Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Google Developer Day Report

Follow up from here. It's a very long entry, so feel free to skip around, look at the pictures or read notes from sections of your choice.

I reached San Jose McEnery Convention Center around 9:15am and the crowd started building closer to 9:30am.

The keynote hall opened at 9:30am. A video with different mahsups (primarily using Google Maps) was shown until the keynote started (around 10 minutes late). Here are some of the websites that were shown in the video: map.movin-360.com (seems like a virtual tour of Berlin city), prague360.com (name says it), dudewheresmyusedcar.com (looking for a used car near a zip code), wepoco.com/maps/observations.php (making weather and climate information useful), arena.tv/gastronomie/barfinder.jsp (finding a bar in Germany), cleancruising.com.au (Australian cruising site, another Map mashup), turnhere.com/sfbayarea (local Bay area guide), fishingmap.jp, bimrace.com (tracks your progress in race, shows elevation for a race and animates).

Anyway, what follows is notes/impressions from the different sessions I attended today.

Opening Keynote

The Opening Keynote was given by Jeff Huber, Vice President Engineering.

Jeff explained the rationale behind conducting the event at 10 cities simultaneously that instead of bringing the developers to conference, take the conference to developers. There is approximately 1500 in Bay area, 5000 over all, 160 sessions over all.

housingmaps.com digged into the APIs hidden in JavaScript which motivated Google to create the Maps API. There are over 50,000 sites using these APIs all over the web.

Evolution of development over last several years: Start from open-source building blocks, Linux + Apache + MySQL + [Ruby+PHP+Java+Python]. Set of Web services as building blocks, for example Amazon S3 for storage.

Google's Developer Products are centered around three areas

• Integrate (Ability to take Google services to create your applications)
• Reach (How do I get distribution of my products, traffic to my site)
• Build (Building next gen web based applications)

Jeff talked about how Google provide infrastructure to build some of the products like [jogplanner, apartmentfinder, moviemaps. coolphotoeditor, syncingservice, certifiedusedcars, ok-i'm-kidding].google.com

Integrate (Google APIs + Mashup Editor)
GData APIs - Single RESTful Web service model, uses  APP and RSS for reading/writing to Google's application. For example picnik (online photo editing), spanningsync (syncing mechanism to ical and isync on Mac), Honda Certified used cars (Google Base GData APIs, setting custom search).

Announced: Google Mashup Editor - Experimental product, online application to create mashups. When I went online to sign up, then I got the following message:

The demo created a mashup of CA state parks, feed from external source, fed to Google Maps, and then link with Google Base for camping gear in 3 lines of code + HTML wrappers. Finally publish on googlemashups.com or igoogle.com.

Reach (Gadget + Mapplets)
Google's network is the largest network, 500 million users per month. Gadgets API. Very open model, 100,000 gadgets have been created. Todo List Gadget had 6.7 million page views in last week, Expedia Fare Calendar Gadget (updates every time you are online with the latest roundtrip fares) had 4.7 million page views in last week.

10:35am: Seems like they turned on the Air Conditioner and it's too loud!!

Announcement: Google Mapplets - Combined Gadgets and Maps API.

Orbitz mapplet, Weatherbug. The cool thing is you can show data from different sources such as Hotel and Weather on the same map. Combined Orbitz and WeatherBug with Google Maps - this combination is more useful than any of the individual sites. Called as "enabling a mashups of mashups".

Build (GWT + Gears)

Announcement: Google Gears - offline access for web apps, cross-browser, cross-platform, BSD-license. A way by which developers can add off line capability to your applications in a standard manner. Browser extension to allow web apps to work offline - Firefox, IE, Safari + Mac, Linux, Windows. Launching as open source project.

This is an evolutionary approach where end users continue using their application as they are using today w/o worrying about network connection, Developers continue building the application using their existing skills and code base, simply adapt to Gears API.

Also launching Google Reader Online - Working with Adobe, Opera and Firefox for industry collaboration. Kevin Lynch from Adobe showed a Flex/Apollo application with very similar online and offline experience.

Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google) made a cameo appearance. He talked about how the "person" involved in maintaining the Internet needs to be out-of-the-loop for it to truly self-sustaining and how Mapplets are leading towards that. And of course, payback to community which created such a fantastic ecosystem.
 

Google Maps API Introduction

The complete presentation is available at doug.ricket.com/gdd2007. Doug Ricket, the speaker, used the preso from this link.

API is all about writing little bit of JavaScript and do cool things. Here are some examples of how Google Maps API have been used:

• onNYturf.com - Subway map of NY city on Google maps (classic API set - some data put on map, useful to users)
• trulia.com - Real estate search
• Panoramio - Upload your photos and tag them with a specific geographic location
• wikimapia.org - People are adding content all over the world to communicate (entirely user generated content)

The trend is towards more collaborative.

Load maps API package (indicated by "file=api". There used to be a limit to the number of times this API key can be used in a day. But this limit is now removed. However if 5 million users are expected for the key, then contact Google to ensure sufficient server capacity.

"v=2" indicate that there is a big change in the API and required changes in the application code. In reality, you'll get the latest 2.x release, but behind the scenes versions are getting incremented and you get the latest version.

2.s is a more stable release for enterprise customers, solid and no bugs. You can also specify an exact version.

The fact that you can drag the map is the "big feature". Usability studies indicate that the cursor need to be changed to hand instead of mouse pointer (at least 2.51) - 2.50 you've pointer, 2.51 has a hand.

Because exact version numbers can be specified, almost infinite backward compatibility is available.

Key is registered for your specific website. For the public API, completely free but your site also need to be freely available. The basic API set has to be open to public. If you want to run it inside corporate firewall, then you need to use Enterprise and you get support from the Google team.

Follow along the presentation for all the detailed examples.

In Google Maps terms, InfoWindow is what is called as Balloon, Bubble or Pop-up. Marker is the red balloon, Title option to Marker is the tooltip.

Overlays is anything that can go over the map, for example Marker, Polylines, Polygons, Image and others. Can also create a custom overlay, basically any HTML can be converted into an overlay. There are few overlays that are available as default and then forums where people have shared their overlays.

Q. How far can you zoom in a particular level ?
A. Access to whatever is available to Google maps, in the area of 22 zoom levels. Certain level that is available all over the world. No API to get that level. The documentation says the default level available at all levels, but it's likely 18.

Q. When Maps are not available, can people provide their own tiles
A. Yes.

Icons: Any icon (local or remote) can be used on the map. After 200 markers (on Firefox) and 100 on IE shows performance degradation.

Asynchronous HTTP: Static data in your JavaScript file. Or separate the data from the code. GDownloadUrl downloads XML file, parse the data (GXml.parse) and create a marker (addOverlay(new GMarker(..))). If it's huge amount of markup, then there could be a performance hit.

Geocoder: Translating in address into lat/long and mapping it.

Full documentation: www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation

Q. Will Google add the ability to print satellite views of the maps
A. Not right now but working on it.

Q. Do you have Routing APIs
A. Come to the advanced session.

Q. Is there a way to highlight marker
A. Yes through JavaScript, use GMarker.setImage and highlight the marker that user mouseover.

Q. Can the Geocoder return the quality of geocode
A. It just returns null, check the documentation.

Q. Can you display a title for each marker without mouse over
A. Markers use an image, open source publicly create Overlay called TextMarker would serve that purpose, or create your own in 20-30 lines.

Q. Can Flash be embedded in Info windows
A. Put any HTML in the Info Window.

Q. Displaying Raster data on the map like a bitmap
A. Come to Advanced session. Take an image, put it down on the map anywhere and then add overlays. Or an API where you can specify tiles for different zoom levels.

"Go Forth and Create Mashups" was the key message.

The multi-cuisine (Asian, Mexican, Italian ...) lunch gave a feeling of what Googlers might be eating every day.

A Look Behind the Scenes at Google

Jeff Dean, Google Fellow gave this talk explaining "Building a Computer System for the Worlds' Information". The talk was all about behind the scenes look at Google systems infrastructure.

Every Google service sees continuing growth in computational needs = More queries + More data + More results.

The goal is to create very large scale, high performance computing infrastructure => Hardware + Software systems to make it easy to build products. Focus on price/performance and ease of use.

The Hardware Design Philosophy is:

• Buy as many commodity class PCs (Prefer low-end server/PC-class designs)
• Larger number of unreliable computers than a big unreliable computer because reliability can be handled in software
• Rather parallelize and get latency down
• "Ultra-reliable" hardware makes programmers lazy
  • Fault-tolerance to be built into software

The following set of pictures show how Google's infrastructure evolved over the years:

The three main components in Google's infrastructure are:

• Google File Systems (GFS)
• MapReduce
• BigTable - Simple database doesn't support relational database but lets you spread data over multiple machines.

Why GFS ? Unique file system requirements Huge read/write bandwidth Reliability over thousands of nodes Most operating on large data blocks Need efficient distributed operations Have control over apps, libraries and operating systems

MapReduce - a programming model and library to simplify large-scale computations on large clusters.

Map phase extract relevant information from each record of the input, Reduce phase collects data together and produces final output.

MapReduce is

• Fast (locality optimization, optimized sorter, lots of tuning work)
• Robust (handles machine failure, bad records)
• Easy to Use (little boilerplate, supports many formats)
• Scalable (can easily add more machines to handler more data or reduce the run-time)
• Widely applicable (can solve a broad range of problems)

Lots of products within Google use it.

BigTable - A large-scale storage system for semi-structured data

• Higher level API that a raw file system
  • Somewhat like a database, but not as full-featured
• Useful for structured/semi-structured data
  • URLs
    • Contents, crawl metadata, links, anchors, pagerank ...
  • Per-user data
    • User preference settings, recent queries/search results ...
  • Geographic Data
    • Physical entities, roads, satellite imagery ...
• Scales to large amount of data

Allows to do low-level storage optimization help performance significantly

• Distributed multi-level map
• Fault-tolerant, persistent
  • Uses GFS underlying
• Scalable
  • Thousands of servers
  • Terabytes of in-memory data
  • Petabytes of disk-based data
  • Millions of reads/writes per second, efficient scans
• Self-managing
  • Servers can be added/removed dynamically, adjust to load imbalance

Lot of internal pre-processing such as satellite imagery. Largest BigTable manages ~3000TB of data spread over several thousand machines (larger cells planned)

Used by Google Print, My Search History, Orkut, Crawling/Indexing pipeline

Q. What flavors of Linux ?
A. Some using 2.4 and variants of 2.6

Q. Do you do destructive testing ?
A. Definitely yes. A battery of tests, take a data center offline, much more load than expected and see if it degrades gracefully and much more.

Q. Do you make an attempt to measure that interesting data grows than raw data ?
A. Raw data requires computation to make interesting data. Not looked at different class of data.

Q. Will we see an open source version of GFS ?
A. There have been some discussions about it which would make difficult to open source it. There is an open source structure (Hudop?) that created a mimic of MapReduce.

Q. Do you modify the Linux kernel ?
A. Do modify as problems are discovered, lot of them are contributed back to the community.

Q. Few 1000 thousand servers, what policy is about recycling and green computing ?
A. Generally donate after outlived it's reasonable life and try to repair the machine instead of throwing it away.

Mashups the Easy Way

First mashup - housingmaps.com. Paul did it before the Maps API.

Whole bunch of things before you can make/release the mashup.

Three parts to create a Mashup:

• Feeds
• User Interface
  • Common set of Ajax UI elements (cross-browser compatible)
  • Simple declaration of Ajax components (similar to using HTML tags)
  • Flexible way of using UI controls programmatically
• Infrastructure
  • Lots of machines and serving capacity
  • Hosting or serve infrastructure with no setup up
  • Simple data store modeled after a feed
  • Ability to sandbox application for testing
  • One click deployment of application

Experimental project built by a small team in NY

• An Ajax application that lets you built other Ajax applications
• JavaScript library
• Hosting container at googlemashups.com.

Feeds -> UI -> Test -> Publish -> Distribute

Mashups and Simple Applications made easy.

Google Desktop Gadgets - Access, Share and Personalize Information

The speaker started with a survey and the results were:

• 80% use gadgets on desktop
• 50% use Google gadgets
• 5% develop gadgets

2007 - The Year of the Gadget ?

Specialized mini-application that runs in a web page or on the desktop. There are two types of widgets:

• Universal gadget
  • Minimal web app
  • No downloads necessary
  • Needs online connection
  • HTML + JavaScript
• Desktop Gadget
  • Runs on the desktop
  • Advanced functionality
  • Works online/offline
  • XML + JavaScript

The talk focused on desktop gadgets.

Why develop desktop gadget ? Instantly reach millions of users, Easily distribute content, Increase traffic to your sites.

Gadget is a zip archive with .gg extension and the following structure:

An easier way to develop a gadget from scratch - Google Desktop Gadget Designer - allows you to easily experiment with WYSIWYG interface. It then showed a simple demo to create the gadget using Designer.

Advanced APIs - Add Flash, Graphics, Drag/Drop, Transparency, Download streams or Internet but following are the interesting ones:

• Communication API - send and receive data using the Google Talk framework. For example, multi-user games, social networking gadgets.
• Query API - find related information by searching for a specific term in the user index. For example, music or photo collection organizers. Searches the local desktop and prepare a list.
• Event API - Provide contextual information based on the users actions. For example, For web pages containing an address, show a map of the place.

Useful links:

• Desktop Google SDK
• Desktop Gadgets Developer Group
• FAQ / Knowledge Base
• Desktop Gadget Articles
• Google Desktop Blog
• Open source Desktop Gadgets

Next steps:

• Submit your gadget to Google to reach more users.
• The gadget will appear in the online gadget gallery and in the 'Add gadgets' panel on the users machine.
• Gadgets are automatically targeted and recommended to users who are most likely to use them.
• Populare gadgets will give you the chance to get into Google Desktop Hall of Fame

Key Take-Aways

• 2007 - Year of the Gadget
• Desktop Gadget benefits:
  • Easy to develop and install (Only JavaScript + XML required and WYSIWYG Designer)
  • Easy to use, low resource requirements
  • Powerful APIs offer opportunities for feature-rich designs
• Through the Google Desktop Gadget Gallery developers can:
  • Reach millions of users around the world
  • Target your gadget to users most likely to see it
  • Distribute your content and increase traffic to your website
  • Become famous as a top gadget developer

Custom Search Engine - Search in Your Hands

Ramanathan Guha started Custom Search Engine at Google. Google Custom Search extends Open Publishing to search.

Why Custom Search ?

• Anyone, anywhere can create a substantially better search experience for their chosen topic
• No more complexity that creating a webpage
• The usual incentives apply: fame, fortune, pride ...

What Custom Search provides ?

• Harness the power of Google search
• Put search results on your website
• Customize the look & feel
• Invite friends
• Make money

Allows producing a custom search on demand.

That's the end of sessions. All in all, it was a great crash course for different Google offerings.

Technorati: googledeveloperday gdd gdd07 gdd07us

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[4]

Google Developer Day - May 31, 2007

Google is hosting Google Developer Day on May 31st in 10 countries (US, Brazil, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, Japan, Australia, and China) simultaneously. The distribution all over the globe ensures that major time zones in the world has an opportunity to attend the event in person or virtually from US and United Kingdom. The registration is now closed for sometime but I registered a while ago for the Mountain View location and so looking forward to an exciting time tomorrow. Here are the sessions I plan to attend:

• Opening Keynote
• Google Maps API Introduction
• A Look Behind the Scenes at Google
• Mashups the Easy Way
• Google Desktop Gadgets - Access, Share and Personalize Information
• Custom Search Engine - Google Search in Your Hands

If you can't view the live web cast then the videos will be posted at youtube afterwards. Drop a note if you are attending and would like to meet up over lunch or otherwise.

Technorati: googledeveloperday Google gdd07 gdd

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[4]

Week 15 Mileage

Mon: Rest
Tue: 7 miles
Wed: 20 min rowing
Thu: Rest
Fri: 18.5 miles
Sat: Camping
Sun: Camping

Here are good reads of this time ...

• Women: Pump up your Iron - Iron-deficient women can boost their aerobic capacity by simply increasing their iron intake.
• The Right Stuff - Strip down your running - both physically and mentally - and rediscover the fun.
• Find your perfect pace - From speedwork to hills, it all starts with your "VDOT number". Here is how to find it and where to go from there.
• Cross-train your way to a PR - Sub-4:00 miler Alan Webb reckons he spends a full 50 percent of his training time NOT running. Surprised? Read on.

Technorati: running fitness runninglog

Posted by Arun Gupta in Running  |  Comments[0]

18.5 miles this morning

Ran 18.5 miles (2:45:50) this morning. Click on 'large' or 'small' link next to 'Elevation:' and it shows elevation of each point plotted against distance. I created the same route on runningmap (based on Yahoo maps) which showed the minimum and maximum elevation (click on mountain icon in the toolbar at top) as 156.9 and 579.1 feet. There is constant uphill from mile 3.5 to 8.5, a slight dip and then a constant downhill. This is a good route to practice for San Francisco Marathon because of the constant up-hills. But I need to look for another route with constant up-hills and down-hills to be better prepared to meet the course elevation.

Any recommendations ?

BTW, I plotted the entire marathon course but the distance is totaling out to be .4 miles extra.

Technorati: runsfm running marathon

Posted by Arun Gupta in Running  |  Comments[2]

PaniPuri and Presentation Tips

Guy Kawasaki announced the result of World's Best Presentation Contest Winners. The contest ran from Mar 23 to Apr 23 2007. 2805 votes were received for the 443 entries. The blog very clearly identifies three crucial qualities of a good presentation: big fonts, big graphics and a "storytelling" orientation. The main message from the deck is clear, even in the absence of presenter.

And my favorite is about PaniPuri - IMHO the best appetizer, even a full meal to me

Here are some more resources, with consistent message, on creating effective presentations:

• Top Ten Slide Tips (Garr Reynolds)
• Build a Presentation (Presentation Pointers)
• Presenters University with lots of FREE stuff to add Wow! in your presentations.
• Screencasting Tips for Beginners
• The Other side of Presenter Skills
• Three Laptop Tricks for Better Presentation

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Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[1]

Misc Photography Tips

Some photography tips ... I'll try some of these and then post my pictures.

• How to photograph Silhouettes in 8 steps ?
• The Complete Guide to Children Photography - part 1, part 2
• Make a Flash photo Flipbook in 15 minutes
• 11 Surefire Tips for Improving your Landscape Photography
• Best Digital Camera Manufacturers (Canon is the most favored one and Nikon is not far behind and I love my Nikon D80)

Technorati: digital photographytips

Posted by Arun Gupta in photography  |  Comments[0]

Tango on Jetty

Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT, aka Project Tango), integrated in GlassFish V2 builds, provides a implementation of key enterprise Web services specifications and enables first-class interoperability with .NET 3.0 framework. However if you download stand-alone WSIT builds, then you can also install similar bits on Tomcat 5.5.17. In this entry, I provide a script that allows you to install the same bits on Jetty 6.1.0.

1. Download WSIT Milestone 4 and J2SE 5.0 U2 or later.
2. Install (detailed instructions) the bundle by giving the following command:
   
   java -jar wsit-1_0-fcs-bin-b14-09_apr_2007.jar
3. Copy the script below in 'jax-ws-latest-wsit' directory and name it as 'wsit-on-jetty.xml':
   
   <?xml version="1.0"?>

<project name="WSIT 1.0 Beta On Jetty" default="help" basedir=".">
  <property environment="env"/>
  <property name="jetty.home" value="${env.JETTY_HOME}"/>
  <property name="jetty.lib.home" value="${jetty.home}/lib"/>
  <property name="java.home" value="${env.JAVA_HOME}"/>
  <patternset id="wsit-jars">
    <include name="webservices-rt.jar"/>
    <include name="webservices-tools.jar"/>
    <include name="webservices-extra.jar"/>
    <include name="webservices-extra-api.jar"/>
    <include name="webservices-api.jar"/>
  </patternset>

  <target name="install" description="Install latest WSIT jars on Jetty 6.1.x">
    <echo message="Installing WSIT 1.0 Beta on ${jetty.home} ..."/>

    <copy toDir="${jetty.lib.home}" overwrite="true">
      <fileset dir="lib">
        <patternset refid="wsit-jars"/>
      </fileset>
    </copy>
    <echo message="... installation complete."/>
  </target>

  <target name="uninstall" description="Install latest WSIT jars on Jetty 6.1.x">
    <delete>
      <fileset dir="${jetty.lib.home}">
        <patternset refid="wsit-jars"/>
      </fileset>
    </delete>
  </target>

  <target name="help">
    <echo message="install :"/>
    <echo message=" Installs WSIT 1.0 Beta on Jetty 6.1.x"/>
    <echo/>
    <echo message="uninstall: "/>
    <echo message=" Uninstalls WSIT 1.0 Beta from Jetty 6.1.x"/>
    <echo/>
    <echo message="$JETTY_HOME must be set to the installation directory of Jetty 6.1.x."/>
    <echo/>
    <echo message="Usage:"/>
    <echo message=" ant -f wsit-on-jetty.xml {install,uninstall}"/>
  </target>
</project>
4. Download and install (basically unzip the downloaded file) Jetty 6.1.0. Set an environment variable JETTY_HOME pointing to the location of Jetty install directory.
5. Invoke the command to install WSIT M4 bits on Jetty as:
   
   ant -f wsit-on-jetty.xml install
6. Create a Reliable WSIT endpoint by choosing 'J2EE 1.4' as the 'Java EE version' and make sure 'Set Source Level to 1.4' is unchecked.
7. Copy the WAR file from the 'dist' directory of your application such '\Users\Arun Gupta\WebApplication1\dist\WebApplication1.war' to 'JETTY_HOME/webapps'.
8. Start Jetty instance using the following command:
   
   java -jar start.jar etc/jetty.xml
   
   It's weird that 'bin' directory contains only 'jetty.sh' (no .bat script) and the only way documented to run is using this command.
9. The endpoint should now be available at: 'http://localhost:8080/<context-root>/<service-name>?WSDL', for example 'http://localhost:8080/WebApplication1/HelloService?WSDL'. Note, Jetty does not seem to support hot deployment. So if you drop a WAR file in 'webapps' directory then you need to re-start your Jetty instance.
   
   
10. A Web service client to this endpoint can be easily generated following #ws2 screencast.
    
    

This is one trivial sample. If you try other interesting combinations and they don't work, please file an issue.

Technorati: wsit glassfish webservices jetty

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[5]

JavaOne 2007 slides are now available

JavaOne 2007 slides for Technical Sessions and Hands-on-Labs are available here.

Technorati: javaone presos

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[1]

Mephisto on GlassFish V3

This blog shows how Mephisto, a web publishing system based on Ruby on Rails, can be deployed on GlassFish V3 with minimal changes. These detailed steps are derived from the original instructions. Here are the exact steps that I followed:

1. Download Install GlassFish V3 Technology Preview 1 (lets say GLASSFISH_HOME).
2. Install and Configure JRuby
   1. Download and Install JRuby1.0 RC2 in 'GLASSFISH_HOME/lib' directory. Rename the installation directory to 'jruby' (lets say JRUBY_HOME).
   2. Include 'JRUBY_HOME/bin' in your environment PATH.
   3. Install Rails and ActiveRecord gems in JRuby installation by giving the command:
      
      gem install rails -y --no-rdoc
gem install activerecord-jdbc -y --no-rdoc
   4. Download and Install MySQL/J Connector in a new directory. Copy the JAR file from the main installation directory to 'JRUBY_HOME/lib' directory.
3. Install and Configure Database
   1. Download and install MySQL Community Server 5.0 (lets say MYSQL_HOME).
   2. Start MySQL database by giving the command 'mysqld-nt --user root --console' in MYSQL_HOME/bin directory on Windows or './bin/mysqld_safe' from MYSQL_HOME directory on Unix flavors.
   3. Create a database and grant privileges by giving the following commands:
       
      MYSQL_HOME/bin/mysql -u root
mysql> create database mephisto character set utf8;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> grant all on mephisto.* to arun@localhost identified by 'noway';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit;
Bye
4. Install and Configure Mephisto
   1. Download and unzip Mephisto 0.7.3. Rename the installation directory to 'mephisto' (lets say MEPHISTO_HOME) for convenience.
   2. Install Mephisto as described here. The two steps are summarized below for convenience:
      1. Copy 'MEPHISTO_HOME/config/database.example.yml' to 'MEPHISTO_HOME/config/database.yml'. Change database entries in the file from:
         
         development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: mephisto_development
  username: root
  password:
  host: localhost
         
         to
         
         development:
  adapter: jdbc
  driver: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
  url: jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mephisto
  username: arun
  password: noway
      2. Edit 'MEPHISTO_HOME/config/environment.rb', add the following fragment before "Rails::Initializer.run" statement.
         
         if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /java/
  require 'rubygems'
  RAILS_CONNECTION_ADAPTERS = %w(jdbc)
end
      3. Run 'rake db:bootstrap' to bootstrap the development database. On windows, you may have to invoke this command as 'JRUBY_HOME\bin\jruby.bat JRUBY_HOME\bin\rake db:bootstrap'.
5. Start GlassFish V3 by invoking the following command in GLASSFISH_HOME:
   
   java -jar lib/glassfish-10.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
6. Deploy the application from 'GLASSFISH_HOME/bin' as:
   
   asadmin deploy --path MEPHISTO_HOME
7. Mephisto is now deployed at 'http://localhost:8080/mephisto'.

This shows how a Ruby application, with minimal change, can be deployed on GlassFish V3. This was also shown in the JavaOne 2007 Technical keynote (start @ 8:29 and finish @ 10:50).

I encourage you to try other popular Rails applications on GlassFish and leave your feedback here.

Technorati: glassfish mephisto rubyonrails ror jrubyonglassfish

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[16]

Week 14 Mileage

Mon: Rest
Tue: 3.5 miles
Wed: 3.5 miles
Thu: 3.5 miles
Fri: 10 miles Bike
Sat: 7 miles
Sun: Rest

Traveling spoiled my long run this weekend but I plan to do a good one coming weekend.

Couple of good reads this time ...

• Eat like Lance - Learn to fine-tune your diet from the man who coached Lance Armstrong to 7 consecutive Tour-de-France wins.
• Runner's Pantry - 10 canned foods that should be in every runner's pantry.

Technorati: running fitness runninglog

Posted by Arun Gupta in Running  |  Comments[0]

jMaki publish/subscribe and debugging

So far you've been playing with jMaki and created some Web and/or Rails applications. Let's say you've gone a step ahead and some widgets in your application use jMaki's publish/subscribe mechanism to talk with each other. Some jMaki widgets, such as Menu and Dynamic Container are pre-configured to publish and subscribe to the same topic. So if you develop a simple menu-based application then it'll work without adding any glue code. Another example is Yahoo GeoCoder publishing and Yahoo Maps and Google Maps subscribing. This allows you to drop all three widgets together on the same page and if you enter a city and state in GeoCoder, the coordinates will show up in both the maps. So far so good, but what if you are writing custom publish and subscribe code and it's not working. Lets see how we can debug that.

Let's say there is a Yahoo Calendar and Data Table widget in the page. The Data Table displays stock tickers by pulling the data from quote servers for the current date. You'd like to modify the application such that whenever a date is selected in the Calendar widget, the Data Table refreshes itself by pulling quotes for that date.

The Calendar widget already publishes an event to "/yahoo/calendar/onSelect" topic. All you need to do is modify 'component.js' in Web pages, resources, yahoo, dataTable subtree and listen to that topic. For that, you add the following statement:

jmaki.subscribe("/yahoo/calendar/onSelect", calendarListener);

on line 172 of 'component.js'. The 'calendarListener' function is defined as:

function calendarListener(item) {
    var targetDiv = document.getElementById("newpage");
    targetDiv.innerHTML = item.value;
}

On 'index.jsp', where both the widgets live together, a new <div> is added:

<div id="newpage"></div>

Now any date selected in the calendar is printed on the page. The 'calendarListener' function can be easily modified such that the dataTable is refreshed after processing the date.

We created a simple, yet powerful example, demonstrating jMaki publish/subscribe mechanism.

The mechanism is simple so it should just work even if there are custom widgets and they publish events to their own topic. But this is software so in all likelihood don't be surprised if it does not :) But jMaki at least provide a way to debug that situation. Open 'Web pages', 'resources', 'jmaki.js'. Search for 'this.debugGlue=false;this.debug=false;' in this file. Change the 'false' to 'true' and save the file. After you refresh your application in the browser window, the bottom-right portion of your browser window shows all the topics and messages published on it as shown below:

Happy debugging!

All jMaki Web applications can be deployed on GlassFish or Rails applications can be WARed and then deployed on GlassFish.

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

Gmail equivalence

a.r.u.n.g.u.p.t.a-AT-gmail-DOT-com is the same as arungupta-AT-gmail-DOT-com or a.rungup.ta-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

Read for more details. New learning every day

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Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[2]

Tim Bray's keynote session at Rails Conf

Tim Bray, Web Guy from Sun Microsystems gave the keynote session at Rails Conf 2007 yesterday (May 19). With 1600 attendees, it was quite a different experience from JavaOne last week which had approx 16,000 people. The session was to start @ 9am and we were made to wait until 8:55am outside the Ballroom.

Anyway, once the session started it was packed!

• How many people work for startups ? - Approx 40%
• How many work for non-startups, like Sun ? - Approx 40%
• How many for service providers, like ThoughtWorks - Approx 20%
• How many are using Ruby as the first programming language - Approx 5%
• How many came to Ruby from:
  • Java - Approx 70%
  • Microsoft - Approx 40%
  • PHP - Approx 40%

He also announced Sun will donate servers to open-source Ruby projects. Showed screen shots of Mephisto source code in NetBeans 6 and RHTML debugging.

Tim invited Charles Nutter, JRuby core developer on the stage and asked "Why JRuby ?".

Charles: JRuby is a new different way of looking at Ruby. Because it runs on Java, it scales very well, tested thoroughly, allows Ruby to get into enterprises where Ruby and/or Rails have never entered and there is a vast amount of Java libraries accessible to Ruby developers.

Tim: Any gotchas ?
Charles: If not feeling the pain under Ruby, keep doing it. JRuby is not a solution to all problems. If you want to scale better or differently, then this may be your solution. This gets you into enterprises where there is no Ruby or Rails presence.

Tim: When will JRuby be released ?
Charles: JRuby RC is out and FCS will be released by month-end.

Charles also said to give JRuby tee-shirts (pretty cool looking and has Duke holding a Ruby gem) if you contribute to the project or submit patches. Here are some pictures of Tim:

One of the big questions that we were getting asked at the Sun pod was "What is Sun doing at Rails Conf ?". Tim answered that very clearly in his session:

Sun sells Computers, Infrastructures, Operating Systems (Solaris) which is driving biggest, hairiest, ugliest and yet highly-performant systems in the world. We have x4500 Thumper, M9000, Identity Management Solutions. And then we are a systems company so we have NetBeans - a highly productive Rails development environment, jMaki - rich set of widgets for Rails view, and GlassFish - deployment of Rails applications.

Another couple of interesting topics that Tim touched on is:

• How to make money on free products ?
  • Adoption - Aligns with Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) says "mindshare gets market share". Adoption is all about friction and the biggest is payment friction. Being open source allows you to get rid of that.
  • Deployment - After adoption, you see deployment.
  • Monetization at the point of value - The hypothesis is "No serious business will deploy any serious application on any serious solution unless it is supported."
• Even if Rails is successful beyond our wildest dreams, Java, .NET and PHP will never go away. The solution is to deal with them and integrate them using REST. Here are some strong positives about Java - the platform, the language, a set of APIs, the community:
  • Highly concurrent with multiple threads in the JVM. This allows your application to scale much better.
  • Security in the JVM - Sandbox security allows to build robust internet-based applications
  • Universe of Java APIs is better than C, PHP and all other languages.
  • 6 million community of Java developers

I had to leave the session early because of setting up the booth but it was a great talk!

Check out the flickr stream for the show.

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

7 miles on treadmill - boring

One of the disadvantages of traveling on weekend is I miss my long distance road-running. This weekend because of Rails Conf 2007, I had to plan my long run on a treadmill. So anyway, I got up at 5:45am and planned a 10 miler on the treadmill (few more weeks for the marathon). I'm a road-runner and have never run that long a distance on treadmill but decided to give it a shot today. After running barely 4 miles I started feeling bored. I browsed through all the channels and it was either 'Good Morning Weekend' or something else. I finally hooked on to History channel which was showing a great program on F16 & F18. But even that couldn't keep me around for long. The walls around me were the same, the scenery was not changing and I was sweating more than normal (what else to expect in a closed room!). I finally decided to stop at 7 miles, burnt lot of calories because I changed the gradient from 3 to 5 multiple times but it was quite boring!

I wonder how anybody can run 153.76 miles on a treadmill

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Posted by Arun Gupta in Running  |  Comments[6]

Sun @ Rails Conf 2007 - Keep coming!

Sun is a diamond sponsor of Rails Conference 2007. At the booth we are showing how jMaki provides a rich set of widgets for Rails application. Also talk to us about how GlassFish V2 can provide a deployment environment for WAR-ed up RoR apps and how GlassFish V3 provides deployment of original packaging of RoR apps.

We are also showing the best platform for hosting Ruby on Rails -- Sun Fire T2000, Sun Startup Essentials, NetBeans 6 great Ruby and Rails capabilities. And our booth is shared with Joyent. And then of course, we are giving a few sessions

We are loving the response so far, keep it coming!

 

Thanks to Lou for the pictures.

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