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• “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on GDSE and also on the regular Stackoverflow site, and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? (* With the exception of Flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with Flash, but I'm worried that Flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.) For simple & short games the Newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "OK, I'm going to download and play that"?

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• Voxel Face Crawling (Mesh simplification, possibly using greedy)

  - by Tim Winter

  This is in regards to a Minecraft-like terrain engine. I store blocks in chunks (16x256x16 blocks in a chunk). When I generate a chunk, I use multiple procedural techniques to set the terrain and to place objects. While generating, I keep one 1D array for the full chunk (solid or not) and a separate 1D array of solid blocks. After generation, I iterate through the solid blocks checking their neighbors so I only generate block faces that don't have solid neighbors. I store which faces to generate in their own list (that's 6 lists, one per possible face). When rendering a chunk, I render all lists in the camera's current chunk and only the lists facing the camera in all other chunks. Using a 2D atlas with this little shader trick Andrew Russell suggested, I want to merge similar faces together completely. That is, if they are in the same list (same normal), are adjacent to each other, have the same light level, etc. My assumption would be to have each of the 6 lists sorted by the axis they rest on, then by the other two axes (the list for the top of a block would be sorted by it's Y value, then X, then Z). With this alone, I could quite easily merge strips of faces, but I'm looking to merge more than just strips together when possible. I've read up on this greedy meshing algorithm, but I am having a lot of trouble understanding it. To even use it, I would think I'd need to perform a type of flood-fill per sorted list to get the groups of merge-able faces. Then, per group, perform the greedy algorithm. It all sounds awfully expensive if I would ever want dynamic terrain/lighting after initial generation. So, my question: To perform merging of faces as described (ignoring whether it's a bad idea for dynamic terrain/lighting), is there perhaps an algorithm that is simpler to implement? I would also quite happily accept an answer that walks me through the greedy algorithm in a much simpler way (a link or explanation). I don't mind a slight performance decrease if it's easier to implement or even if it's only a little better than just doing strips. I worry that most algorithms focus on triangles rather than quads and using a 2D atlas the way I am, I don't know that I could implement something triangle based with my current skills. PS: I already frustum cull per chunk and as described, I also cull faces between solid blocks. I don't occlusion cull yet and may never.

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• What do you do when a client requires Rich Text Editing on their website?

  - by George Stocker

  As we all know by now, XSS attacks are dangerous and really easy to pull off. Various frameworks make it easy to encode HTML, like ASP.NET MVC does: <%= Html.Encode("string"); %> But what happens when your client requires that they be able to upload their content directly from a Microsoft Word document? Here's the scenario: People can copy and paste content from Microsoft word into a WYSIWYG editor (in this case tinyMCE), and then that information is posted to a web page. The website is public, but only members of that organization will have access to post information to a webpage. What is the best way to handle this requirement? Currently there is no checking done on what the client posts (since only 'trusted' users can post), but I'm not particularly happy with that and would like to lock it down further in case an account is hacked. The platform in question is ASP.NET MVC. The only conceptual method that I'm aware of that meets these requirements is to whitelist HTML tags and let those pass through. Is there another way? If not, is the best way to let them store it in the Database in any form, but only display it properly encoded and stripped of bad tags? NB: The questions differ in that he only assumes there's one way. I'm also asking the following questions: 1. Is there a better way that doesn't rely on HTML Whitelists? 2. Is there a better way that relies on a different view engine? 3. Is there a WYSIWYG editor that includes the ability to whitelist on the fly? 4. Should I even worry about this since it will only be for 'private posting' (Much in the same way that a private blog allows HTML From the author, but since only he can post, it's not an issue)? Edit #2: If suggesting a WYSIWYG editor, it must be free (as in speech, or as in beer). Update: All of the suggestions thus far revolve around a specific Rich Text Editor to use: Only provide an editor as a suggestion if it allows for sanitization of HTML tags; and it fulfills the requirement of accepting pasted documents from a WYSIWYG Editor like Microsoft Word. There are three methods that I know of: 1. Not allow HTML. 2. Allow HTML, but sanitize it 3. Find a Rich Text Editor that sanitizes and allows HTML. The previous questions remain (1-4 above). Related Question Preventing Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

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• Post Crosstalk 2012

  - by David Dorf

  This year the Oracle Retail users conference, Crosstalk, had a 20% increase in attendees, which was driven by both new customers and those acquired via Endeca.  As the product assets of Oracle have grown, so has the completeness of the solution set.  This year was marked by the breadth of omni-channel stories. Rose Spicer and her marketing team (see photo on left) always strive for an equal balance of retailer presentations, networking opportunities, and unique experiences -- this year was no exception.  We had 41 different retailers from China, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, US, Canada and the UK sharing their insights with one another. In all there were 251 executives from 120 iconic brands such as Daphne, Kohl's, Morrisons, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hot Topic, Talbots, Petco, Deckers, Sportmaster, Mr. Price, Falabella, and Disney to name a few. From a product perspective, there were a few new developments from Oracle Retail: Endeca's search engine has been integrated into the ATG commerce platform. The latest Retail Analytics application, Oracle Retail Customer Analytics, is generally available. Oracle Retail previewed a new fully-integrated mobile POS. But the real benefit of attending Crosstalk was hearing about the experiences of retailers and partners.  Here are are a few interesting facts I picked up: At Kohl's, the most popular website accessed by customers within their stores is Facebook.  With all the buzz about showrooming, I was really expecting it to be Amazon. Daphne, a Chinese shoe retailer, is opening 3 new stores per day.  Being located near the factories allows them to have a very agile supply chain as well. Disney Stores have increased sales by 25% at stores upgraded to include Mobile POS.  They continue to lead the pack with excellent customer experiences. Quicksilver reported that 1 in 5 visits to their website comes from a tablet.  More evidence that tablets are replacing traditional PCs in households. By tagging shoes with RFID, Saks is able to ensure all shoe models are on display.  If a model is not being displayed, it has no chance of being sold. Additionally, there were awards, store tours on Michigan Avenue, fireworks at Navy Pier, and the Oracle Retail house band, Bolo313, performing at Solider Field.  Speaking of which, a few retailers got on stage and jammed with band -- possible rival to Rock & Roll Retail? You can always find the latest info from us at the Retail Rack. The next events on tap are the Partner Summit followed by OpenWorld.

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• Cross-platform independent development

  - by Joe Wreschnig

  Some years ago, if you wrote in C and some subset of C++ and used a sufficient number of platform abstractions (via SDL or whatever), you could run on every platform an indie could get on - Linux, Windows, Mac OS of various versions, obscure stuff like BeOS, and the open consoles like the GP2X and post-death Dreamcast. If you got a contract for a closed platform at some point, you could port your game to that platform with "minimal" code changes as well. Today, indie developers must use XNA to get on the Xbox 360 (and upcoming Windows phone); must not use XNA to work anywhere else but Windows; until recently had to use Java on Android; Flash doesn't run on phones, HTML5 doesn't work on IE. Unlike e.g. DirectX vs. OpenGL or Windows vs. Unix, these are changes to the core language you write your code in and can't be papered over without, basically, writing a compiler. You can move some game logic into scripts and include an interpreter - except when you can't, because the iPhone SDK doesn't allow it, and performance suffers because no one allows JIT. So what can you do if you want a really cross-platform portable game, or even just a significant body of engine and logic code? Is this not a problem because the platforms have fundamentally diverged - it's just plain not worthwhile to try to target both an iPhone and the Xbox 360 with any shared code because such a game would be bad? (I find this very unlikely. I can easily see wanting to share a game between a Windows Mobile phone and an Android, or an Xbox 360 and an iPad.) Are interfaces so high-level now that porting time is negligible? (I might believe this for business applications, but not for games with strict performance requirements.) Is this going to become more pronounced in the future? Is the split going to be, somewhat scarily, still down vendor lines? Will we all rely on high-level middleware like Flash or Unity to get anything cross-platform done? tl;dr - Is porting a problem, is it going to be a bigger problem in the future, and if so how do we solve it?

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• Oracle WebCenter: Social Networking & Collaboration

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter provides unprecedented Social Networking and Collaboration.We recently talked with Carin Chan, Principal Product Manager at Oracle, around the topic of Social Networking and Collaboration. In today’s work environment, employees have come to expect social and collaborative services to augment their work environment. Whether it is to post a blog or to poll fellow coworkers, employees expect and demand access to highly integrated, collaborative work environments that allow them to quickly contribute at work -- whether it is to make informed decisions, contribute on projects, or share knowledge.Social and collaborative services from Oracle WebCenter add an immeasurable amount of value to achieving a modern user experience. Oracle WebCenter Services provides rich and comprehensive social computing services that include services such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, presence, activity streams and graphs, and polls/surveys that offer employees access to rich collaborative services to work efficiently.Employees can create pages or spaces that mix and match collaborative services while bringing in data from other applications to share with groups, teams, or organizations. These out of the box social and collaborative services include: People Connections and Activity Streams enable users to quickly assemble and visualize their social business networks and track user activities.Activity Graphs tracks all user activities in real-time and gathers intelligence about these users, their connections and the way they use information to make educated recommendations and provide on the spot information discovery.Wikis and blogs enable the community authoring of documents and sharing of ideas and also allow for the gathering of feedback and comments on those ideas.Tags and links allow users to easily mark, connect and share information with others.RSS feeds are available to track new or changed information related to discussion forums, processes or activities in an Oracle WebCenter environment.Discussion forums enable sharing of group knowledge and easy creation of communities around specific topics.Announcements allow you to manage and publish important news to your user base.Instant Messaging and Presence enable real-time awareness and communication with available users in the context of a business task.Web and Voice Conferencing enables real-time communication with internal and external business users.Lists provide a way to manage list data directly on the web as well as export and import it from and to Microsoft Excel.Oracle WebCenter Analytics provides comprehensive reporting metrics on activity and content usage within portals or composite applications.Activity Streams allow you to track activities and visualize your business networks.While being able to integrate into your portal deployment, these services are also integrated into how users are already working. This includes integration with software such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office and mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone. These services are just a tip of the iceberg regarding social and collaborative services that Oracle WebCenter has to offer your employees. Be sure to keep checking back this week for in future posts, we’ll delve deeper into a few of these collaborative services and discuss how a combination of collaborative services offer a better portal deployment to empower business users. Technorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, social, activity streams, blogs, wikis

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• AI for a mixed Turn Based + Real Time battle system - Something "Gambit like" the right approach?

  - by Jason L.

  This is maybe a question that's been asked 100 times 1,000 different ways. I apologize for that :) I'm in the process of building the AI for a game I'm working on. The game is a turn based one, in the vein of Final Fantasy but also has a set of things that happen in real time (reactions). I've experimented with FSM, HFSMs, and Behavior Trees. None of them felt "right" to me and all felt either too limiting or too generic / big. The idea I'm toying with now is something like a "Rules engine" that could be likened to the Gambit system from Final Fantasy 12. I would have a set of predefined personalities. Each of these personalities would have a set of conditions it would check on each event (Turn start, time to react, etc). These conditions would be priority ordered, and the first one that returns true would be the action I take. These conditions can also point to a "choice" action, which is just an action that will make a choice based on some Utility function. Sort of a mix of FSM/HFSM and a Utility Function approach. So, a "gambit" with the personality of "Healer" may look something like this: (ON) Ally HP = 0% - Choose "Relife" spell (ON) Ally HP < 50% - Choose Heal spell (ON) Self HP < 65% - Choose Heal spell (ON) Ally Debuff - Choose Debuff Removal spell (ON) Ally Lost Buff - Choose Buff spell Likewise, a "gambit" with the personality of "Agressor" may look like this: (ON) Foe HP < 10% - Choose Attack skill (ON) Foe any - Choose target - Choose Attack skill (ON) Self Lost Buff - Choose Buff spell (ON) Foe HP = 0% - Taunt the player What I like about this approach is it makes sense in my head. It also would be extremely easy to build an "AI Editor" with an approach like this. What I'm worried about is.. would it be too limiting? Would it maybe get too complicated? Does anyone have any experience with AIs in Turn Based games that could maybe provide me some insight into this approach.. or suggest a different approach? Many thanks in advance!!!

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• Poll Results: Foreign Key Constraints

  - by Darren Gosbell

  A few weeks ago I did the following post asking people – if they used foreign key constraints in their star schemas. The poll is still open if you are interested in adding to it, but here is what the chart looks like as of today. (at the bottom of the poll itself there is a link to the live results, unfortunately I cannot link the live results in here as the blogging platform blocks the required javascript)   Interestingly the results are fairly even. Of the 78 respondents, fractionally over half at least aim to start with referential integrity in their star schemas. I did not want to influence the results by sharing my opinion, but my personal preference is to always aim to have foreign key constraints. But at the same time, I am pragmatic about it, I do have projects where for various reasons some constraints are not defined. And I also have other designs that I have inherited, where it would just be too much work to go back and add foreign key constraints. If you are going to implement foreign keys in your star schema, they really need to be there at the start. In fact this poll was was the result of a feature request for BIDSHelper asking for a feature to check for null/missing foreign keys and I am entirely convinced that BIDS is the wrong place for this sort of functionality. BIDS is a design tool, your data needs to be constantly checked for consistency. It's not that I think that it's impossible to get a design working without foreign key constraints, but I like the idea of failing as soon as possible if there is an error and enforcing foreign key constraints lets me "fail early" if there are constancy issues with my data. By far the biggest concern with foreign keys is performance and I suppose I'm curious as to how often people actually measure and quantify this. I worked on a project a number of years ago that had very large data volumes and we did find that foreign key constraints did have a measurable impact, but what we did was to disable the constraints before loading the data, then enabled and checked them afterwards. This saved as time (although not as much as not having constraints at all), but still let us know early in the process if there were any consistency issues. For the people that do not have consistent data, if you have ETL processes that you control that are building your star schema which you also control, then to be blunt you only have yourself to blame. It is the job of the ETL process to make the data consistent. There are techniques for handling situations like missing data as well as  early and late arriving data. Ralph Kimball's book – The Data Warehouse Toolkit goes through some design patterns for handling data consistency. Having foreign key relationships can also help the relational engine to optimize queries as noted in this recent blog post by Boyan Penev

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• Use of Business Parameters in BPM12c

  - by Abhishek Mittal-Oracle

  With the release of BPM12c, a new feature to use Business Parameters is introduced through which we can define a business parameter which will behave as a global variable which can be used within BPM project. Business Administrator can be the one responsible to modify the business parameters value dynamically at run-time which may bring change in BPM process flow where it is used.This feature was a part of BPM10g product and was extensively used. In BPM11g, this feature is not present currently.Business Parameters can be defined in 2 ways:1. Using Jdev to define business parameters, and 2. Using BPM workspace to define business parameters.It is important to note that business parameters need to be mapped with a valid organisation unit defined in a BPM project. If the same is not handled, exceptions like 'BPM-70702' will be thrown by BPM Engine. This is because business parameters work along with organisation defined in a BPM project.At the same time, we can use same business parameter across different organisation units with different values. Business Parameters in BPM12c has this capability to handle multiple values with different organisation units defined in a single BPM project. This enables business to re-use same business parameters defined in a BPM project across different organisations.Business parameters can be defined using the below data types:1. int2. string 3. boolean4. double While defining an business parameter, it is mandatory to provide a default value. Below are the steps to define a business parameter in Jdev: Step 1:  Open 'Organization' and click on 'Business Parameters' tab.Step 2:  Click on '+' button.Step 3: Add business parameter name, type and provide default value(mandatory).Step 4: Click on 'OK' button.Step 5: Business parameter is defined. Below are the steps to define a business parameter in BPM workspace: Step 1: Login to BPM workspace using admin-username and password.Step 2: Click on 'Administration' on the right top side of workspace.Step 3: Click on 'Business Parameters' in the left navigation panel under 'Organization'. Step 4:  Click on '+' button.Step 5: Add business parameter name, type and provide default value(mandatory).Step 6: Click on 'OK' button.Step 7: Business parameter is defined. Note: As told earlier in the blog, it is necessary to define and map a valid organization ID with predefined variable 'organizationalUnit' under data associations in an BPM process before the business parameter is used. I have created one sample PoC demonstrating the use of Business Parameters in BPM12c and it can be found here.

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• SSAS deployment error: Internal error: Invalid enumeration value. Please call customer support! is not a valid value for this element.

  - by Kevin Shyr

  The first search on this error yielded some blog posts that says to check SQL server version.  It suggested that I couldn't deploy a SSAS project originally set for SSAS 2008 to a SSAS 2008 R2, which didn't make sense to me.  Combined with the fact that the error message was telling me to call customer support.  Why do I need to call customer support unless something catastrophic happened?Turns out that one of the file on the SQL server is corrupt.  I could simply delete the database on the SSAS server and re-run deployment.  Problem solved.SSAS errors in visual studio: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Error      10           Internal error: Invalid enumeration value. Please call customer support! is not a valid value for this element.                                0              0              Error      11           An error occurred while parsing the 'StorageMode' element at line 1, column 10523 ('http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine' namespace) under Load/ObjectDefinition/Dimension/StorageMode.                            0              0              Error      12           Errors in the metadata manager. An error occurred when instantiating a metadata object from the file, '\\?\E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSAS10_50.MSSQLSERVER\OLAP\Data\DWH Sales Facts.0.db\Competitor.48.dim.xml'.                        0              0

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• The Politics of Junk Filtering

  - by mikef

  If the national postal service, such as the Royal Mail in the UK, were to go through your letters and throw away all the stuff it considered to be junk instead of delivering it to you, you might be rather pleased until you discovered that it took a too liberal decision about what was junk. Catalogs you'd asked for? Junk! Requests from charities? Who needs them! Parcels from competing carriers? Toss them away! The possibility for abuse for an agency that was in a monopolistic position is just too scary to tolerate. After all, the postal service could charge 'consultancy fees' to any sender who wanted to guarantee that his stuff got delivered, or they could even farm this out to other companies. Because Microsoft Outlook is just about the only email client used by the international business community in the west, its' SPAM filter is the final arbiter as to what gets read. My Outlook 2007, set to the default settings, junks all the perfectly innocent email newsletters that I subscribe to. Whereas Google Mail, Yahoo, and LIVE are all pretty accurate in detecting spam, Outlook makes all sorts of silly mistakes. The documentation speaks techno-babble about 'advanced heuristics', but the result boils down to an inaccurate mess. The more that Microsoft fiddles with it, the stickier the mess. To make matters worse, it still lets through obvious spam. The filter is occasionally updated along with other automatic 'security' updates you opt for automatic updates. As an editor for a popular online publication that provides a newsletter service, this is an obvious source of frustration. We follow all the best-practices we know about. We ensure that it is a trivial task to opt out of receiving it. We format the newsletter to the requirements of the Service Providers. We follow up, and resolve, every complaint. As a result, it gets delivered. It is galling to discover that, after all that effort, Outlook then often judges the contents to be junk on a whim, so you don't get to see it. A few days ago, Microsoft published the PST file format specification, under pressure from a European Union interoperability investigation by ECIS (the European Committee for Interoperable Systems). The objective was that other applications could then access existing PST files so as to migrate from existing Outlook installations to other solutions. Joaquín Almunia, the current competition commissioner, should now turn his attention to the more subtle problems of Microsoft Outlook. The Junk problem seems to have come from clumsy implementation of client-side spam filtering rather than from deliberate exploitation of a monopoly on the desktop email client for businesses, but it is a growing problem nonetheless. Cheers, Michael Francis

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• Game development: “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  Heyo, I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on gamedev and also on the regular stackoverflow and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). For simple & short games the newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "ok, I'm going to download and play that"? Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? Thanks! (* With the exception of flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have these downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with flash, but I'm worried that flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.)

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• JavaOne Rock Star – Adam Bien

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Among the most celebrated developers in recent years, especially in the domain of Java EE and JavaFX, is consultant Adam Bien, who, in addition to being a JavaOne Rock Star for Java EE sessions given in 2009 and 2011, is a Java Champion, the winner of Oracle Magazine’s 2011 Top Java Developer of the Year Award, and recently won a 2012 JAX Innovation Award as a top Java Ambassador. Bien will be presenting the following sessions: TUT3907 - Java EE 6/7: The Lean Parts CON3906 - Stress-Testing Java EE 6 Applications Without Stress CON3908 - Building Serious JavaFX 2 Applications CON3896 - Interactive Onstage Java EE Overengineering I spoke with Bien to get his take on Java today. He expressed excitement that the smallest companies and startups are showing increasing interest in Java EE. “This is a very good sign,” said Bien. “Only a few years ago J2EE was mostly used by larger companies -- now it becomes interesting even for one-person shows. Enterprise Java events are also extremely popular. On the Java SE side, I'm really excited about Project Nashorn.” Nashorn is an upcoming JavaScript engine, developed fully in Java by Oracle, and based on the Da Vinci Machine (JSR 292) which is expected to be available for Java 8.    Bien expressed concern about a common misconception regarding Java's mediocre productivity. “The problem is not Java,” explained Bien, “but rather systems built with ancient patterns and approaches. Sometimes it really is ‘Cargo Cult Programming.’ Java SE/EE can be incredibly productive and lean without the unnecessary and hard-to-maintain bloat. The real problems are ‘Ivory Towers’ and not Java’s lack of productivity.” Bien remarked that if there is one thing he wanted Java developers to understand it is that, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Or at least of some evil. Modern JVMs and application servers are hard to optimize upfront. It is far easier to write simple code and measure the results continuously. Identify the hotspots first, then optimize.”   He advised Java EE developers to, “Rethink everything you know about Enterprise Java. Before you implement anything, ask the question: ‘Why?’ If there is no clear answer -- just don't do it. Most well known best practices are outdated. Focus your efforts on the domain problem and not the technology.” Looking ahead, Bien remarked, “I would like to see open source application servers running directly on a hypervisor. Packaging the whole runtime in a single file would significantly simplify the deployment and operations.” Check out a recent Java Magazine interview with Bien about his Java EE 6 stress monitoring tool here.

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• Recording Topics manually and automatically

  - by maria.cozzolino(at)oracle.com

  When you are recording UPK topics, the default mode for recording is manual recording, where you tell the system when to record each screen shot. This mode allows you to take the exact screen shot you need. However, it does get a bit tedious when you are recording long topics, especially if you forget to take a few screen shots. In UPK 3.5, a new version of recording was introduced - Automatic Recording. It was designed to simplify the recording process by automatically capturing screen shots as you perform your transaction. If you haven't experimented with Automatic Recording, I'd recommend you give it a try - it might make your recording life easier. If you are recording with sound, you can also narrate your topic while recording it. To turn on Automatic Recording: 1. In Tools/Options, there are two recorder tabs. The first tab, under content defaults, includes settings that you may want to share between developers, like whether keyboard shortcuts are automatically captured. 2. The second tab is the one that contains the personal preferences, like screen shot capture key and whether to record automatically or manually. On this tab, choose the option for Automatic Recording. 3. Save the settings. Note that this setting will NOT impact content defaults; this is for your user only. When you launch the recorder, you will notice a slightly different message with guidance on how to start and stop automatic recording. Once you start recording, the recorder window is hidden until the end of the recording session to allow you to capture your transaction. In the task tray, there is a series of icons that let you know that you are capturing content. You can pause the recording, as well as set and view your sound levels if you are using sound. A camera appears during each screen capture to help you know when the system is capturing a screen shot, and a context indicator appears to show the recognition. With automatic recording, you can let the system capture the necessary screen shots. It may provide a more natural recording experience, and is probably easier for the untrained developer. On the other hand, you have a bit more control with manual recording on which screen shot appears, but it also means you have to remember to capture the screen shot. :) We'd be interested in hearing which type of recording you do, and any rationale on why you made that choice. Please comment and let us know. --Maria Cozzolino, Manager of UPK Software Requirements and UI Design

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• Case Management API by Koen van Dijk

  - by JuergenKress

  Case Management is a new addition to Oracle BPM in release 11.1.1.1.7 (PS6). This new release contains the Case Management engine, see blog Léon at  http://leonsmiers.blogspot.nl/ for more details.  However, currently this release does not contain a case portal. The case management API's, just like the already existing Oracle BPM API's, help in developing a portal page with relative ease. This blog will use some real life examples from the EURent casemanagement application and portal application developed by Oracle. The Oracle BPM Case Management API is a Java Based API that enables developers to programmatically access the new Case Management functionalities. It is an elaborate API that can access all the functionalities of Oracle Case Management. I will describe two of those functionalities in this blog: retrieving case data as DOM (http://www.w3.org/DOM/) and attaching a document to a case. Libraries First of all when creating a Case Management project you will need to attach the following libraries: These contain all the classes that are in the Case Management API. Service client To do anything with the BPM CaseManagement API in general it is necessary to create a CaseManagementServiceClient Object. The Case Management service client is the central piece of the Case Management API. It can be used to retrieve two different types of services. The first is the case stream service and the case service. The case stream service contains functionality to upload and download documents to and from a case. The second one is the CaseService. This service contains all the other functionality acting upon a case including but not limited to: 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: ACM API,adaptive Case Management,BPM,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• A few questions about integrating AudioKinetic Wwise and Unity

  - by SaldaVonSchwartz

  I'm new to Wwise and to using it with Unity, and though I have gotten the integration to work, I'm still dealing with some loose ends and have a few questions: (I'm on Unity 4.3 as of now but I think it shouldn't make any difference) The base path: The Wwise documentation implies you set this in the AkGlobalSoundEngineInitializer basePath public ivar, which is exposed to the editor. However, I found that this variable is not really used. Instead, the path is hardcoded to /Audio/GeneratedSoundBanks in AkBankPath. I had to modify both scripts to actually look in the path that I set in the editor property. What's the deal with this? Just sloppyness or am I missing something? Also about paths: since I'm on Mac, I'm using Unity natively under OS X and in tadem, the Wwise authoring tool via VMWare and I share the OS X Unity project folder so I can generate the soundbanks into the assets folder. However, the authoring tool (downloaded the latest one for Windows) doesn't automatically generate any "platform-specific" subfolders for my wwise files. That is, again, the Unity integration scripts assume the path to be /Audio/GeneratedSoundBanks/<my-platform>/ which in my case would be Mac (I set the authoring tool to generate for Mac). The documentation says wwise will automatically generate the platform-specific folders but it just dumps all the stuff in GeneratedSoundBanks. Am I missing some setting? cause right now I just manually create the /Mac folder. The C# methods AkSoundEngine.PostEvent and AkSoundEngine.LoadBank for instance, have a few overloads, including ones where I can refer to the soundbanks or events by their ID. However, if I try to use these, for instance: AkSoundEngine.LoadBank(, AkSoundEngine.AK_DEFAULT_POOL_ID) where the int I got from the .h header, I get Ak_Fail. If I use the overloads that reference the objects by string name then it works. What gives? Converting the ID header to C#: The integration comes with a C# script that seems to fork a process to call Python in turn to covert the C++ header into a C# script. This always fails unless I manually execute the Python script myself from outside Unity. Might be a permissions thing, but has anyone experienced this? The Profiler: I set up the Unity player to run in the background and am using the "Profile" version of the plugin. However, when I start the Unity OS X standalone app, the profiler in VMWare does not see it. This I'm thinking might just be that I'm trying to see a running instance of the sound engine inside an OS X binary from a Windows virtual machine. But I'm just wondering if anyone has gotten the Windows profiler to see an OS X Unity binary. Different versions of the integration plugin: It's not clear to me from the documentation whether I have to manually (or write a script to do it) remove the "Profile" version and install the "Release" version when I'm going to do a Release build or if I should install both version in Unity and it'll select the right one. Thanks!

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• Space partitioning when everything is moving

  - by Roy T.

  Background Together with a friend I'm working on a 2D game that is set in space. To make it as immersive and interactive as possible we want there to be thousands of objects freely floating around, some clustered together, others adrift in empty space. Challenge To unburden the rendering and physics engine we need to implement some sort of spatial partitioning. There are two challenges we have to overcome. The first challenge is that everything is moving so reconstructing/updating the data structure has to be extremely cheap since it will have to be done every frame. The second challenge is the distribution of objects, as said before there might be clusters of objects together and vast bits of empty space and to make it even worse there is no boundary to space. Existing technologies I've looked at existing techniques like BSP-Trees, QuadTrees, kd-Trees and even R-Trees but as far as I can tell these data structures aren't a perfect fit since updating a lot of objects that have moved to other cells is relatively expensive. What I've tried I made the decision that I need a data structure that is more geared toward rapid insertion/update than on giving back the least amount of possible hits given a query. For that purpose I made the cells implicit so each object, given it's position, can calculate in which cell(s) it should be. Then I use a HashMap that maps cell-coordinates to an ArrayList (the contents of the cell). This works fairly well since there is no memory lost on 'empty' cells and its easy to calculate which cells to inspect. However creating all those ArrayLists (worst case N) is expensive and so is growing the HashMap a lot of times (although that is slightly mitigated by giving it a large initial capacity). Problem OK so this works but still isn't very fast. Now I can try to micro-optimize the JAVA code. However I'm not expecting too much of that since the profiler tells me that most time is spent in creating all those objects that I use to store the cells. I'm hoping that there are some other tricks/algorithms out there that make this a lot faster so here is what my ideal data structure looks like: The number one priority is fast updating/reconstructing of the entire data structure Its less important to finely divide the objects into equally sized bins, we can draw a few extra objects and do a few extra collision checks if that means that updating is a little bit faster Memory is not really important (PC game)

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• Interviews: Going Beyond the Technical Quiz

  - by Tony Davis

  All developers will be familiar with the basic format of a technical interview. After a bout of CV-trawling to gauge basic experience, strengths and weaknesses, the interview turns technical. The whiteboard takes center stage and the challenge is set to design a function or query, or solve what on the face of it might seem a disarmingly simple programming puzzle. Most developers will have experienced those few panic-stricken moments, when one’s mind goes as blank as the whiteboard, before un-popping the marker pen, and hopefully one’s mental functions, to work through the problem. It is a way to probe the candidate’s knowledge of basic programming structures and techniques and to challenge their critical thinking. However, these challenges or puzzles, often devised by some of the smartest brains in the development team, have a tendency to become unnecessarily ‘tricksy’. They often seem somewhat academic in nature. While the candidate straight out of IT school might breeze through the construction of a Markov chain, a candidate with bags of practical experience but less in the way of formal training could become nonplussed. Also, a whiteboard and a marker pen make up only a very small part of the toolkit that a programmer will use in everyday work. I remember vividly my first job interview, for a position as technical editor. It went well, but after the usual CV grilling and technical questions, I was only halfway there. Later, they sat me alongside a team of editors, in front of a computer loaded with MS Word and copy of SQL Server Query Analyzer, and my task was to edit a real chapter for a real SQL Server book that they planned to publish, including validating and testing all the code. It was a tough challenge but I came away with a sound knowledge of the sort of work I’d do, and its context. It makes perfect sense, yet my impression is that many organizations don’t do this. Indeed, it is only relatively recently that Red Gate started to move over to this model for developer interviews. Now, instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the whiteboard challenges, the candidate can expect to sit with their prospective team, in front of Visual Studio, loaded with all the useful tools in the developer’s kit (ReSharper and so on) and asked to, for example, analyze and improve a real piece of software. The same principles should apply when interviewing for a database positon. In addition to the usual questions challenging the candidate’s knowledge of such things as b-trees, object permissions, database recovery models, and so on, sit the candidate down with the other database developers or DBAs. Arm them with a copy of Management Studio, and a few other tools, then challenge them to discover the flaws in a stored procedure, and improve its performance. Or present them with a corrupt database and ask them to get the database back online, and discover the cause of the corruption.

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• ObjectStorageHelper<T> now available for Windows 8 RTM

  - by jamiet

  In October 2011 I wrote a blog post entitled ObjectStorageHelper<T> – A WinRT utility for Windows 8 where I introduced a little utility class called ObjectStorageHelper<T> that I had been working on while noodling around on the Developer Preview of Windows 8. ObjectStorageHelper<T> makes it easy for anyone building apps for Windows 8 to save data to files. How easy? As easy as this: var myPoco = new Poco() { IntProp = 1, StringProp = "one" }; var objectStorageHelper = new ObjectStorageHelper<Poco>(StorageType.Local); await objectStorageHelper.SaveAsync(myPoco); Compare that to the plumbing code that you would have to write otherwise: var Obj = new Poco() { IntProp = 1, StringProp = "one" }; StorageFile file = null; StorageFolder folder = GetFolder(storageType); file = await folder.CreateFileAsync(FileName(Obj), CreationCollisionOption.ReplaceExisting); IRandomAccessStream writeStream = await file.OpenAsync(FileAccessMode.ReadWrite); using (Stream outStream = Task.Run(() => writeStream.AsStreamForWrite()).Result) {     serializer.Serialize(outStream, Obj);     await outStream.FlushAsync(); } and you can see how ObjectStorageHelper<T> can help save a Windows 8 developer quite a few headaches. ObjectStorageHelper<T> simply requires you to pass it an object to be saved, tell it where to save it (Roaming, Local or Temporary), and you’re done. Retrieving an object from storage is equally as simple: var objectStorageHelper = new ObjectStorageHelper<Poco>(StorageType.Local); var myPoco = await objectStorageHelper.LoadAsync(); Please check the homepage for the project at http://winrtstoragehelper.codeplex.com/ for (much) more info. A number of people have used and tested ObjectStorageHelper<T> since those early days and one of those folks in particular, David Burela, was good enough to report a couple of bugs: Saving Asynchronously Save fails when class is in another project As a result of David’s bug reports and some more extensive testing on my side I have overhauled the initial code that I wrote last October and am confident that it is now much more robust and ready for primetime (check the commit history if you’re interested). The source code (which, again, you can find on Codeplex at http://winrtstoragehelper.codeplex.com/) includes a suite of unit tests to test all of the basic use cases (if you can think of any more please let me know). If you use this in any of your Windows 8 projects then please let me know. I love getting feedback and I’d also love to know if this is actually being used anywhere. @Jamiet

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• Extending the ADF Controller exception handler

  - by frank.nimphius

  The Oracle ADF controller provides a declarative option for developers to define a view activity, method activity or router activity to handle exceptions in bounded or unbounded task flows. Exception handling however is for exceptions only and not handling all types of Throwable. Furthermore, exceptions that occur during the JSF RENDER RESPONSE phase are not looked at either as it is considered too late in the cycle. For developers to try themselves to handle unhandled exceptions in ADF Controller, it is possible to extend the default exception handling, while still leveraging the declarative configuration. To add your own exception handler: · Create a Java class that extends ExceptionHandler · Create a textfile with the name “oracle.adf.view.rich.context.Exceptionhandler” (without the quotes) and store it in .adf\META-INF\services (you need to create the “services” folder) · In the file, add the absolute name of your custom exception handler class (package name and class name without the “.class” extension) For any exception you don't handle in your custom exception handler, just re-throw it for the default handler to give it a try … import oracle.adf.view.rich.context.ExceptionHandler; public class MyCustomExceptionHandler extends ExceptionHandler { public MyCustomExceptionHandler() {      super(); } public void handleException(FacesContext facesContext,                              Throwable throwable, PhaseId phaseId)                              throws Throwable {    String error_message;    error_message = throwable.getMessage();    //check error message and handle it if you can    if( … ){          //handle exception        …    }    else{       //delegate to the default ADFc exception handler        throw throwable;}    } } Note however, that it is recommended to first try and handle exceptions with the ADF Controller default exception handling mechanism. In the past, I've seen attempts on OTN to handle regular application use cases with custom exception handlers for where there was no need to override the exception handler. So don't go for this solution to quickly and always think of alternative solutions. Sometimes a try-catch-final block does it better than sophisticated web exception handling.

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• View Images and Videos in 3D in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  Different websites have their own format for viewing images and videos, but may not be a lot of fun to use. The Cooliris extension for Firefox lets you view those same images and videos in a dynamic 3D format. Before For our example we conducted a search for nature photos at Flickr. You could view them in a static format or even as a slideshow but what about something more dynamic looking? After As soon as the extension has finished installing, you will notice a new toolbar button used for launching the Cooliris tab. When you launch the Cooliris tab you will have an expandable menu system in the upper left corner. A speed dial setup in the center. And a small toolbar in the lower right corner Before going further you should check and make any desired adjustments in the preferences to enhance your viewing experience. In the upper right corner you can start your search by selecting from the available sources. The same search for nature images is more focused and clean looking this time. Clicking on an image will bring it forward and enlarge it. You can use the slider tool at the bottom of the tab to browser left or right through the images and videos. And when you find one that interests you, click on the popout button to open it in a new tab. Conclusion The Cooliris extension makes viewing images and videos fun and interactive with its’ 3D style format. Links Download the Cooliris extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Download Cooliris for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari (Mac Only), & Chrome Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Firefox Display Large Images Full SizeInstalling Windows Media Player Plugin for FirefoxStop YouTube Videos from Automatically Playing in FirefoxShare Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.itEasily View Source of Included Files in Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED

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• How do you play or record audio (to .WAV) on Linux in C++? [closed]

  - by Jacky Alcine

  Hello, I've been looking for a way to play and record audio on a Linux (preferably Ubuntu) system. I'm currently working on a front-end to a voice recognition toolkit that'll automate a few steps required to adapt a voice model for PocketSphinx and Julius. Suggestions of alternative means of audio input/output are welcome, as well as a fix to the bug shown below. Here is the current code I've used so far to play a .WAV file: void Engine::sayText ( const string OutputText ) { string audioUri = "temp.wav"; string requestUri = this->getRequestUri( OPENMARY_PROCESS , OutputText.c_str( ) ); int error , audioStream; pa_simple *pulseConnection; pa_sample_spec simpleSpecs; simpleSpecs.format = PA_SAMPLE_S16LE; simpleSpecs.rate = 44100; simpleSpecs.channels = 2; eprintf( E_MESSAGE , "Generating audio for '%s' from '%s'..." , OutputText.c_str( ) , requestUri.c_str( ) ); FILE* audio = this->getHttpFile( requestUri , audioUri ); fclose(audio); eprintf( E_MESSAGE , "Generated audio."); if ( ( audioStream = open( audioUri.c_str( ) , O_RDONLY ) ) < 0 ) { fprintf( stderr , __FILE__": open() failed: %s\n" , strerror( errno ) ); goto finish; } if ( dup2( audioStream , STDIN_FILENO ) < 0 ) { fprintf( stderr , __FILE__": dup2() failed: %s\n" , strerror( errno ) ); goto finish; } close( audioStream ); pulseConnection = pa_simple_new( NULL , "AudioPush" , PA_STREAM_PLAYBACK , NULL , "openMary C++" , &simpleSpecs , NULL , NULL , &error ); for (int i = 0;;i++ ) { const int bufferSize = 1024; uint8_t audioBuffer[bufferSize]; ssize_t r; eprintf( E_MESSAGE , "Buffering %d..",i); /* Read some data ... */ if ( ( r = read( STDIN_FILENO , audioBuffer , sizeof (audioBuffer ) ) ) <= 0 ) { if ( r == 0 ) /* EOF */ break; eprintf( E_ERROR , __FILE__": read() failed: %s\n" , strerror( errno ) ); if ( pulseConnection ) pa_simple_free( pulseConnection ); } /* ... and play it */ if ( pa_simple_write( pulseConnection , audioBuffer , ( size_t ) r , &error ) < 0 ) { fprintf( stderr , __FILE__": pa_simple_write() failed: %s\n" , pa_strerror( error ) ); if ( pulseConnection ) pa_simple_free( pulseConnection ); } usleep(2); } /* Make sure that every single sample was played */ if ( pa_simple_drain( pulseConnection , &error ) < 0 ) { fprintf( stderr , __FILE__": pa_simple_drain() failed: %s\n" , pa_strerror( error ) ); if ( pulseConnection ) pa_simple_free( pulseConnection ); } } NOTE: If you want the rest of the code to this file, you can download it here directly from Launchpad.

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• New Wine in New Bottles

  - by Tony Davis

  How many people, when their car shows signs of wear and tear, would consider upgrading the engine and keeping the shell? Even if you're cash-strapped, you'll soon work out the subtlety of the economics, the cost of sudden breakdowns, the precious time lost coping with the hassle, and the low 'book value'. You'll generally buy a new car. The same philosophy should apply to database systems. Mainstream support for SQL Server 2005 ends on April 12; many DBAS, if they haven't done so already, will be considering the migration to SQL Server 2008 R2. Hopefully, that upgrade plan will include a fresh install of the operating system on brand new hardware. SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are designed to work together. The improved architecture, processing power, and hyper-threading capabilities of modern processors will dramatically improve the performance of many SQL Server workloads, and allow consolidation opportunities. Of course, there will be many DBAs smiling ruefully at the suggestion of such indulgence. This is nothing like the real world, this halcyon place where hardware and software budgets are limitless, development and testing resources are plentiful, and third party vendors immediately certify their applications for the latest-and-greatest platform! As with cars, or any other technology, the justification for a complete upgrade is complex. With Servers, the extra cost at time of upgrade will generally pay you back in terms of the increased performance of your business applications, reduced maintenance costs, training costs and downtime. Also, if you plan and design carefully, it's possible to offset hardware costs with reduced SQL Server licence costs. In his forthcoming SQL Server Hardware book, Glenn Berry describes a recent case where he was able to replace 4 single-socket database servers with one two-socket server, saving about $90K in hardware costs and $350K in SQL Server license costs. Of course, there are exceptions. If you do have a stable, reliable, secure SQL Server 6.5 system that still admirably meets the needs of a specific business requirement, and has no security vulnerabilities, then by all means leave it alone. Why upgrade just for the sake of it? However, as soon as a system shows sign of being unfit for purpose, or is moving out of mainstream support, the ruthless DBA will make the strongest possible case for a belts-and-braces upgrade. We'd love to hear what you think. What does your typical upgrade path look like? What are the major obstacles? Cheers, Tony.

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• SSIS Expression Editor & Tester

  Published today on CodePlex is the SSIS Expression Editor & Tester project. If you want to try it just pop over to CodePlex and download it. About five years ago I developed my own expression editor control. It first got used in our custom tasks as the MS editor didn’t become available until SQL 2005 SP1, but even then it had some handy features I preferred. For example resizable panes so that if your expression result was more than two lines you could see them all. It also meant I could change the functions available in the tree view, the most obvious use being to add some handy snippets and samples that I used a lot. This quickly developed into a small expression testing tool. I’d develop complex expressions using my editor and then copy it back into the package itself. I have been meaning to make the tool available for some time and finally made the effort, the code is checked-in and the signed downloads are published on CodePlex. There are two flavours, SQL 2005 or 2008, and just a simple zip file to download and extract. The tool doesn’t need installing, and is completely portable. It does need SSIS to be installed on the local machine though. Each zip file contains two files: ExpressionTester.exe – The tool itself, run this. ExpressionEditor.dll – The reusable editor control. A while ago the gentlemen behind BIDS Helper noticed the editor on a task and asked about using it. This became incorporated into their variable window extensions feature. To try and help them and anyone else that wants to use the editor control, it is available as a single assembly that you can reference yourself, and of course all the source code is on CodePlex too. Just add a reference to the ExpressionEditor.dll assembly and you should be up and running in no time. There is a sample project Package Test in the source code which shows how to use the editor control form in it’s simplest form, or if you want to host control directly then the tester tool is a perfect example.

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• Advice on designing a robust program to handle a large library of meta-information & programs

  - by Sam Bryant

  So this might be overly vague, but here it is anyway I'm not really looking for a specific answer, but rather general design principles or direction towards resources that deal with problems like this. It's one of my first large-scale applications, and I would like to do it right. Brief Explanation My basic problem is that I have to write an application that handles a large library of meta-data, can easily modify the meta-data on-the-fly, is robust with respect to crashing, and is very efficient. (Sorta like the design parameters of iTunes, although sometimes iTunes performs more poorly than I would like). If you don't want to read the details, you can skip the rest Long Explanation Specifically I am writing a program that creates a library of image files and meta-data about these files. There is a list of tags that may or may not apply to each image. The program needs to be able to add new images, new tags, assign tags to images, and detect duplicate images, all while operating. The program contains an image Viewer which has tagging operations. The idea is that if a given image A is viewed while the library has tags T1, T2, and T3, then that image will have boolean flags for each of those tags (depending on whether the user tagged that image while it was open in the Viewer). However, prior to being viewed in the Viewer, image A would have no value for tags T1, T2, and T3. Instead it would have a "dirty" flag indicating that it is unknown whether or not A has these tags or not. The program can introduce new tags at any time (which would automatically set all images to "dirty" with respect to this new tag) This program must be fast. It must be easily able to pull up a list of images with or without a certain tag as well as images which are "dirty" with respect to a tag. It has to be crash-safe, in that if it suddenly crashes, all of the tagging information done in that session is not lost (though perhaps it's okay to loose some of it) Finally, it has to work with a lot of images (10,000) I am a fairly experienced programmer, but I have never tried to write a program with such demanding needs and I have never worked with databases. With respect to the meta-data storage, there seem to be a few design choices: Choice 1: Invidual meta-data vs centralized meta-data Individual Meta-Data: have a separate meta-data file for each image. This way, as soon as you change the meta-data for an image, it can be written to the hard disk, without having to rewrite the information for all of the other images. Centralized Meta-Data: Have a single file to hold the meta-data for every file. This would probably require meta-data writes in intervals as opposed to after every change. The benefit here is that you could keep a centralized list of all images with a given tag, ect, making the task of pulling up all images with a given tag very efficient

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