Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Search engine in Firefox and Favicon

Two minor updates to my blog today:

• Following the instructions, I created a search plug-in for TheAquarium and my blog. So if you are viewing this blog in Firefox (and other browsers that support Open Search Description Format) and click on the search bar, then you'll see an option to add both the search engines. Alternatively, you can also drop this file in searchplugins directory of Firefox and it will show up after restarting the browser. Use this file for adding my blog search engine. I still need to debug why correct images are not showing up when Firefox auto discover the engines and the page is bookmarked.
• Following the instructions, created a Favicon for my blog. So now whenever you visit my blog in a browser (tested in Firefox), a small image appears at the front of the URL area. This same image is also visible as an icon in the tab title.

Technorati: firefox searchengine theaquarium  favicon icons

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[2]

Web Services Security Blogs

Manveen works on XML Web Services and Security and is now blogging. Welcome to the blogosphere! She has already posted three entries this week:

• XWSS on Maven
• On configuring Glassfish keystores
• Converting an existing webservice to one using the JSR109 deployment model

Here are some other entries published by Web Services Security team recently:

• Disabling InclusivePrefixList in XWSS (Ashutosh, Mar 27)

• Disabling InclusivePrefixList in WSIT (Venu, Mar 20)

• Configuring Timestamp verification in WSIT through policy assertions (Ashutosh, Mar 13)

• Develop WSTrust Application Using NetBeans (Shyam, Mar 13)

All these entries, along with rest of WSIT entries, can be viewed through the WSIT aggregated pipe.

Technorati: WSIT Web services Security

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[0]

Screencast #SWDP1: How to download, install, and get started with Sun Web Developer Pack ?

Sun Web Developer Pack (SWDP) was released 2 weeks ago. This is a new toolkit from Sun that allows you to build your next generation Web applications using Ajax technologies with Project jMaki & Project Dynamic Faces, light-weight Web services with Atom / REST APIs / WADL and server side scripting with Project Phobos and deploy them on industry-grade containers like GlassFish. This screencast shows you the download options, how to install and get started (including NetBeans plug-in installation) with SWDP.

Enjoy it here!

Thanks to Ana for helping me script the screencast.

And feel free to leave a comment on the blog or ask questions on SWDP Forum.

Technorati: swdp NetBeans GlassFish screencast

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[2]

Week 6 Mileage

Mon: 3.5 miles
Tue: 3.0 miles
Wed: 3.5 miles
Thu: 7 miles
Fri: None
Sat: 5 miles
Sun: 8 miles

I could not run on Friday because The Venetian charges $35 for their fitness center usage. Happy running and reading the following links:

• Be a smart eater - 20 simple swaps that will cut fat and calories from your diet, boost nutrition, and make you a better runner
• 9 ways to loose flab
• The Perfect Form - Running better, from head to toe.
• Can hill running make you faster ?

I forgot my Polar F11 at The Venetian last week. Luckily they found it, after multiple reminders, and called me over the weekend to inform they have sent it to me. I'm waiting ...

Technorati: running training fitness runninglog polar

Posted by Arun Gupta in Running  |  Comments[0]

Week 5 Mileage

Mon: 3.5 miles
Tue: 3.5 miles
Wed: 7 miles
Thu: Rest
Fri: None
Sat: Traveling
Sun: Traveling

Low mileage and no hill runs yet!

Happy running and reading the following links:

• The Runners Diet
• Run Off 5 Pounds

Technorati: running training fitness runninglog

Posted by Arun Gupta in Running  |  Comments[0]

Day 3 @ The Server Side Java Symposium

In the opening keynote of last day (Day 1 & Day 2) of TheServerSide Java Symposium, Joe asked the following questions, to an audience of approx 500 Java developers, receiving instant feedback.

How  satisfied are you with Sun ?

How important is that a tool or library be open source ?

Which of the following best describes your company ?

I attended 2 more talks on Writing Big Apps with Google Web Toolkit and Scripting API in Java SE 6 that day and left around right after lunch to catch my flight back home.

Technorati: theserverside sun

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[0]

Day 2 @ The Server Side Java Symposium

In the opening keynote of Day 2 (Day 1), Joe Ottinger, Editor-in-chief of TheServerSide, asked the following questions, to an audience of approx 500 Java developers, receiving instant feedback using little handy devices on each attendees table. As with any surveys, the data may be skewed because of multiple reasons (not all participating, voting twice, pressing the wrong key etc). But here are the questions and their answers:

Which languages do you use most often ?

I could not capture the exact percentage but the priority order is listed below. This being a Java conference, the percentage for Java developers is well expected.

Which version of JavaEE API do you use ?

How do you call Remote services ?

I gave a talk on JAX-WS and WSIT: Tangoing with .NET yesterday and it went well. The two demos in the talk are also available as screencast in #ws1 and #ws3. I always leave time for Q&A and this time the discussions were way after the session was over. And I like it that way The key message is WSIT, available in GlassFish v2, gives you first-class interoperability with Microsoft .NET 3.0 framework and comes with fully integrated development experience in NetBeans 5.5.1 IDE.

I enjoyed a panel discussion on "Open Source Business Panel" and there were representatives from Alfresco, JBoss, SpikeSource, LifeRay, Interface21. The monetization model for all the participating companies was by selling professional services, technical support and training. Sun Java System Application Server (product version of GlassFish v2) offer training, services and support. Read Ed Ort's detailed summary of the session here.

I spent the afternoon with Joe Ottinger, Editor-in-chief of TheServerSide.com, deploying a trivial deployment-descriptor-free Web service on GlassFish v2. Basically we used the instructions as I described in an earlier entry. He was using GlassFish v2 b33 and was not able to get it working. On my laptop, with v2 b39, the service deployed easily. And even with b33 it worked. Anyway, Joe is going to install a fresh copy of b33 and try it. He also gave some good feedback in terms of how java.sun.com/webservices should be structured. We are already working on cleaning up the website and you'll see the changes in the weeks to come.

I spent the evening walking on the strip and took bunch of pictures.

Technorati: theserverside webservices wsit glassfish

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[6]

Day 1 @ The Server Side Java Symposium

I've been in Las Vegas for past 2 days attending The Server Side Java Symposium. Sun is the only platinum sponsor.

The conference is at The Venetian, one of the nicest hotels on the strip, but found two irritating issues for working people:

• Using fitness center facilities require you to pay $35/day charge. That is ridiculous to me. They anyway charge fortune for the room so why this extra fee ? I used the facility yesterday without knowing the charge but found out about the charge as there were folks lined up on the "reservation desk" for the fitness center. I've never seen that for a fitness center in a hotel.
• There are no power connections on the office table. There is a personalized fax machine but I'd rather have a power connection to make it convenient.

TheServerSide sponsored the travel and lodging and check out the pictures of the suite, it's pretty cool!

I missed the opening keynote by Karen Tegan Padir but heard it went well. Later that day, I attended a session by Ben Galbraith and Dion Alamer (co-founders of Ajaxian) on "State of Ajax".

The session started by asking "Does anyone here not know how to do Ajax ?". There were few hands raised and so the session started by creating a simple HTML form that takes a zip code and returns the corresponding city using XMLHttpRequest without any page refresh. Then the talk explained three main Ajaxian architectures:

• Return data (JSON / XML) - Smart clients, parse XML and JSON and populate the front end.
• Return HTML (responseText + innerHTML) - Slightly dumb client, just shows the results as is.
• Return JavaScript (eval) - Really dumb client, invoke the script sent by server.

The talk identified Google Maps, Google Suggest, Housingmaps,  TaDaList as Ajax innovators. In my opinion, Google Suggest was really the first effort that showed Ajax-like interactions.

Ben and Dion divided JavaScript in two camps: "JavaScript is Good" and "JavaScript is Bad". jMaki was classified in the first camp, Google Web Toolkit in the second camp and Direct Web Remoting in partly both the camps. Project Phobos was also classified in "JavaScript is Good" camp as it enables server-side scripting. Ben will be uploading a new video on jMaki showing Craig's list mashup so stay tuned for that.

Prototype, Scriptaculous and Dojo were rated as the most popular toolkits in a survey conducted last year on Ajaxian. The speakers classified Dojo as "Huge Elephant of JavaScript" with support for offline storage, presentation, remoting, charts and many other features.

IntelliJ IDEA 6.0 and NetBeans 5.5 for development and FireBug for debugging were the recommended tools. Then there were few slides on offline storage, especially the upcoming capabilities in Firefox 3 (off-line cache, off-line events, persistent cache), dojo.storage package and Adobe Apollo with offline flash. There was a brief mention of Project Tamarin that will provide approx 10 times faster JavaScript runtime and this will be integrated in a later version of Firefox. And the talk concluded by giving a future slide including topics such as off-line Ajax, fast JavaScript interpreters, HTML 5 and others.

A complete Day 1 report is available here. Ed Ort also posted notes.

Technorati: theserverside Ajax venetian

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[2]

Day 2 @ Ajax World - Part 2

Following from previous entry, I spent rest of my day at Sun pod showing various demos and talking to users. The evening was fun with a 2-hour cruise trip.

The boat was shaking a lot so I could not get any good pictures of the New York City skyline or Statue of Liberty. But it was nice spending time with other friends.

Technorati: ajaxworld sun swdp web2.0

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[0]

Day 2 at Ajax World

After spending the evening at Times Square yesterday, I rolled early in the bed to attend the morning keynote at 7:30am. And I had to run before that So I attended three sessions before the Expo Floor opened.

Like yesterday, the opening keynote, scheduled for 7:30am, started at 7:45am. I've a 10am flight tomorrow morning so with this consistent delayed start, I might have to miss the keynote tomorrow although I'd very much like to attend it.

Jeremy said even though folks have been using Ajax-like technologies for years but without Google Maps and GMail, we wouldn't be in this room, not so many and not so fired up. There were approximately 300 people for this 7:30am session. This is nothing compared to JavaOne keynote which typically has between 8000 to 12000 people in the keynote but the overall attendance of this conference itself is around 800. So in terms of percentage, it's still decent.

The opening keynote was by Bret Taylor who founded and led Google Maps. He showed 5 lines of code to integrate Google Maps in a website and another 8 lines of code to integrate Google Search. The point was that it is really easy to work with Ajax, especially as compared with SOAP/WSDL stack. Then he explained some of the techniques used behind Google Maps and GMail to solve some of the common problems of Ajax.

Per him, the main reason that triggered the explosive growth of Ajax is that most of the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) agreed to deal with DOM, XHR, hash/anchor encoding and such similar techniques that enable Ajax in a consistent manner. He then explained how technology/browsers are evolving, on a daily basis, to make it a more pleasant experience.

The second session was "Inside the U.S. Air Force: How AJAX Is Improving Communications and Quality of Life" - a joint talk by Tony Tran & Peggy Rackstraw. Tony Tran, Vice President of Roundarch who build the employee portal for Air Force explained how Air Force is adopting Ajax/RIA. Tony showed samples, using before and after comparison of clicks and page refreshes, of how adding RIA to the Air Force portal increased productivity of the employees by making the website easier to use. After a good success in their first phase, they worked with Laszlo systems to solve their distributed email system (higher TCO, multiple email servers/domains, basic editing capabilities) and IM within the team and friends & families. Then Peggy from Laszlo Systems demoed "Deployed Life" which had initial problems with Firefox but then worked with IE. IM was cool because it allowed a drag-and-drop of pictures/videos from your local machine.

The third session was "Enterprise Ajax Using Java" by Greg Murray. The talk was about newly launched Sun Web Developer Pack and how jMaki provides an extensible framework to develop your Ajax applications. The talk was full of demos making it more real. I talk about SWDP and jMaki on my blog anyway, so won't dwell in details here. And now I'm sitting at Sun pod.

At Sun pod, we are showing jMaki Charting, Theming, Glue, Mashups along with other cool features, Grizzly Comet demo, Phobos CRUD generator, RESTful Web services API and lots of other stuff. All of these technologies are available in recently released Sun Web Developer Pack that can be run on top of GlassFish v2. Come by and talk to us.

Tonight is Ajax on Hudson and I'm looking forward to that.

Technorati: ajaxworld sun swdp glassfish grizzly comet jmaki web2.0

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[1]

Cricket World Cup 2007 - India at Worst and Best

In the cricket world cup, India's defeat by Bangladesh on Friday was a shameful one. The team spirit, top/middle/bottom order, bowlers and the fielders - everybody performed terrible. And on top of that, Bangladesh really played very well. And as I said earlier, may the best team win - Bangladesh was indeed a superior team on that day. I'm happy for them!

Although I was extremely disappointed by India's loss in their debut match but today, against Bermuda, was the other extreme. India scored 415 for 5, a record total in World cups. The top order gave a solid start (205 for 2 in 30 overs) and stormed the Bermudan bowlers by scoring 144 runs in the last 12 overs.

Comparing the statistics of two matches India has played so far:

India's desperation to not only win the second match but win with a huge margin is evident from these statistics. After this win, India is in a better position to get into "Super 8" but they still have to beat Sri Lanka to be sure of that.

Over the weekend, Pakistan's coach Bob Woolmer died under mysterious circumstances and their team captain, Inzamam-ul Haq, retired from One Day International cricket after Pakistan's early ouster from the world cup. My condolences to Bob Woolmer and his family. Irrespective of whether India reaches final or not, I always wait for the match with Pakistan, especially in World cup where India has always won. I'll have to miss that exciting moment this time.

Technorati: cricket worldcupcricket india pakistan bermuda bangladesh 2007

Posted by Arun Gupta in Sports  |  Comments[18]

Day 1 - Reporting from Ajax World

I arrived in New York City yesterday early morning to show Sun's offerings at Ajax World. The Roosevelt Hotel reservation desk was courteous to allow me a really early check in (7am). After spending day with family & friends yesterday, I attended the opening keynote by Douglas Crockford this morning. After 20 minutes of delay Jeremy Geelan of SYS-CON, chair of the show, opened it and highlighted that they are neither vendors nor developers and they are here to listen and share with the community. I think that was an interesting statement considering there are multiple players involved in the game.

Doug started with a show of hands asking questions about Ajax awareness and finally asked "Who knows what does Web 2.0 mean?". And there were around approx 10 hands showed up. This term "Web 2.0" is fuzzy and any attempt to version the world wide web seems irrational. At Sun, we refer to this fuzzy term as "Next Generation Web Application" that allow to develop Rich Internet Applications. But you'll see Sun using "Web 2.0" sometimes because of a general adoption of this term.

Sun Web Developer Pack is one such toolkit that provides binaries, tutorial, documentation, samples (including source) to build your next generation Web applications and deploy them on industry-grade containers such as GlassFish and Sun Java System Web Server and others.

Most of Doug's slides were saying just few words and then he was talking through them. He introduced Ajax, it's history, different attempts at Rich Internet Application development, JavaScript, security in Ajax applications, Ajax in mobile applications, and competition (Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's WPF).

Even though the keynote started late, but it finished slightly before time allowing me to attend Real World Web 2.0 Comet-based Applications by Jean Francois. There he gave an overview of the problem solved by Comet, different approaches of Comet, Grizzly Comet in GlassFish, and how to write a Comet application using GlassFish. In summary, Grizzly Comet solves reduce the latency and load on server but there is no standard way to for Comet-based applications so there is no interoperability between implementations. Please stop by at Sun's booth if you are interested in seeing a demo or talk more about Sun's offerings in this space.

A complete glimpse of schedule is available here and Sun sessions are listed here.

As a side note, I find it weird that there is no free internet connectivity at Ajax World. Isn't the conference about sharing, community and connectivity ?

Technorati: ajaxworld sun swdp glassfish grizzly comet

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[3]

More on Sun Web Developer Pack

More buzz on Sun Web Developer Pack ...

• Sun Announces the Next Major Version of the Open Source Java Enterprise Edition 5 (GlassFish v2) Application Server and the New Sun Web Developer Pack (official announcement)
• Sun Unveils GlassFish V2 Beta for Web 2.0 and SOA Development (Linux World)
• GlassFish app server to swim in the enterprise (InfoWorld)
• Sun Web Developer Pack (Flash Web Design)
• Sun Announces GlassFish V2 Beta At AJAXWorld (Sys-Con/Ajax World)
• Sun Pushes Ahead with New App Server, Web Toolset (eweek)
• Sun releases 'enterprise ready' GlassFish beta (Computer Business Review Online)
• Sun Adds Enterprise Features To Open-Source App Server (CRN/Channel Web)
• Sun To Provide Commercial Support for Glassfish (Internet News)
• Sun unveils beta of open source application server: The new features in GlassFish are aimed at enterprises (Computer World)

Technorati: swdp web2.0 ajax scripting glassfish jmaki phobos

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[0]

Sun Web Developer Pack in Blogs

Here is the SWDP buzz so far:

• Sun Web Developer Pack
• Phobos in the Sun Web Developer Pack
• Sun Web Developer Pack (wikipedia)
• Sun Web Developer Pack (Ajaxian)
• Sun Web Developer Pack Announced (Webservices.org)
• Sun Web Developer Pack announced (The Server Side)
• Java EE 5, Web 2.0 with Sun Web Server Update 1 Technology Preview
• Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Update 1 Technology Preview Ships
• Sun Web Developer Pack R1
• Sun Web Developer Pack R1 with WADL and RESTful WS goodies
• SWDP R1 with RSS and Atom Goodies
• Introducing SWDP

Download it, Get started, and give us feedback. And if you are wondering, it's a FREE download.

Technorati: swdp web2.0 ajax scripting glassfish jmaki phobos

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[1]

Next Gen Web @ JavaOne

Follow up from my previous entry, here is a complete list of all the next generation Web application, a.k.a "Web 2.0", sessions from Sun.

There is more content that has not been publicly announced yet. And while we are working on making presentations for this year richer, fuller and more hands-on, get your self familiar with JavaOne 2006 archives on this topic.

Technorati: Javaone Web2.0 Ajax jmaki REST JavaScript

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[1]