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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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• What is the most efficient way to convert to binary and back in C#?

  - by Saad Imran.

  I'm trying to write a general purpose socket server for a game I'm working on. I know I could very well use already built servers like SmartFox and Photon, but I wan't to go through the pain of creating one myself for learning purposes. I've come up with a BSON inspired protocol to convert the the basic data types, their arrays, and a special GSObject to binary and arrange them in a way so that it can be put back together into object form on the client end. At the core, the conversion methods utilize the .Net BitConverter class to convert the basic data types to binary. Anyways, the problem is performance, if I loop 50,000 times and convert my GSObject to binary each time it takes about 5500ms (the resulting byte[] is just 192 bytes per conversion). I think think this would be way too slow for an MMO that sends 5-10 position updates per second with a 1000 concurrent users. Yes, I know it's unlikely that a game will have a 1000 users on at the same time, but like I said earlier this is supposed to be a learning process for me, I want to go out of my way and build something that scales well and can handle at least a few thousand users. So yea, if anyone's aware of other conversion techniques or sees where I'm loosing performance I would appreciate the help. GSBitConverter.cs This is the main conversion class, it adds extension methods to main datatypes to convert to the binary format. It uses the BitConverter class to convert the base types. I've shown only the code to convert integer and integer arrays, but the rest of the method are pretty much replicas of those two, they just overload the type. public static class GSBitConverter { public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this short value) { return BitConverter.GetBytes(value); } public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<short> value) { List<byte> bytes = new List<byte>(); short length = (short)value.Count(); bytes.AddRange(length.ToGSBinary()); for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) bytes.AddRange(value.ElementAt(i).ToGSBinary()); return bytes.ToArray(); } public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this bool value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<bool> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<byte> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this int value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<int> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this long value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<long> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this float value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<float> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this double value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<double> value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this string value); public static byte[] ToGSBinary(this IEnumerable<string> value); public static string GetHexDump(this IEnumerable<byte> value); } Program.cs Here's the the object that I'm converting to binary in a loop. class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { GSObject obj = new GSObject(); obj.AttachShort("smallInt", 15); obj.AttachInt("medInt", 120700); obj.AttachLong("bigInt", 10900800700); obj.AttachDouble("doubleVal", Math.PI); obj.AttachStringArray("muppetNames", new string[] { "Kermit", "Fozzy", "Piggy", "Animal", "Gonzo" }); GSObject apple = new GSObject(); apple.AttachString("name", "Apple"); apple.AttachString("color", "red"); apple.AttachBool("inStock", true); apple.AttachFloat("price", (float)1.5); GSObject lemon = new GSObject(); apple.AttachString("name", "Lemon"); apple.AttachString("color", "yellow"); apple.AttachBool("inStock", false); apple.AttachFloat("price", (float)0.8); GSObject apricoat = new GSObject(); apple.AttachString("name", "Apricoat"); apple.AttachString("color", "orange"); apple.AttachBool("inStock", true); apple.AttachFloat("price", (float)1.9); GSObject kiwi = new GSObject(); apple.AttachString("name", "Kiwi"); apple.AttachString("color", "green"); apple.AttachBool("inStock", true); apple.AttachFloat("price", (float)2.3); GSArray fruits = new GSArray(); fruits.AddGSObject(apple); fruits.AddGSObject(lemon); fruits.AddGSObject(apricoat); fruits.AddGSObject(kiwi); obj.AttachGSArray("fruits", fruits); Stopwatch w1 = Stopwatch.StartNew(); for (int i = 0; i < 50000; i++) { byte[] b = obj.ToGSBinary(); } w1.Stop(); Console.WriteLine(BitConverter.IsLittleEndian ? "Little Endian" : "Big Endian"); Console.WriteLine(w1.ElapsedMilliseconds + "ms"); } Here's the code for some of my other classes that are used in the code above. Most of it is repetitive. GSObject GSArray GSWrappedObject

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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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• How to install Windows 8 to dual boot with Windows 7/XP?

  - by Gopinath

  Microsoft released Windows 8 beta(customer preview) few days ago and yesterday I had a chance to install it on one of my home computers. My home PC is running on Windows 7 and I would like to install Windows 8 side by side so that I can dual boot. The installation process was pretty simple and with in 40 minutes my PC was up and running with beautiful Windows 8 OS along with Windows 7. In this post I want to share my experience and provide information for you to install Windows 8. 1. Identify a drive  with at least 20 GB of space – Identify one of the drives on your hard disk that can be used to install Windows 8. Delete all the files or preferably quick format it and make sure that it has at least 20 GB of free space. Rename the drive name to Windows 8 so that it will be helpful to identify the destination drive during installation process. 2. Download Windows 8 installer ISO– Go to Microsoft’s website and download Windows 8 ISO file which is approximately 2.5 GB file(32 bit English version). 3. Create Windows 8 bootable USB/DVD – Its advised to launch Windows 8 installer using a bootable USB or DVD for enabling dual boot instead of unzipping the ISO file and launching the setup from Windows 7 OS. Also consider creating bootable USB instead of bootable DVD to save a disc. To create bootable USB/DVD follow these steps Download and install the Windows 7 DVD / USB tool available at microsoftstore.com Launch the utility and follow the onscreen instructions where you would be asked to choose the ISO file(point to file downloaded in step 2) and choose a USB drive or DVD as destination. The onscreen instructions are very simple and you would be able to complete it in 20 minutes time. So now you have Windows 8 installation setup on your USB drive or DVD. 4. Change BIOS settings to boot from USB/DVD – Restart your PC and open BIOS configuration settings key by pressing F2 or  F12 or DELETE key (the key depends on your computer manufacturer). Go to boot sequence options and make sure that USB/DVD is ahead of hard disk in the boot sequence. Save the settings and restart the PC. 5. Install Windows 8 – After the restart you should be straight into Windows 8 installation screen. Follow the onscreen instructions and install Windows 8 on the drive that is identified during step 1. When prompted for product serial key enter NF32V-Q9P3W-7DR7Y-JGWRW-JFCK8. The installer would restart couple of times during the installation process. On the first restart, make sure that you remove USB/DVD. Windows 8 installation process is pretty simple and very quick. The complete process of creating bootable USB and installation should complete in 30 – 40 minutes time.

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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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• Innovation and the Role of Social Media

  - by Brian Dirking

  A very interesting post by Andy Mulholland of CAP Gemini this week – “The CIO is trapped between the CEO wanting innovation and the CFO needing compliance” – had many interesting points: “A successful move in one area won’t be recognized and rapidly implemented in other areas to multiply the benefits, or worse unsuccessful ideas will get repeated adding to the cost and time wasted. That’s where the need to really address the combination of social networking, collaboration, knowledge management and business information is required.” Without communicating what works and what doesn’t, the innovations of our organization may be lost, and the failures repeated. That makes sense. If you liked Andy Mulholland’s blog post, you need to hear Howard Beader’s presentation at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on innovation and the role of social media. (Howard will be speaking in the Market Leaders Session at 1 PM on Wednesday June 22nd). Some of the thoughts Howard will share include: • Innovation is more than just ideas, it’s getting ideas to market, and removing the obstacles that stand in the way • Innovation is about parallel processing – you can’t remove the obstacles one by one because you will get to market too late • Innovation can be about product innovation, but it can also be about process innovation This brings us to Andy’s second issue he raises: "..the need for integration with, and visibility of, processes to understand exactly how the enterprise functions and delivers on its policies…" Andy goes on to talk about this from the perspective of compliance and the CFO’s concerns. And it’s true: innovation can come both in product innovation, but also internal process innovation. And process innovation can have as much impact as product innovation.  New supply chain models can disrupt an industry overnight. Many people ignore process innovation as a benefit of social business, because it is perceived as a bottom line rather than top line impact. But it can actually impact your top line by changing your entire business model. Oracle WebCenter sits at this crossroads between product innovation and process innovation, enabling you to drive go-to-market innovations through internal social media tools, removing obstacles in parallel, and also providing you deep insight into your processes so you can identify bottlenecks and realize whole new ways of doing business. Learn more about how at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, where Oracle will be in booth #213 showing Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Fusion Applications.

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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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• Open World Day 1 Continued

  - by Antony Reynolds

  A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part II A couple of things I forgot to mention about yesterdays OpenWorld. First I attended a presentation on SOA Suite and Virtualization which explained how Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder (OVAB) can be used to accelerate the deployment of an Enterprise Deployment Guide (EDG) compliant SOA Suite infrastructure.  OVAB provides the ability to introspect a deployed software component such as WebLogic Server, SOA Suite or other components and extract the configuration and package it up for rapid deployment into an Oracle Virtual Machine.  OVAB allows multiple machines to be configured and connections made between the machines and outside resources such as databases.  That by itself is pretty cool and has been available for a while in OVAB.  What is new is that Oracle has done this for an EDG compliant installations and made it available as an OVAB assembly for customers to use, significantly accelerating the deployment of an EDG deployment.  A real help for customers standing up EDG environments, particularly in test, dev and QA environments. The other thing I forgot to mention was the most memorable demo I saw at OpenWorld.  This was done by my co-author Matt Wright who was showcasing the products of his company Rubicon Red.  They showed a really cool application called OneSpot which puts all the information about a single users business processes in one spot!  Apparently a customer suggested the name.  It allows business flows to be defined that map onto events.  As events occur the status of the business flow is updated to reflect the change.  The interface is strongly reminiscent of social media sites and provides a graphical view of business flows.  So how does this differ from BPEL and BPM process flows?  The OneSpot process flow is more like a BAM process flow, it is based on events arriving from multiple sources, and is focused on the clients view of the process, not the actual business process.  This is important because it allows an end user to get a view of where his current business flow is and what actions, if any, are required of him.  This by itself is great, but better still is that OneSpot has a real time updating view of events that have occurred (BAM style no need to refresh the browser).  This means that as new events occur the end user can see them and jump to the business flow or take other appropriate actions.  Under the covers OneSpot makes use of Oracle Human Workflow to provide a forms interface, but this is not the HWF GUI you know!  The HWF GUI screens are much prettier and have more of a social media feel about them due to their use of images and pulling in relevant related information.  If you are at OOW I strongly recommend you visit Matt or John at the Rubicon Red stand and ask, no demand a demo of OneSpot!

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• Scrum and Team Consolidation

  - by John K. Hines

  I’m still working my way through one of the more painful team consolidations of my career.  One thing that’s made it hard was my assumption that the use of Agile methods and Scrum would make everything easy.  Take three teams, make all work visible, track it, and presto: An efficient, functioning software development team. What I’ve come to realize is that the primary benefit of Scrum is that Scrum brings teams closer to their customers.  Frequent meetings, short iterations, and phased deployments are all meant to keep the customer in the loop.  It’s true that as teams become proficient with Scrum they tend to become more efficient.  But I don’t think it’s true that Scrum automatically helps people work together. Instead, Scrum can point out when teams aren’t good at working together.   And it really illustrates when teams, especially teams in sustaining mode, are reacting to their customers instead of innovating with them.  At the moment we’ve inherited a huge backlog of tools, processes, and personalities.  It’s up to us to sort them all out.  Unfortunately, after 7 &frac12; months we’re still sorting. What I’d recommend for any blended team is to look at your current product lifecycles and work on a single lifecycle for all work.  If you can’t objectively come up with one process, that’s a good indication that the new team might not be a good fit for being a single unit (which happens all the time in bigger companies).  Go ahead & self-organize into sub-teams.  Then repeat the process. If you can come up with a single process, tackle each piece and standardize all of them.  Do this as soon as possible, as it can be uncomfortable.  Standardize your requirements gathering and tracking, your exploration and technical analysis, your project planning, development standards, validation and sustaining processes.  Standardize all of it.  Make this your top priority, get it out of the way, and get back to work. Lastly, managers of blended teams should realize what I’m suggesting is a disruptive process.  But you’ve just reorganized the team is already disrupted.   Don’t pull the bandage off slowly and force the team through a prolonged transition phase, lowering their productivity over the long term.  You can role model leadership to your team and drive a true consolidation.  Destroy roadblocks, reassure those on your team who are afraid of change, and push forward to create something efficient and beautiful.  Then use Scrum to reengage your customers in a way that they’ll love. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process

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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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• O the Agony - Merging Scrum and Waterfall

  - by John K. Hines

  If there's nothing else to know about Scrum (and Agile in general), it's this: You can't force a team to adopt Agile methods.  In all cases, the team must want to change. Well, sure, you could force a team.  But it's going to be a horrible, painful process with a huge learning curve made even steeper by the lack of training and motivation on behalf of the team.  On a completely unrelated note, I've spent the past three months working on a team that was formed by merging three separate teams.  One of these teams has been adopting and using Agile practices like Scrum since 2007, the other was in continuous bug fix mode, releasing on average one new piece of software per year using semi-Waterfall methods.  In particular, one senior developer on the Waterfall team didn't see anything in Agile but overhead. Fast forward through three months of tension, passive resistance, process pushback, and you have seven people who want to change and one who explicitly doesn't.  It took two things to make Scrum happen: The team manager took a class called "Agile Software Development using Scrum". The team lead explained the point of Agile was to reduce the workload of the senior developer, with another senior developer and the manager present. It's incredible to me how a single person can strongly influence the direction of an entire team.  Let alone if Scrum comes down as some managerial decree onto a functioning team who have no idea what it is.  Pity the fool. On the bright side, I am now an expert at drawing Visio process flows.  And I have some gentle advice for any first-level managers: If you preside over a team process change, it's beneficial to start the discussion on how the team will work as early as possible.  You should have a vision for this and guide the discussion, even if decisions are weeks away.  Don't always root for the underdog.  It's been my experience that managers who see themselves as compassionate and caring spend a great deal of time understanding and advocating for the one person on the team who feels left out.  Remember that by focusing on this one person you risk alienating the rest of the team, allow tension to build, and delay the resolution of the problem. My way would have been to decree Scrum, force all of my processes on everyone else, and use the past three months ironing out the kinks.  Which takes us all the way back to point number one. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process Scrum and Waterfall

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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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• First time shadow mapping problems

  - by user1294203

  I have implemented basic shadow mapping for the first time in OpenGL using shaders and I'm facing some problems. Below you can see an example of my rendered scene: The process of the shadow mapping I'm following is that I render the scene to the framebuffer using a View Matrix from the light point of view and the projection and model matrices used for normal rendering. In the second pass, I send the above MVP matrix from the light point of view to the vertex shader which transforms the position to light space. The fragment shader does the perspective divide and changes the position to texture coordinates. Here is my vertex shader, #version 150 core uniform mat4 ModelViewMatrix; uniform mat3 NormalMatrix; uniform mat4 MVPMatrix; uniform mat4 lightMVP; uniform float scale; in vec3 in_Position; in vec3 in_Normal; in vec2 in_TexCoord; smooth out vec3 pass_Normal; smooth out vec3 pass_Position; smooth out vec2 TexCoord; smooth out vec4 lightspace_Position; void main(void){ pass_Normal = NormalMatrix * in_Normal; pass_Position = (ModelViewMatrix * vec4(scale * in_Position, 1.0)).xyz; lightspace_Position = lightMVP * vec4(scale * in_Position, 1.0); TexCoord = in_TexCoord; gl_Position = MVPMatrix * vec4(scale * in_Position, 1.0); } And my fragment shader, #version 150 core struct Light{ vec3 direction; }; uniform Light light; uniform sampler2D inSampler; uniform sampler2D inShadowMap; smooth in vec3 pass_Normal; smooth in vec3 pass_Position; smooth in vec2 TexCoord; smooth in vec4 lightspace_Position; out vec4 out_Color; float CalcShadowFactor(vec4 lightspace_Position){ vec3 ProjectionCoords = lightspace_Position.xyz / lightspace_Position.w; vec2 UVCoords; UVCoords.x = 0.5 * ProjectionCoords.x + 0.5; UVCoords.y = 0.5 * ProjectionCoords.y + 0.5; float Depth = texture(inShadowMap, UVCoords).x; if(Depth < (ProjectionCoords.z + 0.001)) return 0.5; else return 1.0; } void main(void){ vec3 Normal = normalize(pass_Normal); vec3 light_Direction = -normalize(light.direction); vec3 camera_Direction = normalize(-pass_Position); vec3 half_vector = normalize(camera_Direction + light_Direction); float diffuse = max(0.2, dot(Normal, light_Direction)); vec3 temp_Color = diffuse * vec3(1.0); float specular = max( 0.0, dot( Normal, half_vector) ); float shadowFactor = CalcShadowFactor(lightspace_Position); if(diffuse != 0 && shadowFactor > 0.5){ float fspecular = pow(specular, 128.0); temp_Color += fspecular; } out_Color = vec4(shadowFactor * texture(inSampler, TexCoord).xyz * temp_Color, 1.0); } One of the problems is self shadowing as you can see in the picture, the crate has its own shadow cast on itself. What I have tried is enabling polygon offset (i.e. glEnable(POLYGON_OFFSET_FILL), glPolygonOffset(GLfloat, GLfloat) ) but it didn't change much. As you see in the fragment shader, I have put a static offset value of 0.001 but I have to change the value depending on the distance of the light to get more desirable effects , which not very handy. I also tried using front face culling when I render to the framebuffer, that didn't change much too. The other problem is that pixels outside the Light's view frustum get shaded. The only object that is supposed to be able to cast shadows is the crate. I guess I should pick more appropriate projection and view matrices, but I'm not sure how to do that. What are some common practices, should I pick an orthographic projection? From googling around a bit, I understand that these issues are not that trivial. Does anyone have any easy to implement solutions to these problems. Could you give me some additional tips? Please ask me if you need more information on my code. Here is a comparison with and without shadow mapping of a close-up of the crate. The self-shadowing is more visible.

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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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• My Website (ports) Have Been Hijacked!

  - by ChrisD

  This is one of the scary problems that turns out to have a pretty easy solution. I tried to view one of my websites hosted by IIS on my primary workstation and the site wouldn’t render.   I checked IIS Admin and the site was there, but I couldn’t access it on either port 443 or port 80. In reviewing the event log I found the following entry: The World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW Service) did not register the URL prefix http://x.x.x.x:80/ for site 1. The site has been disabled. The data field contains the error number I disabled the IIS Service (issued Net Stop W3svc from an admin command prompt) and then scanned for anything listening on port 80. C:\Users\cdarrigo>netstat -ano |findstr 80   TCP    0.0.0.0:80             0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       3124 This confirmed that something had hijacked my ports.  I had another process that was listening on port 80 and it was preventing IIS from serving up my site.   A quick phone call to a friend taught me that the last number shown above (3124) is the process id of the process that's listening on the port.  So whatever process had PID 3124 had to be stopped. I scanned my process list, and determined it was, much to my surprise, Skype.  I exited the Skype application and restarted the IIS service, then manually restarted the web site.  This time, browsing to my site resulted in successfully viewing my site. So why was Skype listening on those ports?  A quick Google search revealed the answer: “Skype listens on those ports to increase quality.” really? “you might become a supernode if those ports are open.” No thanks.  I’m not sure how accurate those statements are, but I want to disable this behavior in Skype none the less. Fortunately Skype provides a configuration option to turn off this behavior.   Launch Skype and log in.  From the Tools menu, select Options Select the Advanced options and then Connection Uncheck the box Use Port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections Back to development bliss.

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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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• Why Healthcare Today Needs BPM and SOA by Avio

  - by JuergenKress

  Within the past couple years, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has led to significant changes in the healthcare industry. A highly-complex supply chain between patients, providers, buyers and insurance companies has led to a lack of overall collaboration when it comes to processes. The first open enrollment deadline for products on the Health Insurance Exchange has passed. So what now? Let’s take a brief look at how things have changed and what organizations can do to stay in (and ahead of) the game. New requirements, new processes Organizations that have not adapted processes to meet new regulatory requirements will fall further behind. New regulatory requirements effectively make some legacy applications obsolete, require batch process to move to real-time, and more. Business Process Management (BPM) can help organizations bring data processes in line while helping IT redesign processes rather than change code or replace existing applications. BPM fills in application gaps and links critical information systems for a more visible, efficient and auditable organization. Social and mobile solutions BPM technology also facilitates social and mobile solutions that can help meet new needs. Patients are dependent on a network of doctors, pharmacists, families and others. Social solutions can connect members of the patient’s community in ways never seen before - enabling real-time, relevant communication. Likewise, mobile technology supports social solutions, and BPM is the most efficient way to make processes simple and role-based. It unties medical professionals from their offices by enabling them to access timely information and alerts anywhere. Why SOA is also needed Integrating BPM with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) also plays a critical role in the development of healthcare solutions that work. SOA can create a single end-to-end process, integrate applications and move them into a common workflow. While SOA enables the reutilization of existing IT infrastructure, BPM supports the process optimization, monitoring and social aspects. SOA and BPM applications support business analysts as they model, create and monitor processes - providing real-time insight and a unified workflow of process activities. Read “New” Solutions for a New Healthcare Landscape on our blog to learn more. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: Avio,Healthcare,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Common SOA Problems by C2B2

  - by JuergenKress

  SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM. SCA, as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the separation of application and business logic are maintained. Orchestration or Integration? A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Service Integration is the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service and a payment processing service. Process Orchestration, however, is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end business process. This might include the earlier example of a product ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human task to handle edge-cases. A good (but not exhaustive) rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or have to wait pending manual intervention. BPEL vs BPMN For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they offer. Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component “Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made, therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line. Design for performance: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: C2B2,SOA best practice,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• OpenGL problem with FBO integer texture and color attachment

  - by Grieverheart

  In my simple renderer, I have 2 FBOs one that contains diffuse, normals, instance ID and depth in that order and one that I use store the ssao result. The textures I use for the first FBO are RGB8, RGBA16F, R32I and GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT32F for the depth. For the second FBO I use an R16F texture. My rendering process is to first render to everything I mentioned in the first FBO, then bind depth and normals textures for reading for the ssao pass and write to the second FBO. After that I bind the second FBO's texture for reading in my blur shader and bind the first FBO for writing. What I intend to do is to write the blurred ssao value to the alpha component of the Normals texture. Here are where the problems start. First of all, I use shading language 3.3, which my graphics card does support. I manage ouputs in my shaders using layout(location = #). Now, the normals texture should be bound to color attachment 1, but when I use 1, it seems to write to my diffuse texture which should be in color attachment 0. When I instead use layout(location = 0), it gets correctly written to my normals texture. Besides this, my instance ID texture also gets resets after running the blur shader which is weird because if I use a float texture and write to it instanceID / nInstances, the texture doesn't get reset after the blur shader has ran. Here is how I prepare my first FBO: bool CGBuffer::Init(unsigned int WindowWidth, unsigned int WindowHeight){ //Create FBO glGenFramebuffers(1, &m_fbo); glBindFramebuffer(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, m_fbo); //Create gbuffer and Depth Buffer Textures glGenTextures(GBUFF_NUM_TEXTURES, &m_textures[0]); glGenTextures(1, &m_depthTexture); //prepare gbuffer for(unsigned int i = 0; i < GBUFF_NUM_TEXTURES; i++){ glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_textures[i]); if(i == GBUFF_TEXTURE_TYPE_NORMAL) glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA16F, WindowWidth, WindowHeight, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_FLOAT, NULL); else if(i == GBUFF_TEXTURE_TYPE_DIFFUSE) glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGB8, WindowWidth, WindowHeight, 0, GL_RGB, GL_FLOAT, NULL); else if(i == GBUFF_TEXTURE_TYPE_ID) glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_R32I, WindowWidth, WindowHeight, 0, GL_RED_INTEGER, GL_INT, NULL); else{ std::cout << "Error in FBO initialization" << std::endl; return false; } glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0 + i, GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_textures[i], 0); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP); } //prepare depth buffer glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_depthTexture); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT32F, WindowWidth, WindowHeight, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, NULL); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_depthTexture, 0); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri (GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_COMPARE_MODE, GL_NONE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP); GLenum DrawBuffers[] = {GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT1, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT2}; glDrawBuffers(GBUFF_NUM_TEXTURES, DrawBuffers); GLenum Status = glCheckFramebufferStatus(GL_FRAMEBUFFER); if(Status != GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE){ std::cout << "FB error, status 0x" << std::hex << Status << std::endl; return false; } //Restore default framebuffer glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0); return true; } where I use an enum defined as, enum GBUFF_TEXTURE_TYPE{ GBUFF_TEXTURE_TYPE_DIFFUSE, GBUFF_TEXTURE_TYPE_NORMAL, GBUFF_TEXTURE_TYPE_ID, GBUFF_NUM_TEXTURES }; Am I missing some kind of restriction? Does the color attachment of the FBO's textures somehow gets reset i.e. I'm using a re-size function which re-sizes the textures of the FBO but should I perhaps call glFramebufferTexture2D again too? EDIT: Here is the shader in question: #version 330 core uniform sampler2D aoSampler; uniform vec2 TEXEL_SIZE; // x = 1/res x, y = 1/res y uniform bool use_blur; noperspective in vec2 TexCoord; layout(location = 0) out vec4 out_AO; void main(void){ if(use_blur){ float result = 0.0; for(int i = -1; i < 2; i++){ for(int j = -1; j < 2; j++){ vec2 offset = vec2(TEXEL_SIZE.x * i, TEXEL_SIZE.y * j); result += texture(aoSampler, TexCoord + offset).r; // -0.004 because the texture seems to be a bit displaced } } out_AO = vec4(vec3(0.0), result / 9); } else out_AO = vec4(vec3(0.0), texture(aoSampler, TexCoord).r); }

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