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26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

- by Michael Snow

Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions. That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links: Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!! Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way. CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses. --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶ ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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The Incremental Architect’s Napkin - #5 - Design functions for extensibility and readability

- by Ralf Westphal

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/08/24/the-incremental-architectrsquos-napkin---5---design-functions-for.aspx The functionality of programs is entered via Entry Points. So what we´re talking about when designing software is a bunch of functions handling the requests represented by and flowing in through those Entry Points. Designing software thus consists of at least three phases: Analyzing the requirements to find the Entry Points and their signatures Designing the functionality to be executed when those Entry Points get triggered Implementing the functionality according to the design aka coding I presume, you´re familiar with phase 1 in some way. And I guess you´re proficient in implementing functionality in some programming language. But in my experience developers in general are not experienced in going through an explicit phase 2. “Designing functionality? What´s that supposed to mean?” you might already have thought. Here´s my definition: To design functionality (or functional design for short) means thinking about… well, functions. You find a solution for what´s supposed to happen when an Entry Point gets triggered in terms of functions. A conceptual solution that is, because those functions only exist in your head (or on paper) during this phase. But you may have guess that, because it´s “design” not “coding”. And here is, what functional design is not: It´s not about logic. Logic is expressions (e.g. +, -, && etc.) and control statements (e.g. if, switch, for, while etc.). Also I consider calling external APIs as logic. It´s equally basic. It´s what code needs to do in order to deliver some functionality or quality. Logic is what´s doing that needs to be done by software. Transformations are either done through expressions or API-calls. And then there is alternative control flow depending on the result of some expression. Basically it´s just jumps in Assembler, sometimes to go forward (if, switch), sometimes to go backward (for, while, do). But calling your own function is not logic. It´s not necessary to produce any outcome. Functionality is not enhanced by adding functions (subroutine calls) to your code. Nor is quality increased by adding functions. No performance gain, no higher scalability etc. through functions. Functions are not relevant to functionality. Strange, isn´t it. What they are important for is security of investment. By introducing functions into our code we can become more productive (re-use) and can increase evolvability (higher unterstandability, easier to keep code consistent). That´s no small feat, however. Evolvable code can hardly be overestimated. That´s why to me functional design is so important. It´s at the core of software development. To sum this up: Functional design is on a level of abstraction above (!) logical design or algorithmic design. Functional design is only done until you get to a point where each function is so simple you are very confident you can easily code it. Functional design an logical design (which mostly is coding, but can also be done using pseudo code or flow charts) are complementary. Software needs both. If you start coding right away you end up in a tangled mess very quickly. Then you need back out through refactoring. Functional design on the other hand is bloodless without actual code. It´s just a theory with no experiments to prove it. But how to do functional design? An example of functional design Let´s assume a program to de-duplicate strings. The user enters a number of strings separated by commas, e.g. a, b, a, c, d, b, e, c, a. And the program is supposed to clear this list of all doubles, e.g. a, b, c, d, e. There is only one Entry Point to this program: the user triggers the de-duplication by starting the program with the string list on the command line C:\>deduplicate "a, b, a, c, d, b, e, c, a" a, b, c, d, e …or by clicking on a GUI button. This leads to the Entry Point function to get called. It´s the program´s main function in case of the batch version or a button click event handler in the GUI version. That´s the physical Entry Point so to speak. It´s inevitable. What then happens is a three step process: Transform the input data from the user into a request. Call the request handler. Transform the output of the request handler into a tangible result for the user. Or to phrase it a bit more generally: Accept input. Transform input into output. Present output. This does not mean any of these steps requires a lot of effort. Maybe it´s just one line of code to accomplish it. Nevertheless it´s a distinct step in doing the processing behind an Entry Point. Call it an aspect or a responsibility - and you will realize it most likely deserves a function of its own to satisfy the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). Interestingly the above list of steps is already functional design. There is no logic, but nevertheless the solution is described - albeit on a higher level of abstraction than you might have done yourself. But it´s still on a meta-level. The application to the domain at hand is easy, though: Accept string list from command line De-duplicate Present de-duplicated strings on standard output And this concrete list of processing steps can easily be transformed into code:static void Main(string[] args) { var input = Accept_string_list(args); var output = Deduplicate(input); Present_deduplicated_string_list(output); } Instead of a big problem there are three much smaller problems now. If you think each of those is trivial to implement, then go for it. You can stop the functional design at this point. But maybe, just maybe, you´re not so sure how to go about with the de-duplication for example. Then just implement what´s easy right now, e.g.private static string Accept_string_list(string[] args) { return args[0]; } private static void Present_deduplicated_string_list( string[] output) { var line = string.Join(", ", output); Console.WriteLine(line); } Accept_string_list() contains logic in the form of an API-call. Present_deduplicated_string_list() contains logic in the form of an expression and an API-call. And then repeat the functional design for the remaining processing step. What´s left is the domain logic: de-duplicating a list of strings. How should that be done? Without any logic at our disposal during functional design you´re left with just functions. So which functions could make up the de-duplication? Here´s a suggestion: De-duplicate Parse the input string into a true list of strings. Register each string in a dictionary/map/set. That way duplicates get cast away. Transform the data structure into a list of unique strings. Processing step 2 obviously was the core of the solution. That´s where real creativity was needed. That´s the core of the domain. But now after this refinement the implementation of each step is easy again:private static string[] Parse_string_list(string input) { return input.Split(',') .Select(s => s.Trim()) .ToArray(); } private static Dictionary<string,object> Compile_unique_strings(string[] strings) { return strings.Aggregate( new Dictionary<string, object>(), (agg, s) => { agg[s] = null; return agg; }); } private static string[] Serialize_unique_strings( Dictionary<string,object> dict) { return dict.Keys.ToArray(); } With these three additional functions Main() now looks like this:static void Main(string[] args) { var input = Accept_string_list(args); var strings = Parse_string_list(input); var dict = Compile_unique_strings(strings); var output = Serialize_unique_strings(dict); Present_deduplicated_string_list(output); } I think that´s very understandable code: just read it from top to bottom and you know how the solution to the problem works. It´s a mirror image of the initial design: Accept string list from command line Parse the input string into a true list of strings. Register each string in a dictionary/map/set. That way duplicates get cast away. Transform the data structure into a list of unique strings. Present de-duplicated strings on standard output You can even re-generate the design by just looking at the code. Code and functional design thus are always in sync - if you follow some simple rules. But about that later. And as a bonus: all the functions making up the process are small - which means easy to understand, too. So much for an initial concrete example. Now it´s time for some theory. Because there is method to this madness ;-) The above has only scratched the surface. Introducing Flow Design Functional design starts with a given function, the Entry Point. Its goal is to describe the behavior of the program when the Entry Point is triggered using a process, not an algorithm. An algorithm consists of logic, a process on the other hand consists just of steps or stages. Each processing step transforms input into output or a side effect. Also it might access resources, e.g. a printer, a database, or just memory. Processing steps thus can rely on state of some sort. This is different from Functional Programming, where functions are supposed to not be stateful and not cause side effects.[1] In its simplest form a process can be written as a bullet point list of steps, e.g. Get data from user Output result to user Transform data Parse data Map result for output Such a compilation of steps - possibly on different levels of abstraction - often is the first artifact of functional design. It can be generated by a team in an initial design brainstorming. Next comes ordering the steps. What should happen first, what next etc.? Get data from user Parse data Transform data Map result for output Output result to user That´s great for a start into functional design. It´s better than starting to code right away on a given function using TDD. Please get me right: TDD is a valuable practice. But it can be unnecessarily hard if the scope of a functionn is too large. But how do you know beforehand without investing some thinking? And how to do this thinking in a systematic fashion? My recommendation: For any given function you´re supposed to implement first do a functional design. Then, once you´re confident you know the processing steps - which are pretty small - refine and code them using TDD. You´ll see that´s much, much easier - and leads to cleaner code right away. For more information on this approach I call “Informed TDD” read my book of the same title. Thinking before coding is smart. And writing down the solution as a bunch of functions possibly is the simplest thing you can do, I´d say. It´s more according to the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle than returning constants or other trivial stuff TDD development often is started with. So far so good. A simple ordered list of processing steps will do to start with functional design. As shown in the above example such steps can easily be translated into functions. Moving from design to coding thus is simple. However, such a list does not scale. Processing is not always that simple to be captured in a list. And then the list is just text. Again. Like code. That means the design is lacking visuality. Textual representations need more parsing by your brain than visual representations. Plus they are limited in their “dimensionality”: text just has one dimension, it´s sequential. Alternatives and parallelism are hard to encode in text. In addition the functional design using numbered lists lacks data. It´s not visible what´s the input, output, and state of the processing steps. That´s why functional design should be done using a lightweight visual notation. No tool is necessary to draw such designs. Use pen and paper; a flipchart, a whiteboard, or even a napkin is sufficient. Visualizing processes The building block of the functional design notation is a functional unit. I mostly draw it like this: Something is done, it´s clear what goes in, it´s clear what comes out, and it´s clear what the processing step requires in terms of state or hardware. Whenever input flows into a functional unit it gets processed and output is produced and/or a side effect occurs. Flowing data is the driver of something happening. That´s why I call this approach to functional design Flow Design. It´s about data flow instead of control flow. Control flow like in algorithms is of no concern to functional design. Thinking about control flow simply is too low level. Once you start with control flow you easily get bogged down by tons of details. That´s what you want to avoid during design. Design is supposed to be quick, broad brush, abstract. It should give overview. But what about all the details? As Robert C. Martin rightly said: “Programming is abot detail”. Detail is a matter of code. Once you start coding the processing steps you designed you can worry about all the detail you want. Functional design does not eliminate all the nitty gritty. It just postpones tackling them. To me that´s also an example of the SRP. Function design has the responsibility to come up with a solution to a problem posed by a single function (Entry Point). And later coding has the responsibility to implement the solution down to the last detail (i.e. statement, API-call). TDD unfortunately mixes both responsibilities. It´s just coding - and thereby trying to find detailed implementations (green phase) plus getting the design right (refactoring). To me that´s one reason why TDD has failed to deliver on its promise for many developers. Using functional units as building blocks of functional design processes can be depicted very easily. Here´s the initial process for the example problem: For each processing step draw a functional unit and label it. Choose a verb or an “action phrase” as a label, not a noun. Functional design is about activities, not state or structure. Then make the output of an upstream step the input of a downstream step. Finally think about the data that should flow between the functional units. Write the data above the arrows connecting the functional units in the direction of the data flow. Enclose the data description in brackets. That way you can clearly see if all flows have already been specified. Empty brackets mean “no data is flowing”, but nevertheless a signal is sent. A name like “list” or “strings” in brackets describes the data content. Use lower case labels for that purpose. A name starting with an upper case letter like “String” or “Customer” on the other hand signifies a data type. If you like, you also can combine descriptions with data types by separating them with a colon, e.g. (list:string) or (strings:string[]). But these are just suggestions from my practice with Flow Design. You can do it differently, if you like. Just be sure to be consistent. Flows wired-up in this manner I call one-dimensional (1D). Each functional unit just has one input and/or one output. A functional unit without an output is possible. It´s like a black hole sucking up input without producing any output. Instead it produces side effects. A functional unit without an input, though, does make much sense. When should it start to work? What´s the trigger? That´s why in the above process even the first processing step has an input. If you like, view such 1D-flows as pipelines. Data is flowing through them from left to right. But as you can see, it´s not always the same data. It get´s transformed along its passage: (args) becomes a (list) which is turned into (strings). The Principle of Mutual Oblivion A very characteristic trait of flows put together from function units is: no functional units knows another one. They are all completely independent of each other. Functional units don´t know where their input is coming from (or even when it´s gonna arrive). They just specify a range of values they can process. And they promise a certain behavior upon input arriving. Also they don´t know where their output is going. They just produce it in their own time independent of other functional units. That means at least conceptually all functional units work in parallel. Functional units don´t know their “deployment context”. They now nothing about the overall flow they are place in. They are just consuming input from some upstream, and producing output for some downstream. That makes functional units very easy to test. At least as long as they don´t depend on state or resources. I call this the Principle of Mutual Oblivion (PoMO). Functional units are oblivious of others as well as an overall context/purpose. They are just parts of a whole focused on a single responsibility. How the whole is built, how a larger goal is achieved, is of no concern to the single functional units. By building software in such a manner, functional design interestingly follows nature. Nature´s building blocks for organisms also follow the PoMO. The cells forming your body do not know each other. Take a nerve cell “controlling” a muscle cell for example:[2] The nerve cell does not know anything about muscle cells, let alone the specific muscel cell it is “attached to”. Likewise the muscle cell does not know anything about nerve cells, let a lone a specific nerve cell “attached to” it. Saying “the nerve cell is controlling the muscle cell” thus only makes sense when viewing both from the outside. “Control” is a concept of the whole, not of its parts. Control is created by wiring-up parts in a certain way. Both cells are mutually oblivious. Both just follow a contract. One produces Acetylcholine (ACh) as output, the other consumes ACh as input. Where the ACh is going, where it´s coming from neither cell cares about. Million years of evolution have led to this kind of division of labor. And million years of evolution have produced organism designs (DNA) which lead to the production of these different cell types (and many others) and also to their co-location. The result: the overall behavior of an organism. How and why this happened in nature is a mystery. For our software, though, it´s clear: functional and quality requirements needs to be fulfilled. So we as developers have to become “intelligent designers” of “software cells” which we put together to form a “software organism” which responds in satisfying ways to triggers from it´s environment. My bet is: If nature gets complex organisms working by following the PoMO, who are we to not apply this recipe for success to our much simpler “machines”? So my rule is: Wherever there is functionality to be delivered, because there is a clear Entry Point into software, design the functionality like nature would do it. Build it from mutually oblivious functional units. That´s what Flow Design is about. In that way it´s even universal, I´d say. Its notation can also be applied to biology: Never mind labeling the functional units with nouns. That´s ok in Flow Design. You´ll do that occassionally for functional units on a higher level of abstraction or when their purpose is close to hardware. Getting a cockroach to roam your bedroom takes 1,000,000 nerve cells (neurons). Getting the de-duplication program to do its job just takes 5 “software cells” (functional units). Both, though, follow the same basic principle. Translating functional units into code Moving from functional design to code is no rocket science. In fact it´s straightforward. There are two simple rules: Translate an input port to a function. Translate an output port either to a return statement in that function or to a function pointer visible to that function. The simplest translation of a functional unit is a function. That´s what you saw in the above example. Functions are mutually oblivious. That why Functional Programming likes them so much. It makes them composable. Which is the reason, nature works according to the PoMO. Let´s be clear about one thing: There is no dependency injection in nature. For all of an organism´s complexity no DI container is used. Behavior is the result of smooth cooperation between mutually oblivious building blocks. Functions will often be the adequate translation for the functional units in your designs. But not always. Take for example the case, where a processing step should not always produce an output. Maybe the purpose is to filter input. Here the functional unit consumes words and produces words. But it does not pass along every word flowing in. Some words are swallowed. Think of a spell checker. It probably should not check acronyms for correctness. There are too many of them. Or words with no more than two letters. Such words are called “stop words”. In the above picture the optionality of the output is signified by the astrisk outside the brackets. It means: Any number of (word) data items can flow from the functional unit for each input data item. It might be none or one or even more. This I call a stream of data. Such behavior cannot be translated into a function where output is generated with return. Because a function always needs to return a value. So the output port is translated into a function pointer or continuation which gets passed to the subroutine when called:[3]void filter_stop_words( string word, Action<string> onNoStopWord) { if (...check if not a stop word...) onNoStopWord(word); } If you want to be nitpicky you might call such a function pointer parameter an injection. And technically you´re right. Conceptually, though, it´s not an injection. Because the subroutine is not functionally dependent on the continuation. Firstly continuations are procedures, i.e. subroutines without a return type. Remember: Flow Design is about unidirectional data flow. Secondly the name of the formal parameter is chosen in a way as to not assume anything about downstream processing steps. onNoStopWord describes a situation (or event) within the functional unit only. Translating output ports into function pointers helps keeping functional units mutually oblivious in cases where output is optional or produced asynchronically. Either pass the function pointer to the function upon call. Or make it global by putting it on the encompassing class. Then it´s called an event. In C# that´s even an explicit feature.class Filter { public void filter_stop_words( string word) { if (...check if not a stop word...) onNoStopWord(word); } public event Action<string> onNoStopWord; } When to use a continuation and when to use an event dependens on how a functional unit is used in flows and how it´s packed together with others into classes. You´ll see examples further down the Flow Design road. Another example of 1D functional design Let´s see Flow Design once more in action using the visual notation. How about the famous word wrap kata? Robert C. Martin has posted a much cited solution including an extensive reasoning behind his TDD approach. So maybe you want to compare it to Flow Design. The function signature given is:string WordWrap(string text, int maxLineLength) {...} That´s not an Entry Point since we don´t see an application with an environment and users. Nevertheless it´s a function which is supposed to provide a certain functionality. The text passed in has to be reformatted. The input is a single line of arbitrary length consisting of words separated by spaces. The output should consist of one or more lines of a maximum length specified. If a word is longer than a the maximum line length it can be split in multiple parts each fitting in a line. Flow Design Let´s start by brainstorming the process to accomplish the feat of reformatting the text. What´s needed? Words need to be assembled into lines Words need to be extracted from the input text The resulting lines need to be assembled into the output text Words too long to fit in a line need to be split Does sound about right? I guess so. And it shows a kind of priority. Long words are a special case. So maybe there is a hint for an incremental design here. First let´s tackle “average words” (words not longer than a line). Here´s the Flow Design for this increment: The the first three bullet points turned into functional units with explicit data added. As the signature requires a text is transformed into another text. See the input of the first functional unit and the output of the last functional unit. In between no text flows, but words and lines. That´s good to see because thereby the domain is clearly represented in the design. The requirements are talking about words and lines and here they are. But note the asterisk! It´s not outside the brackets but inside. That means it´s not a stream of words or lines, but lists or sequences. For each text a sequence of words is output. For each sequence of words a sequence of lines is produced. The asterisk is used to abstract from the concrete implementation. Like with streams. Whether the list of words gets implemented as an array or an IEnumerable is not important during design. It´s an implementation detail. Does any processing step require further refinement? I don´t think so. They all look pretty “atomic” to me. And if not… I can always backtrack and refine a process step using functional design later once I´ve gained more insight into a sub-problem. Implementation The implementation is straightforward as you can imagine. The processing steps can all be translated into functions. Each can be tested easily and separately. Each has a focused responsibility. And the process flow becomes just a sequence of function calls: Easy to understand. It clearly states how word wrapping works - on a high level of abstraction. And it´s easy to evolve as you´ll see. Flow Design - Increment 2 So far only texts consisting of “average words” are wrapped correctly. Words not fitting in a line will result in lines too long. Wrapping long words is a feature of the requested functionality. Whether it´s there or not makes a difference to the user. To quickly get feedback I decided to first implement a solution without this feature. But now it´s time to add it to deliver the full scope. Fortunately Flow Design automatically leads to code following the Open Closed Principle (OCP). It´s easy to extend it - instead of changing well tested code. How´s that possible? Flow Design allows for extension of functionality by inserting functional units into the flow. That way existing functional units need not be changed. The data flow arrow between functional units is a natural extension point. No need to resort to the Strategy Pattern. No need to think ahead where extions might need to be made in the future. I just “phase in” the remaining processing step: Since neither Extract words nor Reformat know of their environment neither needs to be touched due to the “detour”. The new processing step accepts the output of the existing upstream step and produces data compatible with the existing downstream step. Implementation - Increment 2 A trivial implementation checking the assumption if this works does not do anything to split long words. The input is just passed on: Note how clean WordWrap() stays. The solution is easy to understand. A developer looking at this code sometime in the future, when a new feature needs to be build in, quickly sees how long words are dealt with. Compare this to Robert C. Martin´s solution:[4] How does this solution handle long words? Long words are not even part of the domain language present in the code. At least I need considerable time to understand the approach. Admittedly the Flow Design solution with the full implementation of long word splitting is longer than Robert C. Martin´s. At least it seems. Because his solution does not cover all the “word wrap situations” the Flow Design solution handles. Some lines would need to be added to be on par, I guess. But even then… Is a difference in LOC that important as long as it´s in the same ball park? I value understandability and openness for extension higher than saving on the last line of code. Simplicity is not just less code, it´s also clarity in design. But don´t take my word for it. Try Flow Design on larger problems and compare for yourself. What´s the easier, more straightforward way to clean code? And keep in mind: You ain´t seen all yet ;-) There´s more to Flow Design than described in this chapter. In closing I hope I was able to give you a impression of functional design that makes you hungry for more. To me it´s an inevitable step in software development. Jumping from requirements to code does not scale. And it leads to dirty code all to quickly. Some thought should be invested first. Where there is a clear Entry Point visible, it´s functionality should be designed using data flows. Because with data flows abstraction is possible. For more background on why that´s necessary read my blog article here. For now let me point out to you - if you haven´t already noticed - that Flow Design is a general purpose declarative language. It´s “programming by intention” (Shalloway et al.). Just write down how you think the solution should work on a high level of abstraction. This breaks down a large problem in smaller problems. And by following the PoMO the solutions to those smaller problems are independent of each other. So they are easy to test. Or you could even think about getting them implemented in parallel by different team members. Flow Design not only increases evolvability, but also helps becoming more productive. All team members can participate in functional design. This goes beyon collective code ownership. We´re talking collective design/architecture ownership. Because with Flow Design there is a common visual language to talk about functional design - which is the foundation for all other design activities. PS: If you like what you read, consider getting my ebook “The Incremental Architekt´s Napkin”. It´s where I compile all the articles in this series for easier reading. I like the strictness of Function Programming - but I also find it quite hard to live by. And it certainly is not what millions of programmers are used to. Also to me it seems, the real world is full of state and side effects. So why give them such a bad image? That´s why functional design takes a more pragmatic approach. State and side effects are ok for processing steps - but be sure to follow the SRP. Don´t put too much of it into a single processing step. ? Image taken from www.physioweb.org ? My code samples are written in C#. C# sports typed function pointers called delegates. Action is such a function pointer type matching functions with signature void someName(T t). Other languages provide similar ways to work with functions as first class citizens - even Java now in version 8. I trust you find a way to map this detail of my translation to your favorite programming language. I know it works for Java, C++, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Go. And if you´re using a Functional Programming language it´s of course a no brainer. ? Taken from his blog post “The Craftsman 62, The Dark Path”. ?

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AngularJS on top of ASP.NET: Moving the MVC framework out to the browser

- by Varun Chatterji

Heavily drawing inspiration from Ruby on Rails, MVC4’s convention over configuration model of development soon became the Holy Grail of .NET web development. The MVC model brought with it the goodness of proper separation of concerns between business logic, data, and the presentation logic. However, the MVC paradigm, was still one in which server side .NET code could be mixed with presentation code. The Razor templating engine, though cleaner than its predecessors, still encouraged and allowed you to mix .NET server side code with presentation logic. Thus, for example, if the developer required a certain <div> tag to be shown if a particular variable ShowDiv was true in the View’s model, the code could look like the following: Fig 1: To show a div or not. Server side .NET code is used in the View Mixing .NET code with HTML in views can soon get very messy. Wouldn’t it be nice if the presentation layer (HTML) could be pure HTML? Also, in the ASP.NET MVC model, some of the business logic invariably resides in the controller. It is tempting to use an antipattern like the one shown above to control whether a div should be shown or not. However, best practice would indicate that the Controller should not be aware of the div. The ShowDiv variable in the model should not exist. A controller should ideally, only be used to do the plumbing of getting the data populated in the model and nothing else. The view (ideally pure HTML) should render the presentation layer based on the model. In this article we will see how Angular JS, a new JavaScript framework by Google can be used effectively to build web applications where: 1. Views are pure HTML 2. Controllers (in the server sense) are pure REST based API calls 3. The presentation layer is loaded as needed from partial HTML only files. What is MVVM? MVVM short for Model View View Model is a new paradigm in web development. In this paradigm, the Model and View stuff exists on the client side through javascript instead of being processed on the server through postbacks. These frameworks are JavaScript frameworks that facilitate the clear separation of the “frontend” or the data rendering logic from the “backend” which is typically just a REST based API that loads and processes data through a resource model. The frameworks are called MVVM as a change to the Model (through javascript) gets reflected in the view immediately i.e. Model > View. Also, a change on the view (through manual input) gets reflected in the model immediately i.e. View > Model. The following figure shows this conceptually (comments are shown in red): Fig 2: Demonstration of MVVM in action In Fig 2, two text boxes are bound to the same variable model.myInt. Thus, changing the view manually (changing one text box through keyboard input) also changes the other textbox in real time demonstrating V > M property of a MVVM framework. Furthermore, clicking the button adds 1 to the value of model.myInt thus changing the model through JavaScript. This immediately updates the view (the value in the two textboxes) thus demonstrating the M > V property of a MVVM framework. Thus we see that the model in a MVVM JavaScript framework can be regarded as “the single source of truth“. This is an important concept. Angular is one such MVVM framework. We shall use it to build a simple app that sends SMS messages to a particular number. Application, Routes, Views, Controllers, Scope and Models Angular can be used in many ways to construct web applications. For this article, we shall only focus on building Single Page Applications (SPAs). Many of the approaches we will follow in this article have alternatives. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain every nuance in detail but we shall try to touch upon the basic concepts and end up with a working application that can be used to send SMS messages using Sent.ly Plus (a service that is itself built using Angular). Before you read on, we would like to urge you to forget what you know about Models, Views, Controllers and Routes in the ASP.NET MVC4 framework. All these words have different meanings in the Angular world. Whenever these words are used in this article, they will refer to Angular concepts and not ASP.NET MVC4 concepts. The following figure shows the skeleton of the root page of an SPA: Fig 3: The skeleton of a SPA The skeleton of the application is based on the Bootstrap starter template which can be found at: http://getbootstrap.com/examples/startertemplate/ Apart from loading the Angular, jQuery and Bootstrap JavaScript libraries, it also loads our custom scripts /app/js/controllers.js /app/js/app.js These scripts define the routes, views and controllers which we shall come to in a moment. Application Notice that the body tag (Fig. 3) has an extra attribute: ngapp=”smsApp” Providing this tag “bootstraps” our single page application. It tells Angular to load a “module” called smsApp. This “module” is defined /app/js/app.js angular.module('smsApp', ['smsApp.controllers', function () {}]) Fig 4: The definition of our application module The line shows above, declares a module called smsApp. It also declares that this module “depends” on another module called “smsApp.controllers”. The smsApp.controllers module will contain all the controllers for our SPA. Routing and Views Notice that in the Navbar (in Fig 3) we have included two hyperlinks to: “#/app” “#/help” This is how Angular handles routing. Since the URLs start with “#”, they are actually just bookmarks (and not server side resources). However, our route definition (in /app/js/app.js) gives these URLs a special meaning within the Angular framework. angular.module('smsApp', ['smsApp.controllers', function () { }]) //Configure the routes .config(['$routeProvider', function ($routeProvider) { $routeProvider.when('/binding', { templateUrl: '/app/partials/bindingexample.html', controller: 'BindingController' }); }]); Fig 5: The definition of a route with an associated partial view and controller As we can see from the previous code sample, we are using the $routeProvider object in the configuration of our smsApp module. Notice how the code “asks for” the $routeProvider object by specifying it as a dependency in the [] braces and then defining a function that accepts it as a parameter. This is known as dependency injection. Please refer to the following link if you want to delve into this topic: http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/di What the above code snippet is doing is that it is telling Angular that when the URL is “#/binding”, then it should load the HTML snippet (“partial view”) found at /app/partials/bindingexample.html. Also, for this URL, Angular should load the controller called “BindingController”. We have also marked the div with the class “container” (in Fig 3) with the ngview attribute. This attribute tells Angular that views (partial HTML pages) defined in the routes will be loaded within this div. You can see that the Angular JavaScript framework, unlike many other frameworks, works purely by extending HTML tags and attributes. It also allows you to extend HTML with your own tags and attributes (through directives) if you so desire, you can find out more about directives at the following URL: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/607873/ExtendingHTMLwithAngularJSDirectives Controllers and Models We have seen how we define what views and controllers should be loaded for a particular route. Let us now consider how controllers are defined. Our controllers are defined in the file /app/js/controllers.js. The following snippet shows the definition of the “BindingController” which is loaded when we hit the URL http://localhost:port/index.html#/binding (as we have defined in the route earlier as shown in Fig 5). Remember that we had defined that our application module “smsApp” depends on the “smsApp.controllers” module (see Fig 4). The code snippet below shows how the “BindingController” defined in the route shown in Fig 5 is defined in the module smsApp.controllers: angular.module('smsApp.controllers', [function () { }]) .controller('BindingController', ['$scope', function ($scope) { $scope.model = {}; $scope.model.myInt = 6; $scope.addOne = function () { $scope.model.myInt++; } }]); Fig 6: The definition of a controller in the “smsApp.controllers” module. The pieces are falling in place! Remember Fig.2? That was the code of a partial view that was loaded within the container div of the skeleton SPA shown in Fig 3. The route definition shown in Fig 5 also defined that the controller called “BindingController” (shown in Fig 6.) was loaded when we loaded the URL: http://localhost:22544/index.html#/binding The button in Fig 2 was marked with the attribute ngclick=”addOne()” which added 1 to the value of model.myInt. In Fig 6, we can see that this function is actually defined in the “BindingController”. Scope We can see from Fig 6, that in the definition of “BindingController”, we defined a dependency on $scope and then, as usual, defined a function which “asks for” $scope as per the dependency injection pattern. So what is $scope? Any guesses? As you might have guessed a scope is a particular “address space” where variables and functions may be defined. This has a similar meaning to scope in a programming language like C#. Model: The Scope is not the Model It is tempting to assign variables in the scope directly. For example, we could have defined myInt as $scope.myInt = 6 in Fig 6 instead of $scope.model.myInt = 6. The reason why this is a bad idea is that scope in hierarchical in Angular. Thus if we were to define a controller which was defined within the another controller (nested controllers), then the inner controller would inherit the scope of the parent controller. This inheritance would follow JavaScript prototypal inheritance. Let’s say the parent controller defined a variable through $scope.myInt = 6. The child controller would inherit the scope through java prototypical inheritance. This basically means that the child scope has a variable myInt that points to the parent scopes myInt variable. Now if we assigned the value of myInt in the parent, the child scope would be updated with the same value as the child scope’s myInt variable points to the parent scope’s myInt variable. However, if we were to assign the value of the myInt variable in the child scope, then the link of that variable to the parent scope would be broken as the variable myInt in the child scope now points to the value 6 and not to the parent scope’s myInt variable. But, if we defined a variable model in the parent scope, then the child scope will also have a variable model that points to the model variable in the parent scope. Updating the value of $scope.model.myInt in the parent scope would change the model variable in the child scope too as the variable is pointed to the model variable in the parent scope. Now changing the value of $scope.model.myInt in the child scope would ALSO change the value in the parent scope. This is because the model reference in the child scope is pointed to the scope variable in the parent. We did no new assignment to the model variable in the child scope. We only changed an attribute of the model variable. Since the model variable (in the child scope) points to the model variable in the parent scope, we have successfully changed the value of myInt in the parent scope. Thus the value of $scope.model.myInt in the parent scope becomes the “single source of truth“. This is a tricky concept, thus it is considered good practice to NOT use scope inheritance. More info on prototypal inheritance in Angular can be found in the “JavaScript Prototypal Inheritance” section at the following URL: https://github.com/angular/angular.js/wiki/UnderstandingScopes. Building It: An Angular JS application using a .NET Web API Backend Now that we have a perspective on the basic components of an MVVM application built using Angular, let’s build something useful. We will build an application that can be used to send out SMS messages to a given phone number. The following diagram describes the architecture of the application we are going to build: Fig 7: Broad application architecture We are going to add an HTML Partial to our project. This partial will contain the form fields that will accept the phone number and message that needs to be sent as an SMS. It will also display all the messages that have previously been sent. All the executable code that is run on the occurrence of events (button clicks etc.) in the view resides in the controller. The controller interacts with the ASP.NET WebAPI to get a history of SMS messages, add a message etc. through a REST based API. For the purposes of simplicity, we will use an in memory data structure for the purposes of creating this application. Thus, the tasks ahead of us are: Creating the REST WebApi with GET, PUT, POST, DELETE methods. Creating the SmsView.html partial Creating the SmsController controller with methods that are called from the SmsView.html partial Add a new route that loads the controller and the partial. 1. Creating the REST WebAPI This is a simple task that should be quite straightforward to any .NET developer. The following listing shows our ApiController: public class SmsMessage { public string to { get; set; } public string message { get; set; } } public class SmsResource : SmsMessage { public int smsId { get; set; } } public class SmsResourceController : ApiController { public static Dictionary<int, SmsResource> messages = new Dictionary<int, SmsResource>(); public static int currentId = 0; // GET api/<controller> public List<SmsResource> Get() { List<SmsResource> result = new List<SmsResource>(); foreach (int key in messages.Keys) { result.Add(messages[key]); } return result; } // GET api/<controller>/5 public SmsResource Get(int id) { if (messages.ContainsKey(id)) return messages[id]; return null; } // POST api/<controller> public List<SmsResource> Post([FromBody] SmsMessage value) { //Synchronize on messages so we don't have id collisions lock (messages) { SmsResource res = (SmsResource) value; res.smsId = currentId++; messages.Add(res.smsId, res); //SentlyPlusSmsSender.SendMessage(value.to, value.message); return Get(); } } // PUT api/<controller>/5 public List<SmsResource> Put(int id, [FromBody] SmsMessage value) { //Synchronize on messages so we don't have id collisions lock (messages) { if (messages.ContainsKey(id)) { //Update the message messages[id].message = value.message; messages[id].to = value.message; } return Get(); } } // DELETE api/<controller>/5 public List<SmsResource> Delete(int id) { if (messages.ContainsKey(id)) { messages.Remove(id); } return Get(); } } Once this class is defined, we should be able to access the WebAPI by a simple GET request using the browser: http://localhost:port/api/SmsResource Notice the commented line: //SentlyPlusSmsSender.SendMessage The SentlyPlusSmsSender class is defined in the attached solution. We have shown this line as commented as we want to explain the core Angular concepts. If you load the attached solution, this line is uncommented in the source and an actual SMS will be sent! By default, the API returns XML. For consumption of the API in Angular, we would like it to return JSON. To change the default to JSON, we make the following change to WebApiConfig.cs file located in the App_Start folder. public static class WebApiConfig { public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config) { config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "DefaultApi", routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}", defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional } ); var appXmlType = config.Formatters.XmlFormatter. SupportedMediaTypes. FirstOrDefault( t => t.MediaType == "application/xml"); config.Formatters.XmlFormatter.SupportedMediaTypes.Remove(appXmlType); } } We now have our backend REST Api which we can consume from Angular! 2. Creating the SmsView.html partial This simple partial will define two fields: the destination phone number (international format starting with a +) and the message. These fields will be bound to model.phoneNumber and model.message. We will also add a button that we shall hook up to sendMessage() in the controller. A list of all previously sent messages (bound to model.allMessages) will also be displayed below the form input. The following code shows the code for the partial:  <div class="well" style="margin-top: 30px;"> <table style="width: 100%;"> <tr> <td style="width: 45%; text-align: center;"> <input type="text" placeholder="Phone number (eg; +44 7778 609466)" ng-model="model.phoneNumber" class="form-control" style="width: 90%" onkeypress="return checkPhoneInput();" /> </td> <td style="width: 45%; text-align: center;"> <input type="text" placeholder="Message" ng-model="model.message" class="form-control" style="width: 90%" /> </td> <td style="text-align: center;"> <button class="btn btn-danger" ng-click="sendMessage();" ng-disabled="model.isAjaxInProgress" style="marginright: 5px;">Send</button> <img src="/Content/ajax-loader.gif" ng-show="model.isAjaxInProgress" /> </td> </tr> </table> </div>  <div style="margin-top: 30px;">  <div ng-show="model.allMessages.length == 0"> No messages have been sent yet! </div>  <div ng-show="model.allMessages.length == 0"> <table style="width: 100%;" class="table table-striped"> <tr> <td>Phone Number</td> <td>Message</td> <td></td> </tr>  <tr ng-repeat="message in model.allMessages"> <td>{{ message.to }}</td> <td>{{ message.message }}</td> <td> <button class="btn btn-danger" ng-click="delete(message.smsId);" ng-disabled="model.isAjaxInProgress">Delete</button> </td> </tr> </table> </div> </div> The above code is commented and should be self explanatory. Conditional rendering is achieved through using the ng-show=”condition” attribute on various div tags. Input fields are bound to the model and the send button is bound to the sendMessage() function in the controller as through the ngclick=”sendMessage()” attribute defined on the button tag. While AJAX calls are taking place, the controller sets model.isAjaxInProgress to true. Based on this variable, buttons are disabled through the ng-disabled directive which is added as an attribute to the buttons. The ng-repeat directive added as an attribute to the tr tag causes the table row to be rendered multiple times much like an ASP.NET repeater. 3. Creating the SmsController controller The penultimate piece of our application is the controller which responds to events from our view and interacts with our MVC4 REST WebAPI. The following listing shows the code we need to add to /app/js/controllers.js. Note that controller definitions can be chained. Also note that this controller “asks for” the $http service. The $http service is a simple way in Angular to do AJAX. So far we have only encountered modules, controllers, views and directives in Angular. The $http is new entity in Angular called a service. More information on Angular services can be found at the following URL: http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/dev_guide.services.understanding_services. .controller('SmsController', ['$scope', '$http', function ($scope, $http) { //We define the model $scope.model = {}; //We define the allMessages array in the model //that will contain all the messages sent so far $scope.model.allMessages = []; //The error if any $scope.model.errorMessage = undefined; //We initially load data so set the isAjaxInProgress = true; $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = true; //Load all the messages $http({ url: '/api/smsresource', method: "GET" }). success(function (data, status, headers, config) { this callback will be called asynchronously //when the response is available $scope.model.allMessages = data; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }). error(function (data, status, headers, config) { //called asynchronously if an error occurs //or server returns response with an error status. $scope.model.errorMessage = "Error occurred status:" + status; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }); $scope.delete = function (id) { //We are making an ajax call so we set this to true $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = true; $http({ url: '/api/smsresource/' + id, method: "DELETE" }). success(function (data, status, headers, config) { // this callback will be called asynchronously // when the response is available $scope.model.allMessages = data; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }); error(function (data, status, headers, config) { // called asynchronously if an error occurs // or server returns response with an error status. $scope.model.errorMessage = "Error occurred status:" + status; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }); } $scope.sendMessage = function () { $scope.model.errorMessage = undefined; var message = ''; if($scope.model.message != undefined) message = $scope.model.message.trim(); if ($scope.model.phoneNumber == undefined || $scope.model.phoneNumber == '' || $scope.model.phoneNumber.length < 10 || $scope.model.phoneNumber[0] != '+') { $scope.model.errorMessage = "You must enter a valid phone number in international format. Eg: +44 7778 609466"; return; } if (message.length == 0) { $scope.model.errorMessage = "You must specify a message!"; return; } //We are making an ajax call so we set this to true $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = true; $http({ url: '/api/smsresource', method: "POST", data: { to: $scope.model.phoneNumber, message: $scope.model.message } }). success(function (data, status, headers, config) { // this callback will be called asynchronously // when the response is available $scope.model.allMessages = data; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }). error(function (data, status, headers, config) { // called asynchronously if an error occurs // or server returns response with an error status. $scope.model.errorMessage = "Error occurred status:" + status // We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }); } }]); We can see from the previous listing how the functions that are called from the view are defined in the controller. It should also be evident how easy it is to make AJAX calls to consume our MVC4 REST WebAPI. Now we are left with the final piece. We need to define a route that associates a particular path with the view we have defined and the controller we have defined. 4. Add a new route that loads the controller and the partial This is the easiest part of the puzzle. We simply define another route in the /app/js/app.js file: $routeProvider.when('/sms', { templateUrl: '/app/partials/smsview.html', controller: 'SmsController' }); Conclusion In this article we have seen how much of the server side functionality in the MVC4 framework can be moved to the browser thus delivering a snappy and fast user interface. We have seen how we can build client side HTML only views that avoid the messy syntax offered by server side Razor views. We have built a functioning app from the ground up. The significant advantage of this approach to building web apps is that the front end can be completely platform independent. Even though we used ASP.NET to create our REST API, we could just easily have used any other language such as Node.js, Ruby etc without changing a single line of our front end code. Angular is a rich framework and we have only touched on basic functionality required to create a SPA. For readers who wish to delve further into the Angular framework, we would recommend the following URL as a starting point: http://docs.angularjs.org/misc/started. To get started with the code for this project: Sign up for an account at http://plus.sent.ly (free) Add your phone number Go to the “My Identies Page” Note Down your Sender ID, Consumer Key and Consumer Secret Download the code for this article at: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzjEWqSE31yoZjZlV0d0R2Y3eW8/edit?usp=sharing Change the values of Sender Id, Consumer Key and Consumer Secret in the web.config file Run the project through Visual Studio!

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Web Browser Control – Specifying the IE Version

- by Rick Strahl

I use the Internet Explorer Web Browser Control in a lot of my applications to display document type layout. HTML happens to be one of the most common document formats and displaying data in this format – even in desktop applications, is often way easier than using normal desktop technologies. One issue the Web Browser Control has that it’s perpetually stuck in IE 7 rendering mode by default. Even though IE 8 and now 9 have significantly upgraded the IE rendering engine to be more CSS and HTML compliant by default the Web Browser control will have none of it. IE 9 in particular – with its much improved CSS support and basic HTML 5 support is a big improvement and even though the IE control uses some of IE’s internal rendering technology it’s still stuck in the old IE 7 rendering by default. This applies whether you’re using the Web Browser control in a WPF application, a WinForms app, a FoxPro or VB classic application using the ActiveX control. Behind the scenes all these UI platforms use the COM interfaces and so you’re stuck by those same rules. Rendering Challenged To see what I’m talking about here are two screen shots rendering an HTML 5 doctype page that includes some CSS 3 functionality – rounded corners and border shadows - from an earlier post. One uses IE 9 as a standalone browser, and one uses a simple WPF form that includes the Web Browser control. IE 9 Browser: Web Browser control in a WPF form: The IE 9 page displays this HTML correctly – you see the rounded corners and shadow displayed. Obviously the latter rendering using the Web Browser control in a WPF application is a bit lacking. Not only are the new CSS features missing but the page also renders in Internet Explorer’s quirks mode so all the margins, padding etc. behave differently by default, even though there’s a CSS reset applied on this page. If you’re building an application that intends to use the Web Browser control for a live preview of some HTML this is clearly undesirable. Feature Delegation via Registry Hacks Fortunately starting with Internet Explore 8 and later there’s a fix for this problem via a registry setting. You can specify a registry key to specify which rendering mode and version of IE should be used by that application. These are not global mind you – they have to be enabled for each application individually. There are two different sets of keys for 32 bit and 64 bit applications. 32 bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: yourapplication.exe 64 bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: yourapplication.exe The value to set this key to is (taken from MSDN here) as decimal values: 9999 (0x270F) Internet Explorer 9. Webpages are displayed in IE9 Standards mode, regardless of the !DOCTYPE directive. 9000 (0x2328) Internet Explorer 9. Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE9 mode. 8888 (0x22B8) Webpages are displayed in IE8 Standards mode, regardless of the !DOCTYPE directive. 8000 (0x1F40) Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE8 mode. 7000 (0x1B58) Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE7 Standards mode. The added key looks something like this in the Registry Editor: With this in place my Html Html Help Builder application which has wwhelp.exe as its main executable now works with HTML 5 and CSS 3 documents in the same way that Internet Explorer 9 does. Incidentally I accidentally added an ‘empty’ DWORD value of 0 to my EXE name and that worked as well giving me IE 9 rendering. Although not documented I suspect 0 (or an invalid value) will default to the installed browser. Don’t have a good way to test this but if somebody could try this with IE 8 installed that would be great: What happens when setting 9000 with IE 8 installed? What happens when setting 0 with IE 8 installed? Don’t forget to add Keys for Host Environments If you’re developing your application in Visual Studio and you run the debugger you may find that your application is still not rendering right, but if you run the actual generated EXE from Explorer or the OS command prompt it works. That’s because when you run the debugger in Visual Studio it wraps your application into a debugging host container. For this reason you might want to also add another registry key for yourapp.vshost.exe on your development machine. If you’re developing in Visual FoxPro make sure you add a key for vfp9.exe to see the rendering adjustments in the Visual FoxPro development environment. Cleaner HTML - no more HTML mangling! There are a number of additional benefits to setting up rendering of the Web Browser control to the IE 9 engine (or even the IE 8 engine) beyond the obvious rendering functionality. IE 9 actually returns your HTML in something that resembles the original HTML formatting, as opposed to the IE 7 default format which mangled the original HTML content. If you do the following in the WPF application: private void button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { dynamic doc = this.webBrowser.Document; MessageBox.Show(doc.body.outerHtml); } you get different output depending on the rendering mode active. With the default IE 7 rendering you get: <BODY><DIV> <H1>Rounded Corners and Shadows - Creating Dialogs in CSS</H1> <DIV class=toolbarcontainer><A class=hoverbutton href="./"><IMG src="../../css/images/home.gif"> Home</A> <A class=hoverbutton href="RoundedCornersAndShadows.htm"><IMG src="../../css/images/refresh.gif"> Refresh</A> </DIV> <DIV class=containercontent> <FIELDSET><LEGEND>Plain Box</LEGEND> <DIV style="BORDER-BOTTOM: steelblue 2px solid; BORDER-LEFT: steelblue 2px solid; WIDTH: 550px; BORDER-TOP: steelblue 2px solid; BORDER-RIGHT: steelblue 2px solid" class="roundbox boxshadow"> <DIV style="BACKGROUND: khaki" class="boxcontenttext roundbox">Simple Rounded Corner Box. </DIV></DIV></FIELDSET> <FIELDSET><LEGEND>Box with Header</LEGEND> <DIV style="BORDER-BOTTOM: steelblue 2px solid; BORDER-LEFT: steelblue 2px solid; WIDTH: 550px; BORDER-TOP: steelblue 2px solid; BORDER-RIGHT: steelblue 2px solid" class="roundbox boxshadow"> <DIV class="gridheaderleft roundbox-top">Box with a Header</DIV> <DIV style="BACKGROUND: khaki" class="boxcontenttext roundbox-bottom">Simple Rounded Corner Box. </DIV></DIV></FIELDSET> <FIELDSET><LEGEND>Dialog Style Window</LEGEND> <DIV style="POSITION: relative; WIDTH: 450px" id=divDialog class="dialog boxshadow" jQuery16107208195684204002="2"> <DIV style="POSITION: relative" class=dialog-header> <DIV class=closebox></DIV>User Sign-in <DIV class=closebox jQuery16107208195684204002="3"></DIV></DIV> <DIV class=descriptionheader>This dialog is draggable and closable</DIV> <DIV class=dialog-content><LABEL>Username:</LABEL> <INPUT name=txtUsername value=" "> <LABEL>Password</LABEL> <INPUT name=txtPassword value=" "> <HR> <INPUT id=btnLogin value=Login type=button> </DIV> <DIV class=dialog-statusbar>Ready</DIV></DIV></FIELDSET> </DIV> <SCRIPT type=text/javascript> $(document).ready(function () { $("#divDialog") .draggable({ handle: ".dialog-header" }) .closable({ handle: ".dialog-header", closeHandler: function () { alert("Window about to be closed."); return true; // true closes - false leaves open } }); }); </SCRIPT> </DIV></BODY> Now lest you think I’m out of my mind and create complete whacky HTML rooted in the last century, here’s the IE 9 rendering mode output which looks a heck of a lot cleaner and a lot closer to my original HTML of the page I’m accessing: <body> <div> <h1>Rounded Corners and Shadows - Creating Dialogs in CSS</h1> <div class="toolbarcontainer"> <a class="hoverbutton" href="./"> <img src="../../css/images/home.gif"> Home</a> <a class="hoverbutton" href="RoundedCornersAndShadows.htm"> <img src="../../css/images/refresh.gif"> Refresh</a> </div> <div class="containercontent"> <fieldset> <legend>Plain Box</legend>  <div style="border: 2px solid steelblue; width: 550px;" class="roundbox boxshadow"> <div style="background: khaki;" class="boxcontenttext roundbox"> Simple Rounded Corner Box. </div> </div> </fieldset> <fieldset> <legend>Box with Header</legend> <div style="border: 2px solid steelblue; width: 550px;" class="roundbox boxshadow"> <div class="gridheaderleft roundbox-top">Box with a Header</div> <div style="background: khaki;" class="boxcontenttext roundbox-bottom"> Simple Rounded Corner Box. </div> </div> </fieldset> <fieldset> <legend>Dialog Style Window</legend> <div style="width: 450px; position: relative;" id="divDialog" class="dialog boxshadow"> <div style="position: relative;" class="dialog-header"> <div class="closebox"></div> User Sign-in <div class="closebox"></div></div> <div class="descriptionheader">This dialog is draggable and closable</div> <div class="dialog-content"> <label>Username:</label> <input name="txtUsername" value=" " type="text"> <label>Password</label> <input name="txtPassword" value=" " type="text"> <hr/> <input id="btnLogin" value="Login" type="button"> </div> <div class="dialog-statusbar">Ready</div> </div> </fieldset> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $("#divDialog") .draggable({ handle: ".dialog-header" }) .closable({ handle: ".dialog-header", closeHandler: function () { alert("Window about to be closed."); return true; // true closes - false leaves open } }); }); </script> </div> </body> IOW, in IE9 rendering mode IE9 is much closer (but not identical) to the original HTML from the page on the Web that we’re reading from. As a side note: Unfortunately, the browser feature emulation can't be applied against the Html Help (CHM) Engine in Windows which uses the Web Browser control (or COM interfaces anyway) to render Html Help content. I tried setting up hh.exe which is the help viewer, to use IE 9 rendering but a help file generated with CSS3 features will simply show in IE 7 mode. Bummer - this would have been a nice quick fix to allow help content served from CHM files to look better. HTML Editing leaves HTML formatting intact In the same vane, if you do any inline HTML editing in the control by setting content to be editable, IE 9’s control does a much more reasonable job of creating usable and somewhat valid HTML. It also leaves the original content alone other than the text your are editing or adding. No longer is the HTML output stripped of excess spaces and reformatted in IEs format. So if I do: private void button3_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { dynamic doc = this.webBrowser.Document; doc.body.contentEditable = true; } and then make some changes to the document by typing into it using IE 9 mode, the document formatting stays intact and only the affected content is modified. The created HTML is reasonably clean (although it does lack proper XHTML formatting for things like <br/> <hr/>). This is very different from IE 7 mode which mangled the HTML as soon as the page was loaded into the control. Any editing you did stripped out all white space and lost all of your existing XHTML formatting. In IE 9 mode at least *most* of your original formatting stays intact. This is huge! In Html Help Builder I have supported HTML editing for a long time but the HTML mangling by the Web Browser control made it very difficult to edit the HTML later. Previously IE would mangle the HTML by stripping out spaces, upper casing all tags and converting many XHTML safe tags to its HTML 3 tags. Now IE leaves most of my document alone while editing, and creates cleaner and more compliant markup (with exception of self-closing elements like BR/HR). The end result is that I now have HTML editing in place that's much cleaner and actually capable of being manually edited. Caveats, Caveats, Caveats It wouldn't be Internet Explorer if there weren't some major compatibility issues involved in using this various browser version interaction. The biggest thing I ran into is that there are odd differences in some of the COM interfaces and what they return. I specifically ran into a problem with the document.selection.createRange() function which with IE 7 compatibility returns an expected text range object. When running in IE 8 or IE 9 mode however. I could not retrieve a valid text range with this code where loEdit is the WebBrowser control: loRange = loEdit.document.selection.CreateRange() The loRange object returned (here in FoxPro) had a length property of 0 but none of the other properties of the TextRange or TextRangeCollection objects were available. I figured this was due to some changed security settings but even after elevating the Intranet Security Zone and mucking with the other browser feature flags pertaining to security I had no luck. In the end I relented and used a JavaScript function in my editor document that returns a selection range object: function getselectionrange() { var range = document.selection.createRange(); return range; } and call that JavaScript function from my host applications code: *** Use a function in the document to get around HTML Editing issues loRange = loEdit.document.parentWindow.getselectionrange(.f.) and that does work correctly. This wasn't a big deal as I'm already loading a support script file into the editor page so all I had to do is add the function to this existing script file. You can find out more how to call script code in the Web Browser control from a host application in a previous post of mine. IE 8 and 9 also clamp down the security environment a little more than the default IE 7 control, so there may be other issues you run into. Other than the createRange() problem above I haven't seen anything else that is breaking in my code so far though and that's encouraging at least since it uses a lot of HTML document manipulation for the custom editor I've created (and would love to replace - any PROFESSIONAL alternatives anybody?) Registry Key Installation for your Application It’s important to remember that this registry setting is made per application, so most likely this is something you want to set up with your installer. Also remember that 32 and 64 bit settings require separate settings in the registry so if you’re creating your installer you most likely will want to set both keys in the registry preemptively for your application. I use Tarma Installer for all of my application installs and in Tarma I configure registry keys for both and set a flag to only install the latter key group in the 64 bit version: Because this setting is application specific you have to do this for every application you install unfortunately, but this also means that you can safely configure this setting in the registry because it is after only applied to your application. Another problem with install based installation is version detection. If IE 8 is installed I’d want 8000 for the value, if IE 9 is installed I want 9000. I can do this easily in code but in the installer this is much more difficult. I don’t have a good solution for this at the moment, but given that the app works with IE 7 mode now, IE 9 mode is just a bonus for the moment. If IE 9 is not installed and 9000 is used the default rendering will remain in use. It sure would be nice if we could specify the IE rendering mode as a property, but I suspect the ActiveX container has to know before it loads what actual version to load up and once loaded can only load a single version of IE. This would account for this annoying application level configuration… Summary The registry feature emulation has been available for quite some time, but I just found out about it today and started experimenting around with it. I’m stoked to see that this is available as I’d pretty much given up in ever seeing any better rendering in the Web Browser control. Now at least my apps can take advantage of newer HTML features. Now if we could only get better HTML Editing support somehow <snicker>… ah can’t have everything.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in .NET FoxPro Windows

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testing Clojure in Maven

- by Ralph

I am new at Maven and even newer at Clojure. As an exercise to learn the language, I am writing a spider solitaire player program. I also plan on writing a similar program in Scala to compare the implementations (see my post http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2571267/modern-java-alternatives-closed). I have configured a Maven directory structure containing the usual src/main/clojure and src/test/clojure directories. My pom.xml file includes the clojure-maven-plugin. When I run "mvn test", it displays "No tests to run", despite my having test code in the src/test/clojure directory. As I misnaming something? Here is my pom.xml file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd"> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <groupId>SpiderPlayer</groupId> <artifactId>SpiderPlayer</artifactId> <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version> <inceptionYear>2010</inceptionYear> <packaging>jar</packaging> <properties> <maven.build.timestamp.format>yyMMdd.HHmm</maven.build.timestamp.format> <main.dir>org/dogdaze/spider_player</main.dir> <main.package>org.dogdaze.spider_player</main.package> <main.class>${main.package}.Main</main.class> </properties> <build> <sourceDirectory>src/main/clojure</sourceDirectory> <testSourceDirectory>src/main/clojure</testSourceDirectory> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>com.theoryinpractise</groupId> <artifactId>clojure-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>1.3.1</version> </plugin> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId> <version>1.3</version> <executions> <execution> <goals> <goal>run</goal> </goals> <phase>generate-sources</phase> <configuration> <tasks> <echo file="${project.build.sourceDirectory}/${main.dir}/Version.clj" message="(ns ${main.package})${line.separator}"/> <echo file="${project.build.sourceDirectory}/${main.dir}/Version.clj" append="true" message="(def version "${maven.build.timestamp}")${line.separator}"/> </tasks> </configuration> </execution> </executions> </plugin> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.1</version> <executions> <execution> <goals> <goal>single</goal> </goals> <phase>package</phase> <configuration> <descriptorRefs> <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef> </descriptorRefs> <archive> <manifest> <mainClass>${main.class}</mainClass> </manifest> </archive> </configuration> </execution> </executions> </plugin> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> <redirectTestOutputToFile>true</redirectTestOutputToFile> <skipTests>false</skipTests> <skip>false</skip> </configuration> <executions> <execution> <id>surefire-it</id> <phase>integration-test</phase> <goals> <goal>test</goal> </goals> <configuration> <skip>false</skip> </configuration> </execution> </executions> </plugin> </plugins> </build> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>commons-cli</groupId> <artifactId>commons-cli</artifactId> <version>1.2</version> <scope>compile</scope> </dependency> </dependencies> </project> Here is my Clojure source file (src/main/clojure/org/dogdaze/spider_player/Deck.clj): ; Copyright 2010 Dogdaze (ns org.dogdaze.spider_player.Deck (:use [clojure.contrib.seq-utils :only (shuffle)])) (def suits [:clubs :diamonds :hearts :spades]) (def ranks [:ace :two :three :four :five :six :seven :eight :nine :ten :jack :queen :king]) (defn suit-seq "Return 4 suits: if number-of-suits == 1: :clubs :clubs :clubs :clubs if number-of-suits == 2: :clubs :diamonds :clubs :diamonds if number-of-suits == 4: :clubs :diamonds :hearts :spades." [number-of-suits] (take 4 (cycle (take number-of-suits suits)))) (defstruct card :rank :suit) (defn unshuffled-deck "Create an unshuffled deck containing all cards from the number of suits specified." [number-of-suits] (for [rank ranks suit (suit-seq number-of-suits)] (struct card rank suit))) (defn deck "Create a shuffled deck containing all cards from the number of suits specified." [number-of-suits] (shuffle (unshuffled-deck number-of-suits))) Here is my test case (src/test/clojure/org/dogdaze/spider_player/TestDeck.clj): ; Copyright 2010 Dogdaze (ns org.dogdaze.spider_player (:use clojure.set clojure.test org.dogdaze.spider_player.Deck)) (deftest test-suit-seq (is (= (suit-seq 1) [:clubs :clubs :clubs :clubs])) (is (= (suit-seq 2) [:clubs :diamonds :clubs :diamonds])) (is (= (suit-seq 4) [:clubs :diamonds :hearts :spades]))) (def one-suit-deck [{:rank :ace, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ace, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ace, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ace, :suit :clubs} {:rank :two, :suit :clubs} {:rank :two, :suit :clubs} {:rank :two, :suit :clubs} {:rank :two, :suit :clubs} {:rank :three, :suit :clubs} {:rank :three, :suit :clubs} {:rank :three, :suit :clubs} {:rank :three, :suit :clubs} {:rank :four, :suit :clubs} {:rank :four, :suit :clubs} {:rank :four, :suit :clubs} {:rank :four, :suit :clubs} {:rank :five, :suit :clubs} {:rank :five, :suit :clubs} {:rank :five, :suit :clubs} {:rank :five, :suit :clubs} {:rank :six, :suit :clubs} {:rank :six, :suit :clubs} {:rank :six, :suit :clubs} {:rank :six, :suit :clubs} {:rank :seven, :suit :clubs} {:rank :seven, :suit :clubs} {:rank :seven, :suit :clubs} {:rank :seven, :suit :clubs} {:rank :eight, :suit :clubs} {:rank :eight, :suit :clubs} {:rank :eight, :suit :clubs} {:rank :eight, :suit :clubs} {:rank :nine, :suit :clubs} {:rank :nine, :suit :clubs} {:rank :nine, :suit :clubs} {:rank :nine, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ten, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ten, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ten, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ten, :suit :clubs} {:rank :jack, :suit :clubs} {:rank :jack, :suit :clubs} {:rank :jack, :suit :clubs} {:rank :jack, :suit :clubs} {:rank :queen, :suit :clubs} {:rank :queen, :suit :clubs} {:rank :queen, :suit :clubs} {:rank :queen, :suit :clubs} {:rank :king, :suit :clubs} {:rank :king, :suit :clubs} {:rank :king, :suit :clubs} {:rank :king, :suit :clubs}]) (def two-suits-deck [{:rank :ace, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ace, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :ace, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ace, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :two, :suit :clubs} {:rank :two, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :two, :suit :clubs} {:rank :two, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :three, :suit :clubs} {:rank :three, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :three, :suit :clubs} {:rank :three, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :four, :suit :clubs} {:rank :four, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :four, :suit :clubs} {:rank :four, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :five, :suit :clubs} {:rank :five, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :five, :suit :clubs} {:rank :five, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :six, :suit :clubs} {:rank :six, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :six, :suit :clubs} {:rank :six, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :seven, :suit :clubs} {:rank :seven, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :seven, :suit :clubs} {:rank :seven, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :eight, :suit :clubs} {:rank :eight, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :eight, :suit :clubs} {:rank :eight, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :nine, :suit :clubs} {:rank :nine, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :nine, :suit :clubs} {:rank :nine, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :ten, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ten, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :ten, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ten, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :jack, :suit :clubs} {:rank :jack, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :jack, :suit :clubs} {:rank :jack, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :queen, :suit :clubs} {:rank :queen, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :queen, :suit :clubs} {:rank :queen, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :king, :suit :clubs} {:rank :king, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :king, :suit :clubs} {:rank :king, :suit :diamonds}]) (def four-suits-deck [{:rank :ace, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ace, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :ace, :suit :hearts} {:rank :ace, :suit :spades} {:rank :two, :suit :clubs} {:rank :two, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :two, :suit :hearts} {:rank :two, :suit :spades} {:rank :three, :suit :clubs} {:rank :three, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :three, :suit :hearts} {:rank :three, :suit :spades} {:rank :four, :suit :clubs} {:rank :four, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :four, :suit :hearts} {:rank :four, :suit :spades} {:rank :five, :suit :clubs} {:rank :five, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :five, :suit :hearts} {:rank :five, :suit :spades} {:rank :six, :suit :clubs} {:rank :six, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :six, :suit :hearts} {:rank :six, :suit :spades} {:rank :seven, :suit :clubs} {:rank :seven, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :seven, :suit :hearts} {:rank :seven, :suit :spades} {:rank :eight, :suit :clubs} {:rank :eight, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :eight, :suit :hearts} {:rank :eight, :suit :spades} {:rank :nine, :suit :clubs} {:rank :nine, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :nine, :suit :hearts} {:rank :nine, :suit :spades} {:rank :ten, :suit :clubs} {:rank :ten, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :ten, :suit :hearts} {:rank :ten, :suit :spades} {:rank :jack, :suit :clubs} {:rank :jack, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :jack, :suit :hearts} {:rank :jack, :suit :spades} {:rank :queen, :suit :clubs} {:rank :queen, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :queen, :suit :hearts} {:rank :queen, :suit :spades} {:rank :king, :suit :clubs} {:rank :king, :suit :diamonds} {:rank :king, :suit :hearts} {:rank :king, :suit :spades}]) (deftest test-unshuffled-deck (is (= (unshuffled-deck 1) one-suit-deck)) (is (= (unshuffled-deck 2) two-suits-deck)) (is (= (unshuffled-deck 4) four-suits-deck))) (deftest test-shuffled-deck (is (= (set (deck 1)) (set one-suit-deck))) (is (= (set (deck 2)) (set two-suits-deck))) (is (= (set (deck 4)) (set four-suits-deck)))) (run-tests) Any idea why the test is not running? BTW, feel free to suggest improvements to the Clojure code. Thanks, Ralph

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Linux Mint 10 LXDE computer to act as LTSP Server without luck

- by Rautamiekka

So I've tried to make our screen-broken HP laptop to also serve as LTSP Server in addition to various other tasks, without luck, which may be cuz I'm running LM10 LXDE while the instructions are for Ubuntu. Excuse my ignorance. The entire output from Terminal after installing LTSP stuff along with a Server kernel and a load of other packages: administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo lt ltrace ltsp-build-client ltsp-chroot ltspfs ltspfsmounter ltsp-info ltsp-localapps ltsp-update-image ltsp-update-kernels ltsp-update-sshkeys administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp-update-sshkeys administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp-update-kernels find: `/opt/ltsp/': No such file or directory administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp-build-client /usr/share/ltsp/plugins/ltsp-build-client/common/010-chroot-tagging: line 3: /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/ltsp_chroot: No such file or directory error: LTSP client installation ended abnormally administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp-update-image Cannot determine assigned port. Assigning to port 2000. mkdir: cannot create directory `/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/ltsp': No such file or directory /usr/sbin/ltsp-update-image: 274: cannot create /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/ltsp/update-kernels.conf: Directory nonexistent /usr/sbin/ltsp-update-image: 274: cannot create /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/ltsp/update-kernels.conf: Directory nonexistent Regenerating kernel... chroot: failed to run command `/usr/share/ltsp/update-kernels': No such file or directory Done. Configuring inetd... Done. Updating pxelinux default configuration...Done. Skipping invalid chroot: /opt/ltsp/i386 chroot: failed to run command `test': No such file or directory administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp-chroot chroot: failed to run command `/bin/bash': No such file or directory administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ bash administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ exit exit administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ls /opt/ltsp i386 administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ls /opt/ltsp/i386/ administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp-build-client NOTE: Root directory /opt/ltsp/i386 already exists, this will lead to problems, please remove it before trying again. Exiting. error: LTSP client installation ended abnormally administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo rm -rv /opt/ltsp/i386 removed directory: `/opt/ltsp/i386' administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp-build-client /usr/share/ltsp/plugins/ltsp-build-client/common/010-chroot-tagging: line 3: /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/ltsp_chroot: No such file or directory error: LTSP client installation ended abnormally administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ aptitude search ltsp p fts-ltsp-ldap - LDAP LTSP module for the TFTP/Fuse supplicant p ltsp-client - LTSP client environment p ltsp-client-core - LTSP client environment (core) p ltsp-cluster-accountmanager - Account creation and management daemon for LTSP p ltsp-cluster-control - Web based thin-client configuration management p ltsp-cluster-lbagent - LTSP loadbalancer agent offers variables about the state of the ltsp server p ltsp-cluster-lbserver - LTSP loadbalancer server returns the optimal ltsp server to terminal p ltsp-cluster-nxloadbalancer - Minimal NX loadbalancer for ltsp-cluster p ltsp-cluster-pxeconfig - LTSP-Cluster symlink generator p ltsp-controlaula - Classroom management tool with ltsp clients p ltsp-docs - LTSP Documentation p ltsp-livecd - starts an LTSP live server on an Ubuntu livecd session p ltsp-manager - Ubuntu LTSP server management GUI i A ltsp-server - Basic LTSP server environment i ltsp-server-standalone - Complete LTSP server environment i A ltspfs - Fuse based remote filesystem for LTSP thin clients p ltspfsd - Fuse based remote filesystem hooks for LTSP thin clients p ltspfsd-core - Fuse based remote filesystem daemon for LTSP thin clients p python-ltsp - provides ltsp related functions administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo aptitude purge ltsp-server ltsp-server-standalone ltspfs The following packages will be REMOVED: debconf-utils{u} debootstrap{u} dhcp3-server{u} gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio{u} ldm-server{u} libpulse-browse0{u} ltsp-server{p} ltsp-server-standalone{p} ltspfs{p} nbd-server{u} openbsd-inetd{u} pulseaudio{u} pulseaudio-esound-compat{u} pulseaudio-module-x11{u} pulseaudio-utils{u} squashfs-tools{u} tftpd-hpa{u} 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 17 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 6,996kB will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] (Reading database ... 158454 files and directories currently installed.) Removing ltsp-server-standalone ... Purging configuration files for ltsp-server-standalone ... Removing ltsp-server ... Purging configuration files for ltsp-server ... dpkg: warning: while removing ltsp-server, directory '/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp' not empty so not removed. dpkg: warning: while removing ltsp-server, directory '/var/lib/tftpboot' not empty so not removed. Processing triggers for man-db ... (Reading database ... 158195 files and directories currently installed.) Removing debconf-utils ... Removing debootstrap ... Removing dhcp3-server ... * Stopping DHCP server dhcpd3 [ OK ] Removing gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio ... Removing ldm-server ... Removing pulseaudio-module-x11 ... Removing pulseaudio-esound-compat ... Removing pulseaudio ... * PulseAudio configured for per-user sessions Removing pulseaudio-utils ... Removing libpulse-browse0 ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Processing triggers for ureadahead ... ureadahead will be reprofiled on next reboot Processing triggers for libc-bin ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place (Reading database ... 157944 files and directories currently installed.) Removing ltspfs ... Processing triggers for man-db ... (Reading database ... 157932 files and directories currently installed.) Removing nbd-server ... Stopping Network Block Device server: nbd-server. Removing openbsd-inetd ... * Stopping internet superserver inetd [ OK ] Removing squashfs-tools ... Removing tftpd-hpa ... tftpd-hpa stop/waiting Processing triggers for ureadahead ... Processing triggers for man-db ... administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo aptitude purge ~c The following packages will be REMOVED: dhcp3-server{p} libpulse-browse0{p} nbd-server{p} openbsd-inetd{p} pulseaudio{p} tftpd-hpa{p} 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] (Reading database ... 157881 files and directories currently installed.) Removing dhcp3-server ... Purging configuration files for dhcp3-server ... Removing libpulse-browse0 ... Purging configuration files for libpulse-browse0 ... Removing nbd-server ... Purging configuration files for nbd-server ... Removing openbsd-inetd ... Purging configuration files for openbsd-inetd ... Removing pulseaudio ... Purging configuration files for pulseaudio ... Removing tftpd-hpa ... Purging configuration files for tftpd-hpa ... Processing triggers for ureadahead ... administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo aptitude install ltsp-server-standalone The following NEW packages will be installed: debconf-utils{a} debootstrap{a} ldm-server{a} ltsp-server{a} ltsp-server-standalone ltspfs{a} nbd-server{a} openbsd-inetd{a} squashfs-tools{a} The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed: dhcp3-server pulseaudio-esound-compat tftpd-hpa 0 packages upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B/498kB of archives. After unpacking 2,437kB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Preconfiguring packages ... Selecting previously deselected package openbsd-inetd. (Reading database ... 157868 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking openbsd-inetd (from .../openbsd-inetd_0.20080125-4ubuntu2_i386.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Processing triggers for ureadahead ... Setting up openbsd-inetd (0.20080125-4ubuntu2) ... * Stopping internet superserver inetd [ OK ] * Starting internet superserver inetd [ OK ] Selecting previously deselected package ldm-server. (Reading database ... 157877 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking ldm-server (from .../ldm-server_2%3a2.1.3-0ubuntu1_all.deb) ... Selecting previously deselected package debconf-utils. Unpacking debconf-utils (from .../debconf-utils_1.5.32ubuntu3_all.deb) ... Selecting previously deselected package debootstrap. Unpacking debootstrap (from .../debootstrap_1.0.23ubuntu1_all.deb) ... Selecting previously deselected package nbd-server. Unpacking nbd-server (from .../nbd-server_1%3a2.9.14-2ubuntu1_i386.deb) ... Selecting previously deselected package squashfs-tools. Unpacking squashfs-tools (from .../squashfs-tools_1%3a4.0-8_i386.deb) ... Selecting previously deselected package ltsp-server. GNU nano 2.2.4 File: /etc/ltsp/ltsp-update-image.conf # Configuration file for ltsp-update-image # By default, do not compress the image # as it's reported to make it unstable NO_COMP="-noF -noD -noI -no-exports" [ Switched to /etc/ltsp/ltsp-update-image.conf ] administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ ls /opt/ firefox/ ltsp/ mint-flashplugin/ administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ ls /opt/ltsp/i386/ administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ ls /opt/ltsp/ i386 administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp ltsp-build-client ltsp-chroot ltspfs ltspfsmounter ltsp-info ltsp-localapps ltsp-update-image ltsp-update-kernels ltsp-update-sshkeys administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp-build-client NOTE: Root directory /opt/ltsp/i386 already exists, this will lead to problems, please remove it before trying again. Exiting. error: LTSP client installation ended abnormally administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ ^C administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo aptitude purge ltsp ltspfs ltsp-server ltsp-server-standalone administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo aptitude purge ltsp-server The following packages will be REMOVED: ltsp-server{p} 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 1,073kB will be freed. The following packages have unmet dependencies: ltsp-server-standalone: Depends: ltsp-server but it is not going to be installed. The following actions will resolve these dependencies: Remove the following packages: 1) ltsp-server-standalone Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] The following packages will be REMOVED: debconf-utils{u} debootstrap{u} ldm-server{u} ltsp-server{p} ltsp-server-standalone{a} ltspfs{u} nbd-server{u} openbsd-inetd{u} squashfs-tools{u} 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 9 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 2,437kB will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] (Reading database ... 158244 files and directories currently installed.) Removing ltsp-server-standalone ... (Reading database ... 158240 files and directories currently installed.) Removing ltsp-server ... Purging configuration files for ltsp-server ... dpkg: warning: while removing ltsp-server, directory '/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp' not empty so not removed. dpkg: warning: while removing ltsp-server, directory '/var/lib/tftpboot' not empty so not removed. Processing triggers for man-db ... (Reading database ... 157987 files and directories currently installed.) Removing debconf-utils ... Removing debootstrap ... Removing ldm-server ... Removing ltspfs ... Removing nbd-server ... Stopping Network Block Device server: nbd-server. Removing openbsd-inetd ... * Stopping internet superserver inetd [ OK ] Removing squashfs-tools ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Processing triggers for ureadahead ... administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo aptitude purge ~c The following packages will be REMOVED: ltsp-server-standalone{p} nbd-server{p} openbsd-inetd{p} 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] (Reading database ... 157871 files and directories currently installed.) Removing ltsp-server-standalone ... Purging configuration files for ltsp-server-standalone ... Removing nbd-server ... Purging configuration files for nbd-server ... Removing openbsd-inetd ... Purging configuration files for openbsd-inetd ... Processing triggers for ureadahead ... administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo rm -rv /var/lib/t teamspeak-server/ tftpboot/ transmission-daemon/ administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo rm -rv /var/lib/tftpboot removed `/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.cfg/default' removed directory: `/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.cfg' removed directory: `/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386' removed directory: `/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp' removed directory: `/var/lib/tftpboot' administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo find / -name "ltsp" /opt/ltsp administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo rm -rv /opt/ltsp removed directory: `/opt/ltsp/i386' removed directory: `/opt/ltsp' administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo aptitude install ltsp-server-standalone The following NEW packages will be installed: debconf-utils{a} debootstrap{a} ldm-server{a} ltsp-server{a} ltsp-server-standalone ltspfs{a} nbd-server{a} openbsd-inetd{a} squashfs-tools{a} The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed: dhcp3-server pulseaudio-esound-compat tftpd-hpa 0 packages upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B/498kB of archives. After unpacking 2,437kB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Preconfiguring packages ... Selecting previously deselected package openbsd-inetd. (Reading database ... 157868 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking openbsd-inetd (from .../openbsd-inetd_0.20080125-4ubuntu2_i386.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... GNU nano 2.2.4 New Buffer GNU nano 2.2.4 File: /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf # # Default LTSP dhcpd.conf config file. # authoritative; subnet 192.168.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { range 192.168.2.70 192.168.2.79; option domain-name "jarvinen"; option domain-name-servers 192.168.2.254; option broadcast-address 192.168.2.255; option routers 192.168.2.254; # next-server 192.168.0.1; # get-lease-hostnames true; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; option root-path "/opt/ltsp/i386"; if substring( option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9 ) = "PXEClient" { filename "/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0"; } else { filename "/ltsp/i386/nbi.img"; } } [ Wrote 22 lines ] administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo service dhcp3-server start * Starting DHCP server dhcpd3 [ OK ] administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo ltsp-build-client /usr/share/ltsp/plugins/ltsp-build-client/common/010-chroot-tagging: line 3: /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/ltsp_chroot: No such file or directory error: LTSP client installation ended abnormally administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ sudo cat /usr/share/ltsp/plugins/ltsp-build-client/common/010-chroot-tagging case "$MODE" in after-install) echo LTSP_CHROOT=$ROOT >> $ROOT/etc/ltsp_chroot ;; esac administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ cd $ROOT/etc/ltsp_chroot bash: cd: /etc/ltsp_chroot: No such file or directory administrator@rauta-mint-turion ~ $ cd $ROOT/etc/ administrator@rauta-mint-turion /etc $ ls acpi chatscripts emacs group insserv.conf.d logrotate.conf mysql php5 rc6.d smbnetfs.conf UPower adduser.conf ConsoleKit environment group- iproute2 logrotate.d nanorc phpmyadmin rc.local snmp usb_modeswitch.conf alternatives console-setup esound grub.d issue lsb-base nbd-server pm rcS.d sound usb_modeswitch.d anacrontab cron.d firefox gshadow issue.net lsb-base-logging.sh ndiswrapper pnm2ppa.conf request-key.conf ssh ushare.conf apache2 cron.daily firefox-3.5 gshadow- java lsb-release netscsid.conf polkit-1 resolvconf ssl vga apm cron.hourly firestarter gtk-2.0 java-6-sun ltrace.conf network popularity-contest.conf resolv.conf sudoers vim apparmor cron.monthly fonts gtkmathview kbd ltsp NetworkManager ppp rmt sudoers.d vlc apparmor.d crontab foomatic gufw kernel lxdm networks printcap rpc su-to-rootrc vsftpd.conf apport cron.weekly fstab hal kernel-img.conf magic nsswitch.conf profile rsyslog.conf sweeprc w3m apt crypttab ftpusers hdparm.conf kerneloops.conf magic.mime ntp.conf profile.d rsyslog.d sysctl.conf wgetrc at.deny cups fuse.conf host.conf kompozer mailcap obex-data-server protocols samba sysctl.d wildmidi auto-apt dbconfig-common gai.conf hostname ldap mailcap.order ODBCDataSources psiconv sane.d teamspeak-server wodim.conf avahi dbus-1 gamin hosts ld.so.cache manpath.config odbc.ini pulse screenrc terminfo wpa_supplicant bash.bashrc debconf.conf gconf hosts.allow ld.so.conf menu openal purple securetty thunderbird X11 bash_completion debian_version gdb hosts.deny ld.so.conf.d menu-methods openoffice python security timezone xdg bash_completion.d default gdm hp legal mime.types opt python2.6 sensors3.conf transmission-daemon xml bindresvport.blacklist defoma ghostscript ifplugd lftp.conf mke2fs.conf pam.conf python2.7 sensors.d ts.conf xulrunner-1.9.2 blkid.conf deluser.conf gimp inetd.conf libpaper.d modprobe.d pam.d python3.1 services ucf.conf zsh_command_not_found blkid.tab depmod.d gnome init libreoffice modules pango rc0.d sgml udev bluetooth dhcp gnome-system-tools init.d linuxmint motd papersize rc1.d shadow ufw bonobo-activation dhcp3 gnome-vfs-2.0 initramfs-tools locale.alias mplayer passwd rc2.d shadow- updatedb.conf ca-certificates dictionaries-common gnome-vfs-mime-magic inputrc localtime mtab passwd- rc3.d shells update-manager ca-certificates.conf doc-base gre.d insserv logcheck mtab.fuselock pcmcia rc4.d skel update-motd.d calendar dpkg groff insserv.conf login.defs mtools.conf perl rc5.d smb2www update-notifier administrator@rauta-mint-turion /etc $ cd ltsp/ administrator@rauta-mint-turion /etc/ltsp $ ls dhcpd.conf ltsp-update-image.conf administrator@rauta-mint-turion /etc/ltsp $ cat dhcpd.conf # # Default LTSP dhcpd.conf config file. # authoritative; subnet 192.168.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { range 192.168.2.70 192.168.2.79; option domain-name "jarvinen"; option domain-name-servers 192.168.2.254; option broadcast-address 192.168.2.255; option routers 192.168.2.254; # next-server 192.168.0.1; # get-lease-hostnames true; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; option root-path "/opt/ltsp/i386"; if substring( option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9 ) = "PXEClient" { filename "/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0"; } else { filename "/ltsp/i386/nbi.img"; } } administrator@rauta-mint-turion /etc/ltsp $

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Java code optimization on matrix windowing computes in more time

- by rano

I have a matrix which represents an image and I need to cycle over each pixel and for each one of those I have to compute the sum of all its neighbors, ie the pixels that belong to a window of radius rad centered on the pixel. I came up with three alternatives: The simplest way, the one that recomputes the window for each pixel The more optimized way that uses a queue to store the sums of the window columns and cycling through the columns of the matrix updates this queue by adding a new element and removing the oldes The even more optimized way that does not need to recompute the queue for each row but incrementally adjusts a previously saved one I implemented them in c++ using a queue for the second method and a combination of deques for the third (I need to iterate through their elements without destructing them) and scored their times to see if there was an actual improvement. it appears that the third method is indeed faster. Then I tried to port the code to Java (and I must admit that I'm not very comfortable with it). I used ArrayDeque for the second method and LinkedLists for the third resulting in the third being inefficient in time. Here is the simplest method in C++ (I'm not posting the java version since it is almost identical): void normalWindowing(int mat[][MAX], int cols, int rows, int rad){ int i, j; int h = 0; for (i = 0; i < rows; ++i) { for (j = 0; j < cols; j++) { h = 0; for (int ry =- rad; ry <= rad; ry++) { int y = i + ry; if (y >= 0 && y < rows) { for (int rx =- rad; rx <= rad; rx++) { int x = j + rx; if (x >= 0 && x < cols) { h += mat[y][x]; } } } } } } } Here is the second method (the one optimized through columns) in C++: void opt1Windowing(int mat[][MAX], int cols, int rows, int rad){ int i, j, h, y, col; queue<int>* q = NULL; for (i = 0; i < rows; ++i) { if (q != NULL) delete(q); q = new queue<int>(); h = 0; for (int rx = 0; rx <= rad; rx++) { if (rx < cols) { int mem = 0; for (int ry =- rad; ry <= rad; ry++) { y = i + ry; if (y >= 0 && y < rows) { mem += mat[y][rx]; } } q->push(mem); h += mem; } } for (j = 1; j < cols; j++) { col = j + rad; if (j - rad > 0) { h -= q->front(); q->pop(); } if (j + rad < cols) { int mem = 0; for (int ry =- rad; ry <= rad; ry++) { y = i + ry; if (y >= 0 && y < rows) { mem += mat[y][col]; } } q->push(mem); h += mem; } } } } And here is the Java version: public static void opt1Windowing(int [][] mat, int rad){ int i, j = 0, h, y, col; int cols = mat[0].length; int rows = mat.length; ArrayDeque<Integer> q = null; for (i = 0; i < rows; ++i) { q = new ArrayDeque<Integer>(); h = 0; for (int rx = 0; rx <= rad; rx++) { if (rx < cols) { int mem = 0; for (int ry =- rad; ry <= rad; ry++) { y = i + ry; if (y >= 0 && y < rows) { mem += mat[y][rx]; } } q.addLast(mem); h += mem; } } j = 0; for (j = 1; j < cols; j++) { col = j + rad; if (j - rad > 0) { h -= q.peekFirst(); q.pop(); } if (j + rad < cols) { int mem = 0; for (int ry =- rad; ry <= rad; ry++) { y = i + ry; if (y >= 0 && y < rows) { mem += mat[y][col]; } } q.addLast(mem); h += mem; } } } } I recognize this post will be a wall of text. Here is the third method in C++: void opt2Windowing(int mat[][MAX], int cols, int rows, int rad){ int i = 0; int j = 0; int h = 0; int hh = 0; deque< deque<int> *> * M = new deque< deque<int> *>(); for (int ry = 0; ry <= rad; ry++) { if (ry < rows) { deque<int> * q = new deque<int>(); M->push_back(q); for (int rx = 0; rx <= rad; rx++) { if (rx < cols) { int val = mat[ry][rx]; q->push_back(val); h += val; } } } } deque<int> * C = new deque<int>(M->front()->size()); deque<int> * Q = new deque<int>(M->front()->size()); deque<int> * R = new deque<int>(M->size()); deque< deque<int> *>::iterator mit; deque< deque<int> *>::iterator mstart = M->begin(); deque< deque<int> *>::iterator mend = M->end(); deque<int>::iterator rit; deque<int>::iterator rstart = R->begin(); deque<int>::iterator rend = R->end(); deque<int>::iterator cit; deque<int>::iterator cstart = C->begin(); deque<int>::iterator cend = C->end(); for (mit = mstart, rit = rstart; mit != mend, rit != rend; ++mit, ++rit) { deque<int>::iterator pit; deque<int>::iterator pstart = (* mit)->begin(); deque<int>::iterator pend = (* mit)->end(); for(cit = cstart, pit = pstart; cit != cend && pit != pend; ++cit, ++pit) { (* cit) += (* pit); (* rit) += (* pit); } } for (i = 0; i < rows; ++i) { j = 0; if (i - rad > 0) { deque<int>::iterator cit; deque<int>::iterator cstart = C->begin(); deque<int>::iterator cend = C->end(); deque<int>::iterator pit; deque<int>::iterator pstart = (M->front())->begin(); deque<int>::iterator pend = (M->front())->end(); for(cit = cstart, pit = pstart; cit != cend; ++cit, ++pit) { (* cit) -= (* pit); } deque<int> * k = M->front(); M->pop_front(); delete k; h -= R->front(); R->pop_front(); } int row = i + rad; if (row < rows && i > 0) { deque<int> * newQ = new deque<int>(); M->push_back(newQ); deque<int>::iterator cit; deque<int>::iterator cstart = C->begin(); deque<int>::iterator cend = C->end(); int rx; int tot = 0; for (rx = 0, cit = cstart; rx <= rad; rx++, ++cit) { if (rx < cols) { int val = mat[row][rx]; newQ->push_back(val); (* cit) += val; tot += val; } } R->push_back(tot); h += tot; } hh = h; copy(C->begin(), C->end(), Q->begin()); for (j = 1; j < cols; j++) { int col = j + rad; if (j - rad > 0) { hh -= Q->front(); Q->pop_front(); } if (j + rad < cols) { int val = 0; for (int ry =- rad; ry <= rad; ry++) { int y = i + ry; if (y >= 0 && y < rows) { val += mat[y][col]; } } hh += val; Q->push_back(val); } } } } And finally its Java version: public static void opt2Windowing(int [][] mat, int rad){ int cols = mat[0].length; int rows = mat.length; int i = 0; int j = 0; int h = 0; int hh = 0; LinkedList<LinkedList<Integer>> M = new LinkedList<LinkedList<Integer>>(); for (int ry = 0; ry <= rad; ry++) { if (ry < rows) { LinkedList<Integer> q = new LinkedList<Integer>(); M.addLast(q); for (int rx = 0; rx <= rad; rx++) { if (rx < cols) { int val = mat[ry][rx]; q.addLast(val); h += val; } } } } int firstSize = M.getFirst().size(); int mSize = M.size(); LinkedList<Integer> C = new LinkedList<Integer>(); LinkedList<Integer> Q = null; LinkedList<Integer> R = new LinkedList<Integer>(); for (int k = 0; k < firstSize; k++) { C.add(0); } for (int k = 0; k < mSize; k++) { R.add(0); } ListIterator<LinkedList<Integer>> mit; ListIterator<Integer> rit; ListIterator<Integer> cit; ListIterator<Integer> pit; for (mit = M.listIterator(), rit = R.listIterator(); mit.hasNext();) { Integer r = rit.next(); int rsum = 0; for (cit = C.listIterator(), pit = (mit.next()).listIterator(); cit.hasNext();) { Integer c = cit.next(); Integer p = pit.next(); rsum += p; cit.set(c + p); } rit.set(r + rsum); } for (i = 0; i < rows; ++i) { j = 0; if (i - rad > 0) { for(cit = C.listIterator(), pit = M.getFirst().listIterator(); cit.hasNext();) { Integer c = cit.next(); Integer p = pit.next(); cit.set(c - p); } M.removeFirst(); h -= R.getFirst(); R.removeFirst(); } int row = i + rad; if (row < rows && i > 0) { LinkedList<Integer> newQ = new LinkedList<Integer>(); M.addLast(newQ); int rx; int tot = 0; for (rx = 0, cit = C.listIterator(); rx <= rad; rx++) { if (rx < cols) { Integer c = cit.next(); int val = mat[row][rx]; newQ.addLast(val); cit.set(c + val); tot += val; } } R.addLast(tot); h += tot; } hh = h; Q = new LinkedList<Integer>(); Q.addAll(C); for (j = 1; j < cols; j++) { int col = j + rad; if (j - rad > 0) { hh -= Q.getFirst(); Q.pop(); } if (j + rad < cols) { int val = 0; for (int ry =- rad; ry <= rad; ry++) { int y = i + ry; if (y >= 0 && y < rows) { val += mat[y][col]; } } hh += val; Q.addLast(val); } } } } I guess that most is due to the poor choice of the LinkedList in Java and to the lack of an efficient (not shallow) copy method between two LinkedList. How can I improve the third Java method? Am I doing some conceptual error? As always, any criticisms is welcome. UPDATE Even if it does not solve the issue, using ArrayLists, as being suggested, instead of LinkedList improves the third method. The second one performs still better (but when the number of rows and columns of the matrix is lower than 300 and the window radius is small the first unoptimized method is the fastest in Java)

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