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• Ajax application: using SOAP vs REST ?

  - by coder

  I'm building an ajax heavy application (client-side strictly html/css/js) which will be getting all the data and using server business logic via webservices. I know REST seems to be the hot topic but I can't find any good arguments. The main argument seems to be its "light-weight". My impression so far is that wsdl/soap based services are more expressive and allow for more a more complex transfer of data. It appears that soap would be more useful in the application I'm building where the only code consuming the services will be the js downloaded in the client browser. REST on the other hand seems to have a smaller entry barrier and so can be more useful for services like twitter in allowing other developers to consume these services easily. Also, REST seems to Te better suited for simple data transfers. So in summary SOAP is useful for complex data transfer and REST is useful in simple data transfer. I'm currently under the impression that using SOAP would be best due to the complexity of the messages but perhaps there's other factors. What are your thoughts on the pros/cons of soap/rest for a heavy ajax web app? EDIT: While the wsdl is in xml, the data I'm transferring back and forth is actually in JSON. It just appears more natural to use wsdl/soap here due to the nature of the app. The verbs GET and POST may not be enough. I may want to say something like: processQueue, or executeTimer. This is why my conclusion has been wsdl/soap would be good for bridging a complex layer between two applications (client and server) whereas REST would be better (due to its simplicity) for allowing many developer-users to consume resources programmatically. So you could say the choice falls along two lines Will the app be verb-oriented (completing tasks: use soap) or noun-oriented (consuming resources: use REST) Will the api be consumed by few developers or many developers (REST is strong for many developers)? Since such an ajax heavy app would potentially use many verbs and would only be used by the client developer it appears soap/wsdl would be the best fit.

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• Use 3 monitors w/built-in intel adapter + two old nvidia PCI cards on 10.10?

  - by Kendall Gifford

  I'd like to move from windows with my current workstation. The only thing holding me back is that I have 3 monitors connected to the system and I really take advantage of the real estate when working. I just installed Ubuntu 10.10 on the system and one of the monitors is up and running just fine. This monitor is connected to the built-in Intel adapter. I also have two old nVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 (nv19pl) cards in my two PCI slots with two monitors connected to them respectively. I installed the legacy (and proprietary) nVidia drivers (the nvidia-96 package) that claims to support these old cards. Now the question is how to get X configured to use all adapters (using two different drivers) so I can use all three monitors (and is this even possible)? From what I've read, it looks like I'll have to write an xorg.conf file since the nVidia driver doesn't support the auto-magic configuration supported by other drivers. On this site: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config it says that on 10.10 I just need to write an xorg.conf "containing only those sections and options that you need to override Xorg's autoconfigurated settings". So, does this mean I can get away with only including the nVidia-specific configuration stuff and all else will get auto-configured? Or, will providing a config with a "Device" section overrule the auto-magic from detecting/using the Intel adapter? I ran the included nvidia-xconfig to generate a basic, nVidia-specific xorg.conf but I'm hesitant to reboot with it in place, suspecting I'll have a screwed up display. Also, is there any way (any tool or command) to generate an xorg.conf from the current, auto-configured running state of an X session? If I have to write a full, complete config, I'd rather start with one that includes everything that's been auto-detected thus far (and merge it with my nVidia version). Anyhow, any info and thoughts are greatly appreciated (as are answers).

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• What's the best approach to Facebook integration?

  - by Jay Stevens

  I have a new site/app going live next week (or somewhere close). I know there will be a relatively small (15,000?) very dedicated group of people on Facebook who will be very likely to be interested in the site, so I know I need Facebook integration of some kind. I won't be doing Facebook logins or pulling/posting to profiles yet, but I plan to... The question: Do I just do a Facebook "Page" for now? This is faster/easier to set up and seems a little less buggy.. and then migrate to a Facebook App later? or Do I create a "Facebook App" (with the api key/id/secret, etc.) now even if I'm doing nothing but using the "like" button. This means I don't have any migration later and I can use the javascript api to log "like" button clicks to Google Analytics, etc. Thoughts? Experiences? Is there a migration process to move your old Page users to your new "App"? What's the advantages / disadvantages of each.

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• How should I work out VAT (UK tax) in my eCommerce site?

  - by Leonard Challis

  We have an ecommerce system in place. The sales actually go through Sage, so we have an export script from our system that uses a third-party Sage Importer program. With a new version of this importer, values are checked more thoroughly. We are getting 1 pence discrepancies because of the way rounding works - our system has always held prices and worked to 4 decimal places. In the checkout the totals would be worked out first, then the rounding to 2 decimal places. The importer does rounding first, though. So, for instance: Our way: Product 1: £13.4561 Qty: 2 Total inc VAT = £32.29 (to 2dp) Importer way: Our way: Product 1: £13.4561 Qty: 2 Total inc VAT = £32.30 (to 2dp) Management are reluctant to lose the 4dp but the developers of the Sage importer have said that this is correct and makes sense -- you woudn't sell a product for £13.4561 in a shop, nor would you charge someone tax at 4 decimal places. I contacted the HMRC and the operator didn't really give me much to go on, telling me a technician would phone back, to which they haven't and I'm still waiting after almost a week and numerous follow-up calls. I did find a PDF on the HMRC's web site, but this did about us much to confuse me as it did to answer my questions. I see that they're happy for people to round up or down, as long it is consistent, but I can't tell whether it should be done on a line by line basis or on the end total of the order. We are now in the position where we need to decide whether it's worth us doing one of the following, or something completely different. Please advise with any experience or information I can read. Change all products on the site to use 2dp Keep 4dp but round each line in the order to 2dp before working out tax Keep it as it is and "fudge" the values at the export script (i.e. make that values correct by adding or subtracting 1p and changing the shipping cost to make the totals still work out) Any thoughts?

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• When using method chaining, do I reuse the object or create one?

  - by MainMa

  When using method chaining like: var car = new Car().OfBrand(Brand.Ford).OfModel(12345).PaintedIn(Color.Silver).Create(); there may be two approaches: Reuse the same object, like this: public Car PaintedIn(Color color) { this.Color = color; return this; } Create a new object of type Car at every step, like this: public Car PaintedIn(Color color) { var car = new Car(this); // Clone the current object. car.Color = color; // Assign the values to the clone, not the original object. return car; } Is the first one wrong or it's rather a personal choice of the developer? I believe that he first approach may quickly cause the intuitive/misleading code. Example: // Create a car with neither color, nor model. var mercedes = new Car().OfBrand(Brand.MercedesBenz).PaintedIn(NeutralColor); // Create several cars based on the neutral car. var yellowCar = mercedes.PaintedIn(Color.Yellow).Create(); var specificModel = mercedes.OfModel(99).Create(); // Would `specificModel` car be yellow or of neutral color? How would you guess that if // `yellowCar` were in a separate method called somewhere else in code? Any thoughts?

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• What do you call an obfuscator that isn't an obfuscator?

  - by Alex.Davies

  SmartAssembly, formerly {smartassembly}, version 5 is now available as an Early Access Build. You can get it here: http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBoard/viewforum.php?f=116 We're having second thoughts about the name change though. It isn't that we like the curly brackets, far from it. The trouble is that the first rule of product naming is to name a product by what it does. SmartAssembly may make an assembly smarter, but that's not something people really google for. The trouble is, I can't think of a better name for it. That's because SmartAssembly really does two completely separate things: Obfuscates Sets up your assembly for the awesome exception reports which get sent to you whenever your application crashes. You may have been (un?)lucky enough to see one in reflector if you use it. This is what those exception reports look like when they arrive back with the developer: Look at all those local variables! If you ask me, this is much cooler than the obfuscation. So obviously we don't want to call it just "Red Gate Obfuscator" or something, because it doesn't do justice to the exception reporting. What would you call it?

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• Cannot FTP without simultaneous SSH connection?

  - by Lucas

  I'm trying to set up an old box as a backup server (running 10.04.4 LTS). I intend to use 3rd party software on my PC to periodically connect to my server via FTP(S) and to mirror certain files. For some reason, all FTP connection attempts fail UNLESS I'm simultaneously connected via SSH. For example, if I use putty to test the connection to port 21, the system hangs and times out. I get: 220 Connected to LeServer USER lucas 331 Please specify the password. PASS [password] <cursor> However, when I'm simultaneously logged in (in another session) everything works: 220 Connected to LeServer USER lucas 331 Please specify the password. PASS [password] 230 Login successful. Basically, this means that my software will never be able to connect on its own, as intended. I know that the correct port is open because it works (sometimes) and nmap gives me: Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2012-03-20 16:15 CDT Interesting ports on xx.xxx.xx.x: Not shown: 995 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 21/tcp open ftp 22/tcp open ssh 53/tcp open domain 139/tcp open netbios-ssn 445/tcp open microsoft-ds Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.15 seconds My only hypothesis is that this has something to do with iptables. Maybe it's allowing only established connections? I don't think that's how I set it up, but maybe? Here's my iptables rules for INPUT: lucas@rearden:~$ sudo iptables -L INPUT Chain INPUT (policy DROP) target prot opt source destination fail2ban-ssh tcp -- anywhere anywhere multiport dports ssh ufw-before-logging-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-before-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-after-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-after-logging-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-reject-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-track-input all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:ftp I'm using vsftpd. Any thoughts/resources on how I could fix this? L

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• Ubuntu One Sync as a File Backup Solution?

  - by Jeff

  I was hoping to utilize Ubuntu One and in particular, the syncing feature within Ubuntu One to provide offsite backup for some of my files. My intention was to mark any of my folders that have important files as 'folders to synchronize' to Ubuntu One. It works great in that whenever an important file is placed in the folder, the file is copied up to Ubuntu One (hence creating a backup). However, if any of these important files are lost or accidently deleted from my computer then due to the synchronization it is also immediately deleted from Ubuntu One. This approach does not work very well to provide backup. On one hand I really like the automatic way in which the synch feature will upload any of my important files to Ubuntu One but on the other hand if I lose the file on my computer it will likely be taken off of the cloud as well (via synchronization). What approach are others taking to backup their important files to Ubuntu One? I didn't want to have to manually upload my important files to Ubuntu One and remember to upload other important files as they are created on my computer. Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

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• Have programmers at your work not taken up or been averse to an offer of a second monitor?

  - by Chris Knight

  I'm putting together a business case for the developers in my company to get a second monitor. After my own experiences and research, this seems a no-brainer to me in terms of increasing productivity and morale/happiness. One question which has niggled me is if I should be pushing to get all developers onto a second monitor or let folk opt-in (i.e. they get one if they want one). Thoughts on this are welcome, but my specific question relates to a snippet on this site: But when the IT manager at Thibeault's company asked other employees if they wanted dual monitors last year, few jumped at the offer. Blinded by my own pre-judgement, this surprised me. Has anyone else experienced this? I fully appreciate that some people prefer a single larger monitor, but my general experience of researching the web suggests that most programmers prefer a dual (or more) setup. I'm guessing this should be tempered with the thought that those developers who contribute to such discussions might not be considered your average developer who might not care one way or the other. Anyway, if you have experienced the above have you tried to sell the concept of dual monitors to the masses? If everyone just got 2 monitors regardless if they wanted it or not, were there adverse reactions or negative effects? UPDATE: The developers are on a mixture of 17", 22", or 24" single monitors. The desks should be able to accommodate dual 22" monitors as I am proposing, though this will take some getting used to I imagine.

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• Blogger still visible after moving to WP; Google Indexing issues after moving from Blogger to WP

  - by Erin

  I recently migrated from Blogger to Wordpress and am having two major transition issues that are really hurting. Despite literally hours of searching and experimenting, I cannot resolve the following: ISSUE ONE: I fixed all of my old blogger links to 301 redirect successfully to my WP links (the 2 structures are different and I realized too late), but my old blogger blog is still sometimes visible! (the 2 designs are completely different) I had 31 hits on my blogger site just yesterday. I have updated my privacy settings to hide my blogger blog from search engines and not be visible on blogger. I also removed my custom domain from blogger already as well. HELP! Not sure how to stop this. ISSUE two: Despite submitting a new site map and reindexing my pages for my WP blog, I am not visible in search engines, although I was very visible previously. In fact, some of my OLD links are showing up. Am I being penalized?? Any thoughts on how to fix. THANK YOU! Erin my site: www.thelawstudentswife.com

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• Procedural... house with rooms generator

  - by pek

  I've been looking at some algorithms and articles about procedurally generating a dungeon. The problem is, I'm trying to generate a house with rooms, and they don't seem to fit my requirements. For one, dungeons have corridors, where houses have halls. And while initially they might seem the same, a hall is nothing more than the area that isn't a room, whereas a corridor is specifically designed to connect one area to another. Another important difference with a house is that you have a specific width and height, and you have to fill the entire thing with rooms and halls, whereas with a dungeon, there is empty space. I think halls in a house is something in between a dungeon corridor (gets you to other rooms) and an empty space in the dungeon (it's not explicitly defined in code). More specifically, the requirements are: There is a set of predefined rooms I cannot create walls and doors on the fly. Rooms can be rotated but not resized Again, because I have a predefined set of rooms, I can only rotate them, not resize them. The house dimensions are set and has to be entirely filled with rooms (or halls) I.e. I want to fill a 14x20 house with the available rooms making sure there is no empty space. Here are some images to make this a little more clear: As you can see, in the house, the "empty space" is still walkable and it gets you from one room to another. So, having said all this, maybe a house is just a really really tightly packed dungeon with corridors. Or it's something easier than a dungeon. Maybe there is something out there and I haven't found it because I don't really know what to search for. This is where I'd like your help: could you give me pointers on how to design this algorithm? Any thoughts on what steps it will take? If you have created a dungeon generator, how would you modify it to fit my requirements? You can be as specific or as generic as you like. I'm looking to pick your brains, really.

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• The lifecycle of "cool"

  - by Dori

  I've been thinking lately about how some programming projects/products become "cool," and in particular, how that trend can later reverse. Here are two examples that might better explain my context: Textmate Whenever someone asks about text editors on OS X, the answer on the SE sites is an automatic "Textmate!" But looked at objectively: Textmate 1.0 shipped October 2004 Textmate 1.5 shipped January 2006 Textmate 2 was announced February 2006 As of September 2010, the currently shipping version is 1.5.9 In all of 2010, there have been a total of three posts on the Textmate blog At what point (if ever) do Textmate fans start thinking about switching to another text editor? When it breaks after some future Apple update? When alpha geeks they respect start recommending something else? Or? jQuery Whenever a JavaScript-related question is asked on the SE sites, the knee-jerk response is "jQuery!" I've seen it happen even when the question itself only required a single line of JavaScript. Or when the question could be better answered by using CSS. Do the answerers understand they're suggesting a blowtorch to light a candle? That they're recommending adding 70K or so of code to do something trivial? Or is it a symptom of "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"—that is, jQuery is all they know how to do, so that's their recommendation? And do they understand that while they may know jQuery well, that doesn't necessarily mean that they know JavaScript? Is there a way to explain that learning JavaScript would make them better jQuery programmers? My bigger-picture questions: Is this niche focus primarily a trait of programmers? How do you get programmers to not immediately jump to recommending their personal favorites? What can motivate programmers to review their initial selection criteria and possibly modify their choice? Your thoughts?

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• Pub banter - content strategy at the ballot box?

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night, I was challenged to explain (and defend) content strategy. Three sheets to the wind after a pub quiz, this is no simple task, but I hope I acquitted myself passably. I say "hope" because there was a really interesting question I couldn't answer to my own satisfaction. I wonder if any of you folks out there in the ethereal internet hive-mind can help me out? A friend - a rather concrete thinker who mathematically models complex biological systems for a living - pointed out that my examples were largely routed in business-to-business web sales and support. He challenged me with: Say you've got a political website, so your goal is to have somebody read it and vote for you - how do you measure the effectiveness of that content? Well, you would. umm. Oh dear. I guess what we're talking about here, to yank it back to my present comfort zone, is a sales process where your point of conversion is off the site. The political example is perhaps a little below the belt, since what you can and can't do, and what data you can and can't collect is so restricted. You can't throw up a "How did you hear about this election?" questionnaire in the polling booth. Exit polls don't pull in your browsing history and site session information. Not everyone fatuously tweets and geo-tags each moment of their lives. Oh, and folks lie. The business example might be easier to attack. You could have, say, a site for a farm shop that only did over the counter sales. Either way, it's tricky. I fell back on some of the work I've done usability testing and benchmarking documentation, and suggested similar, quick and dirty, small sample qualitative UX trials. I'm not wholly sure that was right. Any thoughts? How might we measure and curate for this kind of discontinuous conversion?

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• Types of quotes for an HTML templating language

  - by Ralph

  I'm developing a templating language, and now I'm trying to decide on what I should do with quotes. I'm thinking about having 3 different types of quotes which are all handled differently: backtick ` double quote " single quote ' expand variables ? yes no escape sequences no yes ? escape html no yes yes Backticks Backticks are meant to be used for outputting JavaScript or unescaped HTML. It's often handy to be able to pass variables into JS, but it could also cause issues with things being treated as variables that shouldn't. My variables are PHP-style ($var) so I'm thinking that might mess with jQuery pretty bad... but if I disable variable expansion w/ backticks then, I'm not sure how would insert a variable into a JS code block? Single Quotes Not sure if escape sequences like \n should be treated as literals or converted. I find it pretty rare that I want to disable escape sequences, but if you do, you could use backticks. So I'm leaning towards "yes" for this one, but that would be contrary to how PHP does it. Double Quotes Pretty certain I want everything enabled for this one. Modifiers I'm also thinking about adding modifiers like @ or r in front of the string that would change some of these options to enable a few more combinations. I would need 9 different quotes or 3 quotes and 2 modifiers to get every combination wouldn't I? My language also supports "filters" which can be applied against any "term" (number, variable, string) so you could always write something like "blah blah $var blah"|expandvars Or "my string"|escapehtml Thoughts? What would you prefer? What would be least confusing/most intuitive?

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• Security vulnerability and nda's [closed]

  - by Chris

  I want to propose a situation and gain insight from the communities thoughts. A customer, call them Customer X has a contract with a vendor, Vendor Y to provide an application and services. Customer X discovers a serious authentication vulnerability in Vendor Y's software. Vendor Y and Customer X has a discussion. Vendor Y acknowledges/confirms flaw. Vendor Y confirms they will put effort to fix. Customer X requests Vendor Y to inform all customers impacted by this. Vendor agrees. Fast forward 2 months, and the flaw has not been fixed. Patches were applied to mitigate but the flaw still exists. However, no customers were informed of issue. At this point customer X contacts Vendor Y to determine the status and understand why customer's were not informed. The vendor nicely reminds the customer they are under an NDA and are still working on the issue. A few questions/discussion pieces out of this. By discussing a software flaw with a vendor, does this imply you have agreed to any type of NDA disclosure? Additionally, what rights as does Customer X have to inform other customers of this vulnerability if vendor does not appear willing to comply? I (the op) am under the impression that when this situation occurs, you are supposed to notify vendor of issue, provide them with ample time to respond and if no response you are able to do what you wish with the information. I am thinking back to the MIT/subway incident where they contacted transit authorities, transit authorities didn't respond in a timely fashion so the students disclosed the information publicly on their own. Few things to note about this: I am not the customer in above situation, also lets assume for purposes of keeping discussion inline that customer X has no intentions of disclosing information, they are merely concerned and interested in making sure other customers are aware until it is fixed so they do not expierence a major security breach. (More information can be supplied if needed to add context to question. )

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• displaying multi-section html documents - best practices

  - by ecpepper

  I work at a research organization and we publish a lot of large-ish documents, usually organized in sections. What I want to know is how best to present these multi-section documents on our website. Presently, what I do is load the entire document as a single page, with each section as its own div. Then I show and hide divs as needed via a table of contents and "next" and "prev" buttons. The advantages to this are mainly: 1) that you can move between sections very quickly, 2) it produces consistent analytics (when a page is loaded, I know a report is being read). The disadvantages, however, are real: Readers can't take advantage of browser back/forward buttons to move between sections. It's complicated to create direct links to individual sections (I can do it with javascript but it's not easy for other people to grab and share). For long reports, you have to wait for the full report to load before you can move around (and that can include hordes of images and charts). Do other people have thoughts on better ways to organize this? Here's an example of the current system: http://massbudget.org/825

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• Does it make sense to develop open source python library for database inspection?

  - by gruszczy

  Some time ago I came up with an idea for a library for database inspection. I started developing it and got some very basic functionality, just to check if that's possible. Recently however, I get second thoughts, whether such project would really be useful. I am actually planning to develop following software suite: library for python, that would provide easy interface to inspect database structure, desktop application in PyQt that would use the interface to provide graphical database inspection, web application in Django that would use the interface to provide database inspection through the browser. Do you think such suite would be useful for other developers/database administrators/analysts? I know, that there is pgadmin for PostgreSQL and some tool for sqlite3 and that there is Java tool called DBInspect. Usually I would be against creating new tool and rather join existing project, but I am not Java programmer (and I would rather stick to python or C, which I like) and none of these projects provide a library for database inspection. Anyway I would like to hear some opinions from fellow developers, whether such project make sense or I should try to spend my free time on developing something else.

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• Backtick (Grave accent) button sticking

  - by Scott Lemmon

  I have Ubuntu 12.04 running in a Virtual Box virtual machine, on my Windows 7 32bit system. It has been working great, except that the backtick/tilde button sticks(not physically). When I hit the backtick button it keeps repeating until another input button is pressed. So if I press the spacebar while the backtick is repeating, it stops, but if I press the shift while it is repeating, the backtick turns into a tilde, and the tilde keeps repeating until I release the shift key (at which point it's a backtick again and keeps repeating). This sticking behavior only happens with the backtick key, and only in my Ubuntu virtualization, never in windows. I've tried both my laptop's keyboard and an external USB keyboard and the problem happens on both. Both keyboards I've tried are Japanese 106/109 key layout, but I'm using them with a English(US) 101 profile. When I refer to the backtick key above, I mean where it is on the US layout. If I use the Japanese profile, the key in that location (the US backtick location) still sticks, but its no longer mapped as the backtick key. Any thoughts as to what might be causing this and possible solutions? I've searched a lot, but have not found any help so far. Any help is greatly appreciated.

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• MIA

  - by Robert May

  So, I’ve been missing in action on this blog for quite some time.  I need to rectify that. Part of the reason I’ve been absent is because I haven’t be able to talk about what I’m working on.  A former client watches my blog rather closely, and although we accomplished many good things together, their culture is such that they really don’t like people to freely express their thoughts (you’ll note my blog posts stopped rather abruptly).  I learned some really important lessons about Agile in the last 3 years, and I think its worthwhile to talk about them.  Sometimes things worked really well, sometimes, they failed failed.  Sometimes that failure was me, sometimes it wasn’t. I understand Agile better now, and hopefully, what I have to say will guide others through this process and help others understand Agile better. One thing that I’ve learned is that MANY companies that say they are doing Agile are NOT really doing Agile.  To often, they pick the things they like and don’t follow the process long enough to know what rules they can break, and which ones they shouldn’t.  This is probably the primary reason why Agile fails. So, expect more posts, especially as I’m flying coast to coast. :)

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• Ruby or Python?

  - by Bobby Tables

  Hi all, This question is extremely subjective and open-ended. It might even sound like something I should just research for myself and make my own decision. But I'd like to put it out there and get some thoughts from others. Long story short - I burned out with the rat race and am on a self-funded sabbatical this year. Much of it is to take a break from the corporate grind and travel around, but I also want to play around with new technologies and do some self-learning projects, to stay up to speed on programming, and well - I just love tinkering with programming, when there's no pressure! Here's the thing: I am a lifetime C/C++/Java programmer. I'm a bit of a squiggly bracket snob since I've been working with this family of languages for my entire programming career. So I'd like to learn a language which isn't so closely syntactically related to this group. What I'm basically looking for is a language which is relatively general purpose, fun to learn, has some new concepts that are different from C++/Java, and has a good community. A secondary consideration is that it has good web development frameworks. A tertiary consideration is that it's not totally academic (read: there are real world jobs out there using it). I've narrowed it down to Ruby or Python. My impression of Ruby is that it is extremely web oriented - that the only real application of it is as a server side scripting language for doing web stuff (mainly Ruby on Rails). For Python I'm not so sure. TL;DR and to put it as succinctly as possible: which of these would be better for a C++/Java guy to learn to get some new perspectives on programming? And which is more open and general purpose and applicable to a wider set of applications? I'm leaning towards Ruby at the moment, but I worry to an extent that it looks like it's used as nothing but a server side web language.

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• Spring 2012 Provides Plenty of Events for Developers

  - by Lori Lalonde

  April, May and June will be jam-packed with some really cool events, not just within the KW region, but across Canada (and one very popular annual event coming up in the US). Be sure to check them out if you plan to be in the area, and register early! These events tend to fill up quickly. MoBeers 3: The European Invasion, an event where it's all about great mobile content and beers, is coming to Kitchener on April 10th at The Museum. Registration is $5. For more details, check out http://www.mobeers.com Windows 8 Camps are coming up in Toronto (April 16th & 17th), Vancouver (April 3 & 4), and Montreal (April 10 & 11). It's a 2 day event, and is free to attend. Unfortunately registration is now closed, so if you happened to be one of the lucky ones to get in on the registration before they filled up, let me know your thoughts/experiences on this event. Techfest 2012 will be taking place in Vancouver on April 28th. More information can be found on the event site at http://www.vancouvertechfest.com. Registration is $30 for students, $75 for everyone else! Redengine is hosting Umbraco v5 training and certification sessions in Kitchener/Waterloo from May 1st – May 4th. More details on this event can be found on the Redengine site at: http://redengine.com/redengineering DevTeach will be presenting a conference in Vancouver from May 28th to June 1st at the Hilton Vancouver Metrotown. More details on the sessions, speakers, and pre and post-conference events can be found at http://www.devteach.com. And outside of Canada, TechEd 2012 North America will be in Orlando from June 11th - 14th. Registration is still available on the event site: http://northamerica.msteched.com

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• Prevent Eclipse Java Builder from Compiling Java-Like Source

  - by redjamjar

  I'm in the process of writing an eclipse plugin for my programming language Whiley (see http://whiley.org). The plugin is working reasonably well, although there's lots to do. Two pieces of the jigsaw are: I've created a "Whiley Builder" by subclassing incremental project builder. This handles building and cleaning of "*.whiley" files. I've created a content-type called "Whiley Source Files" for "*.whiley" files, which extends "org.eclipse.jdt.core.javaSource" (this follows Andrew Eisenberg suggestion). The advantage of having the content-type extend javaSource is that it immediately fits into the package explorer, etc. In principle, I could fleshout ICompilationUnit to provide more useful info, although I haven't done that yet. The disadvantage is that the Java builder is trying to compile my whiley files ... and it obviously can't. Originally, I had the Java Builder run first, then the Whiley builder. Superficially, this actually worked out quite well since all of the errors from the Java Builder were discarded by the Whiley Builder (for whiley files). However, I actually want the Whiley Builder to run first, as this is the best way for me to resolve dependencies between Java and Whiley files. Which leads me to my question: can I stop the Java builder from trying to compile certain java-like resources? Specifically, in my case, those with the "*.whiley" extension. As an alternative, I was wondering whether my Whiley Builder could somehow update the resource delta to remove those files which it has dealt with. Thoughts?

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• Podcast Show Notes: Are You Future Proof?

  - by Bob Rhubart

  On September 14, 2012 ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick published Why IT is a Profession in Flux, a short article in which he makes the observation that "IT professionals are under considerable pressure to deliver more value to the business, versus being good at coding and testing and deploying and integrating." I forwarded that article to my list of Usual Suspects (the nearly 40 people who have participated in the podcast over the last 3 years), along with a suggestion that I wanted to put together a panel discussion to further explore the issue. This podcast is the result. As it happened, three of the people who responded to my query were in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld, as was I, so I seized the rare opportunity for a face to face conversation. The participants are all Oracle ACE Directors, as well as architects: Ron Batra, Director of Cloud Computing at AT&T Basheer Khan, Founder, President and CEO at Innowave Technology Ronald van Luttikhuizen, Managing Partner at Vennster. The Conversation Listen to Part 1 Future-Proofing: As powerful forces reshape enterprise IT, your IT and software development skills may not be enough. Listen to Part 2 Survival Strategy: Re-tooling one’s skill set to reflect changes in enterprise IT, including the knowledge to steer stakeholders around the hype to what’s truly valuable. Listen to Part 3 Writing on the Wall: Do the technological trends that are shaping enterprise IT pose any threat to basic software development roles? What opportunities do these changes represent? The entire conversation is also available in video format from the OTN YouTube Channel. Your Two Cents What are you doing to future-proof your IT career? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

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• Great Blog Comments

  - by Paul Sorensen

  Just a quick note to let you know that in the interest of keeping the most useful content available here on the Oracle Certification Blog, we do moderate the comments. We welcome (and encourage dialog, questions, comments, etc) here on the topics at hand. We'll never 'censor' out a comment just because we don't like it - in fact, this is how we often learn ways in which we can do better. But of course we will filter out the typical list like anyone else: crude/offensive remarks, foul language, reference to illegal activity, etc. We will also often redirect any customer-service type inquiries to [email protected] where they can best be handled.Also, if you have a question of a general nature, please research it on the Oracle Certification website first. We often won't respond to questions asking such as "tell me how to get 11g ocp", as we've already made sure that you have that kind of information available. Now if we've inadvertently 'hidden' something on our site (gulp), then fair enough - please let us know that you're having a hard time finding it and we'll be sure to try and "unbury it" ;-)Additionally, you may have more of an 'opinion' type question, such as "should I do 'x' certification or 'y' certification." For these, we highly recommend checking on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Certification Forum, where you can engage in peer-to-peer discussions, share techniques, advice and best practices with others in the field.In the meantime, please continue to share your thoughts, ideas, opinions, tech tips etc - we look forward to seeing them and passing them wherever we can!QUICK LINKS:Oracle Certification WebsiteEmail - Customer ServiceOracle Technology Network (OTN) Certification Forum

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• Adopting Technologies for the Sake of Technologies

  - by shiju

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

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