly the shorter the timespan the more we can control how we use our time. So much can happen over the course of a week and longer timespans. But if push comes to shove I can block out all distractions and interruptions for a day or possibly two. That´s why I believe we can give rough absolute estimates on 3 levels: Noon Tonight Tomorrow Think of a meeting with a Product Owner at 8:30 in the morning. If she asks you, how long it will take you to implement a user story or bug fix, you can say, “It´ll be fixed by noon.”, or you can say, “I can manage to implement it until tonight before I leave.”, or you can say, “You´ll get it by tomorrow night at latest.” Yes, I believe all else would be naive. If you´re not confident to get something done by tomorrow night (some 34h from now) you just cannot reliably commit to any timeframe. That means you should not promise anything, you should not even start working on the issue. So when estimating use these four categories: Noon, Tonight, Tomorrow, NoClue - with NoClue meaning the requirement needs to be broken down further so each aspect can be assigned to one of the first three categories. If you like absolute estimates, here you go. But don´t do deep estimates. Don´t estimate dozens of issues; don´t think ahead (“Issue A is a Tonight, then B will be a Tomorrow, after that it´s C as a Noon, finally D is a Tonight - that´s what I´ll do this week.”). Just estimate so Work-in-Progress (WIP) is 1 for everybody - plus a small number of buffer issues. To be blunt: Yes, this makes promises impossible as to what a team will deliver in terms of scope at a certain date in the future. But it will give a Product Owner a clear picture of what to pull for acceptance feedback tonight and tomorrow. Trust through reliability Our trade is lacking trust. Customers don´t trust software companies/departments much. Managers don´t trust developers much. I find that perfectly understandable in the light of what we´re trying to accomplish: delivering software in the face of uncertainty by means of material good production. Customers as well as managers still expect software development to be close to production of houses or cars. But that´s a fundamental misunderstanding. Software development ist development. It´s basically research. As software developers we´re constantly executing experiments to find out what really provides value to users. We don´t know what they need, we just have mediated hypothesises. That´s why we cannot reliably deliver on preposterous demands. So trust is out of the window in no time. If we switch to delivering in short cycles, though, we can regain trust. Because estimates - explicit or implicit - up to 32 hours at most can be satisfied. I´d say: reliability over scope. It´s more important to reliably deliver what was promised then to cover a lot of requirement area. So when in doubt promise less - but deliver without delay. Deliver on scope (Functionality and Quality); but also deliver on Evolvability, i.e. on inner quality according to accepted principles. Always. Trust will be the reward. Less complexity of communication will follow. More goodwill buffer will follow. So don´t wait for some Kanban board to show you, that flow can be improved by scheduling smaller stories. You don´t need to learn that the hard way. Just start with small batch sizes of three different sizes. Fast feedback What has been finished can be checked for acceptance. Why wait for a sprint of several weeks to end? Why let the mental model of the issue and its solution dissipate? If you get final feedback after one or two weeks, you hardly remember what you did and why you did it. Resoning becomes hard. But more importantly youo probably are not in the mood anymore to go back to something you deemed done a long time ago. It´s boring, it´s frustrating to open up that mental box again. Learning is harder the longer it takes from event to feedback. Effort can be wasted between event (finishing an issue) and feedback, because other work might go in the wrong direction based on false premises. Checking finished issues for acceptance is the most important task of a Product Owner. It´s even more important than planning new issues. Because as long as work started is not released (accepted) it´s potential waste. So before starting new work better make sure work already done has value. By putting the emphasis on acceptance rather than planning true pull is established. As long as planning and starting work is more important, it´s a push process. Accept a Noon issue on the same day before leaving. Accept a Tonight issue before leaving today or first thing tomorrow morning. Accept a Tomorrow issue tomorrow night before leaving or early the day after tomorrow. After acceptance the developer(s) can start working on the next issue. Flexibility As if reliability/trust and fast feedback for less waste weren´t enough economic incentive, there is flexibility. After each issue the Product Owner can change course. If on Monday morning feature slices A, B, C, D, E were important and A, B, C were scheduled for acceptance by Monday evening and Tuesday evening, the Product Owner can change her mind at any time. Maybe after A got accepted she asks for continuation with D. But maybe, just maybe, she has gotten a completely different idea by then. Maybe she wants work to continue on F. And after B it´s neither D nor E, but G. And after G it´s D. With Spinning every 32 hours at latest priorities can be changed. And nothing is lost. Because what got accepted is of value. It provides an incremental value to the customer/user. Or it provides internal value to the Product Owner as increased knowledge/decreased uncertainty. I find such reactivity over commitment economically very benefical. Why commit a team to some workload for several weeks? It´s unnecessary at beast, and inflexible and wasteful at worst. If we cannot promise delivery of a certain scope on a certain date - which is what customers/management usually want -, we can at least provide them with unpredecented flexibility in the face of high uncertainty. Where the path is not clear, cannot be clear, make small steps so you´re able to change your course at any time. Premature completion Customers/management are used to premeditating budgets. They want to know exactly how much to pay for a certain amount of requirements. That´s understandable. But it does not match with the nature of software development. We should know that by now. Maybe there´s somewhere in the world some team who can consistently deliver on scope, quality, and time, and budget. Great! Congratulations! I, however, haven´t seen such a team yet. Which does not mean it´s impossible, but I think it´s nothing I can recommend to strive for. Rather I´d say: Don´t try this at home. It might hurt you one way or the other. However, what we can do, is allow customers/management stop work on features at any moment. With spinning every 32 hours a feature can be declared as finished - even though it might not be completed according to initial definition. I think, progress over completion is an important offer software development can make. Why think in terms of completion beyond a promise for the next 32 hours? Isn´t it more important to constantly move forward? Step by step. We´re not running sprints, we´re not running marathons, not even ultra-marathons. We´re in the sport of running forever. That makes it futile to stare at the finishing line. The very concept of a burn-down chart is misleading (in most cases). Whoever can only think in terms of completed requirements shuts out the chance for saving money. The requirements for a features mostly are uncertain. So how does a Product Owner know in the first place, how much is needed. Maybe more than specified is needed - which gets uncovered step by step with each finished increment. Maybe less than specified is needed. After each 4–32 hour increment the Product Owner can do an experient (or invite users to an experiment) if a particular trait of the software system is already good enough. And if so, she can switch the attention to a different aspect. In the end, requirements A, B, C then could be finished just 70%, 80%, and 50%. What the heck? It´s good enough - for now. 33% money saved. Wouldn´t that be splendid? Isn´t that a stunning argument for any budget-sensitive customer? You can save money and still get what you need? Pull on practices So far, in addition to more trust, more flexibility, less money spent, Spinning led to “doing less” which also means less code which of course means higher Evolvability per se. Last but not least, though, I think Spinning´s short acceptance cycles have one more effect. They excert pull-power on all sorts of practices known for increasing Evolvability. If, for example, you believe high automated test coverage helps Evolvability by lowering the fear of inadverted damage to a code base, why isn´t 90% of the developer community practicing automated tests consistently? I think, the answer is simple: Because they can do without. Somehow they manage to do enough manual checks before their rare releases/acceptance checks to ensure good enough correctness - at least in the short term. The same goes for other practices like component orientation, continuous build/integration, code reviews etc. None of that is compelling, urgent, imperative. Something else always seems more important. So Evolvability principles and practices fall through the cracks most of the time - until a project hits a wall. Then everybody becomes desperate; but by then (re)gaining Evolvability has become as very, very difficult and tedious undertaking. Sometimes up to the point where the existence of a project/company is in danger. With Spinning that´s different. If you´re practicing Spinning you cannot avoid all those practices. With Spinning you very quickly realize you cannot deliver reliably even on your 32 hour promises. Spinning thus is pulling on developers to adopt principles and practices for Evolvability. They will start actively looking for ways to keep their delivery rate high. And if not, management will soon tell them to do that. Because first the Product Owner then management will notice an increasing difficulty to deliver value within 32 hours. There, finally there emerges a way to measure Evolvability: The more frequent developers tell the Product Owner there is no way to deliver anything worth of feedback until tomorrow night, the poorer Evolvability is. Don´t count the “WTF!”, count the “No way!” utterances. In closing For sustainable software development we need to put Evolvability first. Functionality and Quality must not rule software development but be implemented within a framework ensuring (enough) Evolvability. Since Evolvability cannot be measured easily, I think we need to put software development “under pressure”. Software needs to be changed more often, in smaller increments. Each increment being relevant to the customer/user in some way. That does not mean each increment is worthy of shipment. It´s sufficient to gain further insight from it. Increments primarily serve the reduction of uncertainty, not sales. Sales even needs to be decoupled from this incremental progress. No more promises to sales. No more delivery au point. Rather sales should look at a stream of accepted increments (or incremental releases) and scoup from that whatever they find valuable. Sales and marketing need to realize they should work on what´s there, not what might be possible in the future. But I digress… In my view a Spinning cycle - which is not easy to reach, which requires practice - is the core practice to compensate the immeasurability of Evolvability. From start to finish of each issue in 32 hours max - that´s the challenge we need to accept if we´re serious increasing Evolvability. Fortunately higher Evolvability is not the only outcome of Spinning. Customer/management will like the increased flexibility and “getting more bang for the buck”.

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• Inside Red Gate - Divisions

  - by Simon Cooper

  When I joined Red Gate back in 2007, there were around 80 people in the company. Now, around 3 years later, it's grown to more than 200. It's a constant battle against Dunbar's number; the maximum number of people you can keep track of in a social group, to try and maintain that 'small company' feel that attracted myself and so many others to apply in the first place. There are several strategies the company's developed over the years to try and mitigate the effects of Dunbar's number. One of the main ones has been divisionalisation. Divisions The first division, .NET, appeared around the same time that I started in 2007. This combined the development, sales, marketing and management of the .NET tools (then, ANTS Profiler v3) into a separate section of the office. The idea was to increase the cohesion and communication between the different people involved in the entire lifecycle of the tools; from initial product development, through to marketing, then to customer support, who would feed back to the development team. This was such a success that the other development teams were re-worked around this model in 2009. Nowadays there are 4 divisions - SQL Tools, DBA, .NET, and New Business. Along the way there have been various tweaks to the details - the sales teams have been merged into the divisions, marketing and product support have been (mostly) centralised - but the same basic model remains. So, how has this helped? As Red Gate has continued to grow over the years, divisionalisation has turned Red Gate from a monolithic software company into what one person described as a 'federation of small businesses'. Each division is free to structure itself as it sees fit, it's free to decide what to concentrate development work on, organise its own newsletters and webinars, decide its own release schedule. Each division is its own small business. In terms of numbers, the size of each division varies from 20 people (.NET) to 52 (SQL Tools); well below Dunbar's number. From a developer's perspective, this means organisational structure is very flat & wide - there's only 2 layers between myself and the CEOs (not that it matters much; everyone can go and have a chat to Neil or Simon, or anyone else inbetween, whenever they want. Provided you can catch them at their desk!). As Red Gate grows, and expands into new areas, new divisions will be created as needed, old ones merged or disbanded, but the division structure will help to maintain that small-company feel that keeps Red Gate working as it does.

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• JavaFX 2.0 at Devoxx 2011

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  JavaFX Sessions Abound JavaFX had a big presence at Devoxx 2011 as witnessed by the number of sessions this year given by leading JavaFX movers and shakers.     “JavaFX 2.0 -- A Java Developer's Guide” by Java Champions Stephen Chin and Peter Pilgrim     “JavaFX 2.0 Hands On” by Jasper Potts and Richard Bair     “Animation Bringing your User Interfaces to Life” by Michael Heinrichs and John Yoong (JavaFX development team)     “Complete Guide to Writing Custom Bindings in JavaFX 2.0” by Michael Heinrichs (JavaFX development team)     “Java Rich Clients with JavaFX 2.0” by Jasper Potts and Richard Bair     “JavaFX Properties & Bindings for Experts” (and those who want to become experts) by Michael Heinrichs (JavaFX development team)     “JavaFX Under the Hood” by Richard Bair     “JavaFX Open Mic” with Jasper Potts and Richard Bair With the release of JavaFX 2.0 and Oracle’s move towards an open development model with an open bug database already created, it’s a great time for developers to take the JavaFX plunge. One Devoxx attendee, Mark Stephens, a developer at IDRsolutions blogged about a problem he was having setting up JavaFX on NetBeans to work on his Mac. He wrote: “I’ve tried desperate measures (I even read and reread the instructions) but it did not help. Luckily, I am at Devoxx at the moment and there seem to be a lot of JavaFX gurus here (and it is running on all their Macs). So I asked them… It turns out that sometimes the software does not automatically pickup the settings like it should do if you give it the JavaFX SDK path. The solution is actually really simple (isn’t it always once you know). Enter these values manually and it will work.” He simply entered certain values and his problem was solved. He thanked Java Champion Stephen Chin, “for a great talk at Devoxx and putting me out of my misery.” JavaFX in Java Magazine Over in the November/December 2011 issue of Java Magazine, Oracle’s Simon Ritter, well known for his creative Java inventions at JavaOne, has an article up titled “JavaFX and Swing Integration” in which he shows developers how to use the power of JavaFX to migrate Swing interfaces to JavaFX. The consensus among JavaFX experts is that JavaFX is the next step in the evolution of Java as a rich client platform. In the same issue Java Champion and JavaFX maven James Weaver has an article, “Using Transitions for Animation in JavaFX 2.0”. In addition, Oracle’s Vice President of Java Client Development, Nandini Ramani, provides the keys to unlock the mysteries of JavaFX 2.0 in her Java Magazine interview. Look for the JavaFX community to grow and flourish in coming years.

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• Build Mobile App for E-Business Suite Using SOA Suite and ADF Mobile

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  With the upcoming release of Oracle ADF Mobile, I caught up with Srikant Subramaniam, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Fusion Middleware post OpenWorld to learn about the cool hands-on lab at OpenWorld.  For those of you who missed it, you will want to keep reading... Author: Srikant Subramaniam, Senior Principal Product Manager,Oracle Fusion Middleware Oracle ADF Mobile enables rapid and declarative development of native on-device mobile applications. These native applications provide a richer experience for smart devices users running Apple iOS or other mobile platforms. Oracle ADF Mobile protects Oracle customers from technology shifts by adopting a metadata-based development framework that enables developer to develop one app (using Oracle JDeveloper), and deploy to multiple device platforms (starting with iOS and Android).  Oracle ADF Mobile also enables IT organizations to leverage existing expertise in web-based and Java development by adopting a hybrid application architecture that brings together HTML5, Java, and device native container: HTML5 allows developer to deliver device-native user experiences while maintaining portability across different platforms Java allows developers to create modules to support business logic and data services Native container provides integration into device services such as camera, contacts, etc All these technologies are packaged into a development framework that supports declarative application development through Oracle JDeveloper. ADF Mobile also provides out of box integratoin with key Fusion Middleware components, such as SOA Suite and Business Process Management (BPM). Oracle Fusion Middleware provides the necessary infrastructure to extend business processes and services to the mobile device -- enabling the mobile user to participate in human tasks – without the additional “mobile middleware” layer. When coupled with Oracle SOA Suite, this combination can execute business transactions on Oracle E-Business Suite (or any Oracle Application). Demo Use Case: Mobile E-Business Suite (iExpense) Approvals Using an employee expense approval scenario, we illustrate how to use Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle ADF Mobile to build application extensions that integrate intelligently with Oracle Applications (For example, E-Business Suite). Building these extensions using Oracle Fusion middleware and ADF makes modifications simple, quick to implement, and easy to maintain/upgrade. As described earlier, this approach also extends Fusion Middleware to mobile users without the additional "Mobile Middleware" layer. The approver is presented with a list of expense reports that have been submitted for approval. These expense reports are retrieved from the backend E-Business Suite and displayed on the mobile device. Approval (or rejection) of the expense report kicks off the workflow in E-Business Suite and takes it to completion. The demo also shows how to integrate with native device services such as email, contacts, BI dashboards as well as a prebuilt PDF viewer (this is especially useful in the expense approval scenario, as there is often a need for the approver to access the submitted receipts). Summary Oracle recommends Fusion Middleware as the application integration platform to deliver critical enterprise data and processes to mobile applications.  Pre-built connectors between Fusion Middleware and Applications greatly accelerates the integration process.  Instead of building individual integration points between mobile applications and individual enterprise applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware enables IT organizations to leverage a common platform to support both desktop and mobile application.  Additional Information Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• Code Structure / Level Design: Plants vs Zombies game level dissection

  - by lalan

  Hi Friends, I am interested in learning the class structure of Plants vs Zombies, particularly level design; for those who haven't played it - this video contains nice play-through: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89DfdOIJ4xw. How would I go ahead and design the code, mostly structure & classes, which allows for maximum flexibility & clean development? I am familiar with data driven design concepts, and would use events to handle most of dynamic behavior. Dissection at macro level: (Once every Level) Load tilemap, props, etc -- basically build the map (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) Show Enemies you'll face during present level (Once every Level) Unit Selection Window/Panel - selection of defensive plants (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) HUD Creation - based on unit selection (Level Loop) Enemy creation - based on types of zombies allowed (Level Loop) Sun/Resource generation (Level Loop) Show messages like 'huge wave of zombies coming', 'final wave' (Level Loop) Other unique events - Spawn gifts, money, tombstones, etc (Once every Level) Unlock new plant Potential game scripts: a) Level definitions: Level_1_1.xml, Level_1_2.xml, etc. Level_1_1.xml :: Sample script <map> <tilemap>tilemapFrontLawn</tilemap> <SpawnPoints> tiles where particular type of zombies (land vs water) may spawn</spawnPoints> <props> position, entity array -- lawnmower, </props> </map> <zombies> <... list of zombies who gonna attack by ids...> </zombies> <plants> <... list by plants which are available for defense by ids...> </plants> <progression> <ZombieWave name='first wave' spawnScript='zombieLightWave.lua' unlock='null'> <startMessages time=1.5>Ready</startMessages> <endMessages time=1.5>Huge wave of zombies incoming</endMessages> </ZombieWave> </progression> b) Entities definitions: .xmls containing zombies, plants, sun, lawnmower, coins, etc description. Potential classes: //LevelManager - Based on the level under play, it will load level script. Few of the // functions it may have: class LevelManager { public: bool load(string levelFileName); bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); private: LevelData* mLevelData; } // LevelData - Contains the details of level loaded by LevelManager. class LevelData { private: string file; // array of camera,dialog,attackwaves, etc in active level LevelCutSceneCamera** mArrayCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog** mArrayCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave** mArrayAttackWave; .... // which camera,dialog,attackwave is active in level uint mCursorCutSceneCamera; uint mCursorCutSceneDialog; uint mCursorAttackWave; public: // based on cursor, get the next camera,dialog,attackwave,etc in active level // return false/true based on failure/success bool nextCutSceneCamera(LevelCutSceneCamera**); bool nextCutSceneDialog(LevelCutSceneDialog**); } // LevelUnderPlay- LevelManager class LevelUnderPlay { private: LevelCutSceneCamera* mCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog* mCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave* mAttackWave; Entities** mSelectedPlants; Entities** mAllowedZombies; bool isCutSceneCameraActive; public: bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); } I am totally confused.. :( Does it make sense of using class composition (have flat class hierarchy) for managing levels. Is it a good idea to just add/remove/update sprites (or any drawable stuff) to current scene from LevelManager or LevelUnderPlay? If I want to make non-linear level design, how should I go ahead? Perhaps I would need a LevelProgression class, which would decide what to do based on decision tree. Any suggestions would be appreciated very much. Thank for your time, lalan

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• Basic shadow mapping fails on NVIDIA card?

  - by James

  Recently I switched from an AMD Radeon HD 6870 card to an (MSI) NVIDIA GTX 670 for performance reasons. I found however that my implementation of shadow mapping in all my applications failed. In a very simple shadow POC project the problem appears to be that the scene being drawn never results in a draw to the depth map and as a result the entire depth map is just infinity, 1.0 (Reading directly from the depth component after draw (glReadPixels) shows every pixel is infinity (1.0), replacing the depth comparison in the shader with a comparison of the depth from the shadow map with 1.0 shadows the entire scene, and writing random values to the depth map and then not calling glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT) results in a random noisy pattern on the scene elements - from which we can infer that the uploading of the depth texture and comparison within the shader are functioning perfectly.) Since the problem appears almost certainly to be in the depth render, this is the code for that: const int s_res = 1024; GLuint shadowMap_tex; GLuint shadowMap_prog; GLint sm_attr_coord3d; GLint sm_uniform_mvp; GLuint fbo_handle; GLuint renderBuffer; bool isMappingShad = false; //The scene consists of a plane with box above it GLfloat scene[] = { -10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 0.5, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 1.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 1.0, 0.5, -10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 0.5, 0.0, -10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.5, 0.5, 10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 1.0, 0.5, ... }; //Initialize the stuff used by the shadow map generator int initShadowMap() { //Initialize the shadowMap shader program if (create_program("shadow.v.glsl", "shadow.f.glsl", shadowMap_prog) != 1) return -1; const char* attribute_name = "coord3d"; sm_attr_coord3d = glGetAttribLocation(shadowMap_prog, attribute_name); if (sm_attr_coord3d == -1) { fprintf(stderr, "Could not bind attribute %s\n", attribute_name); return 0; } const char* uniform_name = "mvp"; sm_uniform_mvp = glGetUniformLocation(shadowMap_prog, uniform_name); if (sm_uniform_mvp == -1) { fprintf(stderr, "Could not bind uniform %s\n", uniform_name); return 0; } //Create a framebuffer glGenFramebuffers(1, &fbo_handle); glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo_handle); //Create render buffer glGenRenderbuffers(1, &renderBuffer); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, renderBuffer); //Setup the shadow texture glGenTextures(1, &shadowMap_tex); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, s_res, s_res, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, NULL); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); return 0; } //Delete stuff void dnitShadowMap() { //Delete everything glDeleteFramebuffers(1, &fbo_handle); glDeleteRenderbuffers(1, &renderBuffer); glDeleteTextures(1, &shadowMap_tex); glDeleteProgram(shadowMap_prog); } int loadSMap() { //Bind MVP stuff glm::mat4 view = glm::lookAt(glm::vec3(10.0, 10.0, 5.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 1.0, 0.0)); glm::mat4 projection = glm::ortho<float>(-10,10,-8,8,-10,40); glm::mat4 mvp = projection * view; glm::mat4 biasMatrix( 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0 ); glm::mat4 lsMVP = biasMatrix * mvp; //Upload light source matrix to the main shader programs glUniformMatrix4fv(uniform_ls_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(lsMVP)); glUseProgram(shadowMap_prog); glUniformMatrix4fv(sm_uniform_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(mvp)); //Draw to the framebuffer (with depth buffer only draw) glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo_handle); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, renderBuffer); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex, 0); glDrawBuffer(GL_NONE); glReadBuffer(GL_NONE); GLenum result = glCheckFramebufferStatus(GL_FRAMEBUFFER); if (GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE != result) { printf("ERROR: Framebuffer is not complete.\n"); return -1; } //Draw shadow scene printf("Creating shadow buffers..\n"); int ticks = SDL_GetTicks(); glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); //Wipe the depth buffer glViewport(0, 0, s_res, s_res); isMappingShad = true; //DRAW glEnableVertexAttribArray(sm_attr_coord3d); glVertexAttribPointer(sm_attr_coord3d, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 5*4, scene); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 14*3); glDisableVertexAttribArray(sm_attr_coord3d); isMappingShad = false; glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0); printf("Render Sbuf in %dms (GLerr: %d)\n", SDL_GetTicks() - ticks, glGetError()); return 0; } This is the full code for the POC shadow mapping project (C++) (Requires SDL 1.2, SDL-image 1.2, GLEW (1.5) and GLM development headers.) initShadowMap is called, followed by loadSMap, the scene is drawn from the camera POV and then dnitShadowMap is called. I followed this tutorial originally (Along with another more comprehensive tutorial which has disappeared as this guy re-configured his site but used to be here (404).) I've ensured that the scene is visible (as can be seen within the full project) to the light source (which uses an orthogonal projection matrix.) Shader utilities function fine in non-shadow-mapped projects. I should also note that at no point is the GL error state set. What am I doing wrong here and why did this not cause problems on my AMD card? (System: Ubuntu 12.04, Linux 3.2.0-49-generic, 64 bit, with the nvidia-experimental-310 driver package. All other games are functioning fine so it's most likely not a card/driver issue.)

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• What is Database Continuous Integration?

  - by SQLDev

  Although not everyone is practicing continuous integration, many have at least heard of the concept. A recent poll on www.simple-talk.com indicates that 40% of respondents are employing the technique. It is widely accepted that the earlier issues are identified in the development process, the lower the cost to the development process. The worst case scenario, of course, is for the bug to be found by the customer following the product release. A number of Agile development best practices have evolved to combat this problem early in the development process, including pair programming, code inspections and unit testing. Continuous integration is one such Agile concept that tackles the problem at the point of committing a change to source control. This can alternatively be run on a regular schedule. This triggers a sequence of events that compiles the code and performs a variety of tests. Often the continuous integration process is regarded as a build validation test, and if issues were to be identified at this stage, the testers would simply not 'waste their time ' and touch the build at all. Such a ‘broken build’ will trigger an alert and the development team’s number one priority should be to resolve the issue. How application code is compiled and tested as part of continuous integration is well understood. However, this isn’t so clear for databases. Indeed, before I cover the mechanics of implementation, we need to decide what we mean by database continuous integration. For me, database continuous integration can be implemented as one or more of the following: 1)      Your application code is being compiled and tested. You therefore need a database to be maintained at the corresponding version. 2)      Just as a valid application should compile, so should the database. It should therefore be possible to build a new database from scratch. 3)     Likewise, it should be possible to generate an upgrade script to take your already deployed databases to the latest version. I will be covering these in further detail in future blogs. In the meantime, more information can be found in the whitepaper linked off www.red-gate.com/ci If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly or post a comment to this blog post.

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• What is Database Continuous Integration?

  - by David Atkinson

  Although not everyone is practicing continuous integration, many have at least heard of the concept. A recent poll on www.simple-talk.com indicates that 40% of respondents are employing the technique. It is widely accepted that the earlier issues are identified in the development process, the lower the cost to the development process. The worst case scenario, of course, is for the bug to be found by the customer following the product release. A number of Agile development best practices have evolved to combat this problem early in the development process, including pair programming, code inspections and unit testing. Continuous integration is one such Agile concept that tackles the problem at the point of committing a change to source control. This can alternatively be run on a regular schedule. This triggers a sequence of events that compiles the code and performs a variety of tests. Often the continuous integration process is regarded as a build validation test, and if issues were to be identified at this stage, the testers would simply not 'waste their time ' and touch the build at all. Such a ‘broken build’ will trigger an alert and the development team’s number one priority should be to resolve the issue. How application code is compiled and tested as part of continuous integration is well understood. However, this isn’t so clear for databases. Indeed, before I cover the mechanics of implementation, we need to decide what we mean by database continuous integration. For me, database continuous integration can be implemented as one or more of the following: 1)      Your application code is being compiled and tested. You therefore need a database to be maintained at the corresponding version. 2)      Just as a valid application should compile, so should the database. It should therefore be possible to build a new database from scratch. 3)     Likewise, it should be possible to generate an upgrade script to take your already deployed databases to the latest version. I will be covering these in further detail in future blogs. In the meantime, more information can be found in the whitepaper linked off www.red-gate.com/ci If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly or post a comment to this blog post.

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• Kauffman Foundation Selects Stackify to Present at Startup@Kauffman Demo Day

  - by Matt Watson

  Stackify will join fellow Kansas City startups to kick off Global Entrepreneurship WeekOn Monday, November 12, Stackify, a provider of tools that improve developers’ ability to support, manage and monitor their enterprise applications, will pitch its technology at the Startup@Kauffman Demo Day in Kansas City, Mo. Hosted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the event will mark the start of Global Entrepreneurship Week, the world’s largest celebration of innovators and job creators who launch startups.Stackify was selected through a competitive process for a six-minute opportunity to pitch its new technology to investors at Demo Day. In his pitch, Stackify’s founder, Matt Watson, will discuss the current challenges DevOps teams face and reveal how Stackify is reinventing the way software developers provide application support.In October, Stackify had successful appearances at two similar startup events. At Tech Cocktail’s Kansas City Mixer, the company was named “Hottest Kansas City Startup,” and it won free hosting service after pitching its solution at St. Louis, Mo.’s Startup Connection.“With less than a month until our public launch, events like Demo Day are giving Stackify the support and positioning we need to change the development community,” said Watson. “As a serial technology entrepreneur, I appreciate the Kauffman Foundation’s support of startup companies like Stackify. We’re thrilled to participate in Demo Day and Global Entrepreneurship Week activities.”Scheduled to publicly launch in early December 2012, Stackify’s platform gives developers insights into their production applications, servers and databases. Stackify finally provides agile developers safe and secure remote access to look at log files, config files, server health and databases. This solution removes the bottleneck from managers and system administrators who, until now, are the only team members with access. Essentially, Stackify enables development teams to spend less time fixing bugs and more time creating products.Currently in beta, Stackify has already been named a “Company to Watch” by Software Development Times, which called the startup “the next big thing.” Developers can register for a free Stackify account on Stackify.com.###Stackify Founded in 2012, Stackify is a Kansas City-based software service provider that helps development teams troubleshoot application problems. Currently in beta, Stackify will be publicly available in December 2012, when agile developers will finally be able to provide agile support. The startup has already been recognized by Tech Cocktail as “Hottest Kansas City Startup” and was named a “Company to Watch” by Software Development Times. To learn more, visit http://www.stackify.com and follow @stackify on Twitter.

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: spectrumK Holding GmbH

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist Oracle WebCenter Solution Summary spectrumK Holding GmbH was founded in 2007 by various German health insurance funds and national insurance associations and is a service provider for the healthcare market, covering patient care management, financial management, and information management, as well as payment services and legal counseling. spectrumK Holding GmbH business objectives was to implement innovative new Web-based services and solution systems for health insurance funds by integrating a multitude of isolated solutions from different organizations. Using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle WebCenter Content, and Site Studio, the customer created a multiple-portal environment and deployed the 1st three applications for patient receipt, a medication navigator, and disability information. spectrumK Holding GmbH accelerated time-to-market for new features by reducing the development time, achieved 40% development and cost savings using standard modules and realized 80% overall savings using the Oracle multiple portal environment, as compared to individual installations. Company Overview spectrumK Holding GmbH was founded in 2007 by various company health insurance funds and national insurance associations. A service provider for the healthcare market, spectrumK consists of one holding company and four operative subsidiaries. Its broad product portfolio of compulsory health funds covers patient care management, financial management, and information management, as well as payment services and legal counseling. Business ChallengesspectrumK Holding GmbH business objectives were to implement innovative new Web-based services and solution systems for the health insurance funds by integrating a multitude of isolated solutions from different organizations. Specifically, spectrumK was looking to: Establish a portal-based environment to provide health coverage information services to the insured, with the option to integrate a multitude of isolated solutions from different organizations Implement innovative new Web-based spectrumK service products and solutions systems for health insurance funds Lower costs while improving services for the health fund’s clients Find an infrastructure that supports the small development team in efficient implementation and operation of the solution Reuse standard modules while enabling easy, inexpensive adaptations to customer-specific corporate requirements Solution Deployed spectrumK Holding GmbH created a multiple-portal environment, called “KundenCenter+“ which is based on the integration of Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle WebCenter Content, and Site Studio. They initiated and launched the first three of the company’s KundenCenter+, Oracle-based modules for patient receipt, a medication navigator, and disability information, with numerous successful deployments and individual customer environment adaptations. Business ResultsspectrumK Holding GmbH accelerated time-to-market for new features by reducing the development time, achieved 40% development and cost savings using standard modules and realized 80% overall savings using the Oracle multiple portal environment, as compared to individual installations Additional Information  spectrumK Holding GmbH Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Suite Oracle Customer Support Oracle Consulting Oracle WebCenter Content

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• How to structure game states in an entity/component-based system

  - by Eva

  I'm making a game designed with the entity-component paradigm that uses systems to communicate between components as explained here. I've reached the point in my development that I need to add game states (such as paused, playing, level start, round start, game over, etc.), but I'm not sure how to do it with my framework. I've looked at this code example on game states which everyone seems to reference, but I don't think it fits with my framework. It seems to have each state handling its own drawing and updating. My framework has a SystemManager that handles all the updating using systems. For example, here's my RenderingSystem class: public class RenderingSystem extends GameSystem { private GameView gameView_; /** * Constructor * Creates a new RenderingSystem. * @param gameManager The game manager. Used to get the game components. */ public RenderingSystem(GameManager gameManager) { super(gameManager); } /** * Method: registerGameView * Registers gameView into the RenderingSystem. * @param gameView The game view registered. */ public void registerGameView(GameView gameView) { gameView_ = gameView; } /** * Method: triggerRender * Adds a repaint call to the event queue for the dirty rectangle. */ public void triggerRender() { Rectangle dirtyRect = new Rectangle(); for (GameObject object : getRenderableObjects()) { GraphicsComponent graphicsComponent = object.getComponent(GraphicsComponent.class); dirtyRect.add(graphicsComponent.getDirtyRect()); } gameView_.repaint(dirtyRect); } /** * Method: renderGameView * Renders the game objects onto the game view. * @param g The graphics object that draws the game objects. */ public void renderGameView(Graphics g) { for (GameObject object : getRenderableObjects()) { GraphicsComponent graphicsComponent = object.getComponent(GraphicsComponent.class); if (!graphicsComponent.isVisible()) continue; GraphicsComponent.Shape shape = graphicsComponent.getShape(); BoundsComponent boundsComponent = object.getComponent(BoundsComponent.class); Rectangle bounds = boundsComponent.getBounds(); g.setColor(graphicsComponent.getColor()); if (shape == GraphicsComponent.Shape.RECTANGULAR) { g.fill3DRect(bounds.x, bounds.y, bounds.width, bounds.height, true); } else if (shape == GraphicsComponent.Shape.CIRCULAR) { g.fillOval(bounds.x, bounds.y, bounds.width, bounds.height); } } } /** * Method: getRenderableObjects * @return The renderable game objects. */ private HashSet<GameObject> getRenderableObjects() { return gameManager.getGameObjectManager().getRelevantObjects( getClass()); } } Also all the updating in my game is event-driven. I don't have a loop like theirs that simply updates everything at the same time. I like my framework because it makes it easy to add new GameObjects, but doesn't have the problems some component-based designs encounter when communicating between components. I would hate to chuck it just to get pause to work. Is there a way I can add game states to my game without removing the entity-component design? Does the game state example actually fit my framework, and I'm just missing something? EDIT: I might not have explained my framework well enough. My components are just data. If I was coding in C++, they'd probably be structs. Here's an example of one: public class BoundsComponent implements GameComponent { /** * The position of the game object. */ private Point pos_; /** * The size of the game object. */ private Dimension size_; /** * Constructor * Creates a new BoundsComponent for a game object with initial position * initialPos and initial size initialSize. The position and size combine * to make up the bounds. * @param initialPos The initial position of the game object. * @param initialSize The initial size of the game object. */ public BoundsComponent(Point initialPos, Dimension initialSize) { pos_ = initialPos; size_ = initialSize; } /** * Method: getBounds * @return The bounds of the game object. */ public Rectangle getBounds() { return new Rectangle(pos_, size_); } /** * Method: setPos * Sets the position of the game object to newPos. * @param newPos The value to which the position of the game object is * set. */ public void setPos(Point newPos) { pos_ = newPos; } } My components do not communicate with each other. Systems handle inter-component communication. My systems also do not communicate with each other. They have separate functionality and can easily be kept separate. The MovementSystem doesn't need to know what the RenderingSystem is rendering to move the game objects correctly; it just need to set the right values on the components, so that when the RenderingSystem renders the game objects, it has accurate data. The game state could not be a system, because it needs to interact with the systems rather than the components. It's not setting data; it's determining which functions need to be called. A GameStateComponent wouldn't make sense because all the game objects share one game state. Components are what make up objects and each one is different for each different object. For example, the game objects cannot have the same bounds. They can have overlapping bounds, but if they share a BoundsComponent, they're really the same object. Hopefully, this explanation makes my framework less confusing.

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• Dawn of the Enterprise Social Developer

  - by Mike Stiles

  Social is not just for poking friends, posting videos of cats playing pianos, or even just for brand marketing anymore. It has become a key form of communication internally and externally across every area of the enterprise. As a Java developer, are you positioning yourself for the integration of social into enterprise business systems that’s on the near horizon? Because it’s the work you do and the applications you build that will influence what the social-enabled enterprise is going to look like and how it’s going to operate. But as a social developer, step one is wrapping your arms around all the things that are possible. Traditionally, the best exploration, brainstorming and innovation come from collaborating with other developers. That’s how the big questions can be hashed (or hacked) out. Is Java the best social development environment? If not, what is? What’s already being done in terms of application integration? The JavaOne Social Developer Program will offer up a series of talks and events on those very issues Tuesday, October 2 at the San Francisco Hilton. If you’re interested in embarking on this newest frontier of enterprise social development, you can connect with others who are thinking the same thing and get moving on your first project.Talks will include: Emergence Of The Social EnterpriseExtending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business ProcessesIntro to Open Graph and Facebook's APIs Building the Next Wave of Social Commerce Platforms Social Data and the Enterprise LinkedIn: A Professional Network Built with Java Technologies and Agile Practice Social Developer Hackathon In addition to these learning and discussion opportunities, you might consider joining the new Oracle Social Developer Community (OSDC), where the interaction and collaboration can continue indefinitely. It doesn’t take a lot of tea leaf reading to know that the cloud will house the enterprise technology of the future, and social (as well as the rich data it brings) is going to be a major part of that as social integrates across every business function as there’s proven value for consumer facing initiatives. The next phase of social development is going to involve combining enterprise data from multiple sources, new and existing, social and traditional, in order to tell compelling and usable stories. And social is coming to the enterprise quickly, meaning you as a development leader should seek to understand not just what's worked on the consumer side, but what aspects of those successes can be applied inside the organization. Get educated, get connected, and consider registering for this forward-looking event now to get started with enterprise social development.

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• TomEE Integration in NetBeans Next

  - by Geertjan

  At JavaOne 2013, there was a lot of buzz around the TomEE server, e.g., many Tweets, nice party, and a new TomEE consulting company. For those tracking TomEE developments, it is interesting to note that recently the NetBeans IDE development builds have had added to them... TomEE support. Note: The TomEE support described here is not in NetBeans IDE 7.4, but in development builds for the next release of NetBeans IDE.For example, with NetBeans IDE development builds you're able to: register TomEE as a server in the Services window (TomEE has several distributions, e.g., one can use the "with JAX-RS" one, for example) create a Java EE 6 web project (e.g., Maven based) against this server create JPA entities from database create JAX-RS classes from JPA entities create JSF pages from JPA entities the IDE lets you create a new data source for TomEE and deploy it to the server the IDE figures out the components that are already packaged in TomEE, and the fact that (unlike with regular Tomcat), it does not need to package any components such as JSF implementation, persistence provider, or JAX-RS runtime, so that the resulting WAR file is very small the IDE can also do "deploy on save" with TomEE, so that your development cycle is very fast Adam Bien blogged about how he set up TomEE sometime ago, here. The official support in NetBeans IDE will be much more tightly integrated, simplifying the steps Adam describes. For example, the IDE does step 2 from Adam's blog for you, i.e., it sets up TomEE deployment roles. Moreover, it knows about all the technologies included in TomEE so that it can optimize the packaging; it knows about TomEE's persistence setup; it can work with TomEE data sources, etc. Below you see a Maven-based Java EE 6 PrimeFaces application (all entities and JSF pages generated from a database) deployed to TomEE in NetBeans IDE: And here's the management console for configuring and finetuning TomEE in NetBeans IDE: When I tried out the NetBeans IDE development build and TomEE, to see how everything fits together, I was surprised at how fast TomEE started up. Not sure what they did to it, but seems like a server on steroids. And setting it up in NetBeans IDE was trivial. Add the simple set up of TomEE in NetBeans IDE to the many benefits that the widely praised out of the box NetBeans Maven tools make possible, together with the fact that not one single plugin had to be installed to get everything you see described here up and running... and you have a really powerful combination of dev tools, all for free.

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• Adjusting server-side tickrate dynamically

  - by Stuart Blackler

  I know nothing of game development/this site, so I apologise if this is completely foobar. Today I experimented with building a small game loop for a network game (think MW3, CSGO etc). I was wondering why they do not build in automatic rate adjustment based on server performance? Would it affect the client that much if the client knew this frame is based on this tickrate? Has anyone attempted this before? Here is what my noobish C++ brain came up with earlier. It will improve the tickrate if it has been stable for x ticks. If it "lags", the tickrate will be reduced down by y amount: // GameEngine.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application. // #ifdef WIN32 #include <Windows.h> #else #include <sys/time.h> #include <ctime> #endif #include<iostream> #include <dos.h> #include "stdafx.h" using namespace std; UINT64 GetTimeInMs() { #ifdef WIN32 /* Windows */ FILETIME ft; LARGE_INTEGER li; /* Get the amount of 100 nano seconds intervals elapsed since January 1, 1601 (UTC) and copy it * to a LARGE_INTEGER structure. */ GetSystemTimeAsFileTime(&ft); li.LowPart = ft.dwLowDateTime; li.HighPart = ft.dwHighDateTime; UINT64 ret = li.QuadPart; ret -= 116444736000000000LL; /* Convert from file time to UNIX epoch time. */ ret /= 10000; /* From 100 nano seconds (10^-7) to 1 millisecond (10^-3) intervals */ return ret; #else /* Linux */ struct timeval tv; gettimeofday(&tv, NULL); uint64 ret = tv.tv_usec; /* Convert from micro seconds (10^-6) to milliseconds (10^-3) */ ret /= 1000; /* Adds the seconds (10^0) after converting them to milliseconds (10^-3) */ ret += (tv.tv_sec * 1000); return ret; #endif } int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { int sv_tickrate_max = 1000; // The maximum amount of ticks per second int sv_tickrate_min = 100; // The minimum amount of ticks per second int sv_tickrate_adjust = 10; // How much to de/increment the tickrate by int sv_tickrate_stable_before_increment = 1000; // How many stable ticks before we increase the tickrate again int sys_tickrate_current = sv_tickrate_max; // Always start at the highest possible tickrate for the best performance int counter_stable_ticks = 0; // How many ticks we have not lagged for UINT64 __startTime = GetTimeInMs(); int ticks = 100000; while(ticks > 0) { int maxTimeInMs = 1000 / sys_tickrate_current; UINT64 _startTime = GetTimeInMs(); // Long code here... cout << "."; UINT64 _timeTaken = GetTimeInMs() - _startTime; if(_timeTaken < maxTimeInMs) { Sleep(maxTimeInMs - _timeTaken); counter_stable_ticks++; if(counter_stable_ticks >= sv_tickrate_stable_before_increment) { // reset the stable # ticks counter counter_stable_ticks = 0; // make sure that we don't go over the maximum tickrate if(sys_tickrate_current + sv_tickrate_adjust <= sv_tickrate_max) { sys_tickrate_current += sv_tickrate_adjust; // let me know in console #DEBUG cout << endl << "Improving tickrate. New tickrate: " << sys_tickrate_current << endl; } } } else if(_timeTaken > maxTimeInMs) { cout << endl; if((sys_tickrate_current - sv_tickrate_adjust) > sv_tickrate_min) { sys_tickrate_current -= sv_tickrate_adjust; } else { if(sys_tickrate_current == sv_tickrate_min) { cout << "Please reduce sv_tickrate_min..." << endl; } else{ sys_tickrate_current = sv_tickrate_min; } } // let me know in console #DEBUG cout << "The server has lag. Reduced tickrate to: " << sys_tickrate_current << endl; } ticks--; } UINT64 __timeTaken = GetTimeInMs() - __startTime; cout << endl << endl << "Total time in ms: " << __timeTaken; cout << endl << "Ending tickrate: " << sys_tickrate_current; char test; cin >> test; return 0; }

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• Loose Coupling and UX Patterns for Applications Integrations

  - by ultan o'broin

  I love that software architecture phrase loose coupling. There’s even a whole book about it. And, if you’re involved in enterprise methodology you’ll know just know important loose coupling is to the smart development of applications integrations too. Whether you are integrating offerings from the Oracle partner ecosystem with Fusion apps or applications coexistence scenarios, loose coupling enables the development of scalable, reliable, flexible solutions, with no second-guessing of technology. Another great book Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions tells us about loose coupling benefits of reducing the assumptions that integration parties (components, applications, services, programs, users) make about each other when they exchange information. Eliminating assumptions applies to UI development too. The days of assuming it’s enough to hard code a UI with linking libraries called code on a desktop PC for an office worker are over. The book predates PaaS development and SaaS deployments, and was written when web services and APIs were emerging. Yet it calls out how using middleware as an assumptions-dissolving technology “glue" is central to applications integration. Realizing integration design through a set of middleware messaging patterns (messaging in the sense of asynchronously communicating data) that enable developers to meet the typical business requirements of enterprises requiring integrated functionality is very Fusion-like. User experience developers can benefit from the loose coupling approach too. User expectations and work styles change all the time, and development is now about integrating SaaS through PaaS. Cloud computing offers a virtual pivot where a single source of truth (customer or employee data, for example) can be experienced through different UIs (desktop, simplified, or mobile), each optimized for the context of the user’s world of work and task completion. Smart enterprise applications developers, partners, and customers use design patterns for user experience integration benefits too. The Oracle Applications UX design patterns (and supporting guidelines) enable loose coupling of the optimized UI requirements from code. Developers can get on with the job of creating integrations through web services, APIs and SOA without having to figure out design problems about how UIs should work. Adding the already user proven UX design patterns (and supporting guidelines to your toolkit means ADF and other developers can easily offer much more than just functionality and be super productive too. Great looking application integration touchpoints can be built with our design patterns and guidelines too for a seamless applications UX. One of Oracle’s partners, Innowave Technologies used loose coupling architecture and our UX design patterns to create an integration for a customer that was scalable, cost effective, fast to develop and kept users productive while paving a roadmap for customers to keep pace with the latest UX designs over time. Innowave CEO Basheer Khan, a Fusion User Experience Advocate explains how to do it on the Usable Apps blog.

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