Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...
Arun Gupta is a technology enthusiast, a passionate runner, and a community guy who works for Sun Microsystems.
Monday March 31, 2008
Slides for St Louis & Kansas City Developer Update Meetings
I presented on GlassFish
and Metro
in Developer Update meetings in St
Louis & Kansas
City. The slides are available here.
The demos shown in the talk can be seen at:
The flight out of Kansas City got cancelled because of a hydraulic pump failure and finally reached home around mid night :( I was at least glad to come back home the same night!
The travel calendar so far this year is:
| Event | City | Date |
| The Server Side Java Symposium | Las Vegas | Mar 26, 2008 |
| Ajax World East 2008 Day 2, Day 1 | New York | Mar 18-19, 2008 |
| SD West 2008 | Santa Clara | Mar 6, 2008 |
| GlassFish Day | Hyderabad, India | Feb 29, 2008 |
| Sun Tech Days - Day 2, Talent Show, Day 1 | Hyderabad, India | Feb 27-28, 2008 |
| acts_as conference - Day 2, Day 1 | Orlando | Feb 8-9, 2008 |
| South Bay Ruby Meetup | Mountain View | Jan 30, 2008 |
Next stop, FISL in Brazil.
Technorati: conf glassfish netbeans metro webservices stlouis kansascity
Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices | Comments[3]
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Thursday March 27, 2008
Slides & Demos for Rails/GlassFish/jMaki session at TSS JS
As reported earlier,
I presented on "Rails
powered by GlassFish and jMaki" yesterday at The
Server Side Java Symposium - Las Vegas. The slides are
available here.
The demos shown in the talk are available at:
As announced earlier, Ruby Developer Center is a new page launched earlier today and provides all the resources to get started with Ruby, JRuby, Ruby-on-Rails @ Sun.
Check out some pictures from the event:
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Technorati: conf theserverside tssjs lasvegas rubyonrails ruby jruby glassfish netbeans jmaki
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[2]
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Blue Man @ Venetian, Las Vegas
Me & Kohsuke saw Blue Man
show @ The Venetian,
Las Vegas yesterday night. It's a stunning
spectacular that is worth every penny. Even though I was sitting in the
last row of Upper Balcony but really enjoyed every bit of it.
Check out some of their videos:
And some of our pictures:
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I must say the audience participation in 1 hr 45 minutes was quite amazing. And the last few minutes of the show are ecstatic.
In my opinion, a must see show in Vegas!
Technorati: blueman vegas venetian
Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[0]
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Wednesday March 26, 2008
Enjoy some pictures from Las Vegas ...
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Technorati: photography lasvegas tssjs
Posted by Arun Gupta in photography | Comments[1]
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Ruby Developer Center @ Sun Developer Network - New Webpage
Ruby Developer
Center is a new page launched today that is a one stop page
for any thing & everything about Ruby, JRuby, Rails and all
related efforts @ Sun
Microsystems. Here are couple of new articles to get you
started:
- NetBeans, Solaris, GlassFish: The Ruby's Red Slippers Fit
- Rails powered by the GlassFish Application Server
The Overview tab provides a pointers to Getting Started and key Ruby events. In the Reference tab, you can find out about documentation about using Ruby with Solaris, NetBeans, GlassFish, Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL & JavaDB). The Community tab gives pointers to blogs, forums and participation opportunities. Finally Download tab provides a single page to download all related Tools & Platforms.
Let us know what else would you like to see on the website.
Technorati: ruby jruby rubyonrails netbeans glassfish solaris sun sdn
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[1]
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Bellagio Musical Showers - Las Vegas
Recorded on Mar 25, 2008 night ...
Technorati: conf
theserverside
tssjs lasvegas
bellagio
musicalfountain
fountain
Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[0]
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Tuesday March 25, 2008
Rails powered by GlassFish & jMaki @ The Server Side Java Symposium, Las Vegas - Mar 26, 2008
If you want to learn more about:
- How to use GlassFish as development & deployment platform for Rails applications ?
- How GlassFish v3 Gem provides a "green" alternative to WEBrick & Mongrel ?
- How to use NetBeans & jMaki plug-in to embed rich widgets in your Rails applications ?
| Date: | Mar 26, 2008 |
| Time: | 2:30 - 3:30pm |
| Track: | Language & Coding |
| Title: | Rails powered by GlassFish & jMaki |
A popular statement for Las Vegas is What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas! But I promise to share all the slides & demos with you so that you can enjoy at least the technical part of it ;-)
Another interesting session worth attending is How to use the Metro Web services stack to Build Fast, Scalable Services by Kohsuke on Mar 26 (Wed) from 4:10 - 5:15pm.
Technorati: conf theserverside tssjs lasvegas rubyonrails glassfish jmaki netbeans metro webservices
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[1]
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Monday March 24, 2008
JRuby 1.1 RC3 released - Last chance to file bugs
JRuby
1.1 RC3 (third and final release candidate) was released
last week. The highlights are:
- 58 issues resolved since JRuby 1.1RC2
- ri/rdoc w/ documentation included in distribution
- More IO corner cases fixed (popen, reopen)
- Several small bottlenecks fixed
Why should you try ? Read in a detailed article - Rails powered by GlassFish Application Server.
The gem can be installed using the following command:
dhcp64-134-213-159:jruby-1.1RC3
arungupta$ bin/jruby -S gem install glassfish |
Previous entries showing code samples are tagged with v3+gem.
All the latest information about the gem can be found at GlassFish JRuby wiki or JRuby wiki.
Please use the gem and send us feedback on GlassFish forums, dev@glassfish or gem mailing list.
File issues in JIRA or RubyForge or GlassFish Issue Tracker.
Technorati: rubyonrails jruby ruby glassfish v3 gem
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[0]
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Saturday March 22, 2008
Rails powered by the GlassFish Application Server - New Article
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Do you know there are several advantags of deploying Ruby-on-Rails
applications on GlassFish
instead of traditional Apache/Mongrel ? Here they are: |
- Identical Development and Deployment Environments
- Multiple Applications in One Container
- Multiple Requests by a Single Application
- Redeploying an Application
- Clustering, Load Balancing, and High Availability
- Database Connection Pooling
- Cohosting Ruby-on-Rails and Java EE Applications
Please send feedback to dev@glassfish.dev.java.net or leave a comment on the blog.
Technorati: rubyonrails jruby ruby glassfish
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[0]
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Friday March 21, 2008
Ajax World East 2008 - Day 2 Report
I delivered my Maki
as an Ajax Mashup Framework talk and the slides are available
here.
Lots of attendees came by afterwards and told me that they enjoyed the
demo. The talk showed how jMaki
Webtop provides a lightweight mashup framework that runs in
the browser. Here is a pictorial representation of the demo shown:
jMaki Webtop is basically a jMaki widget that can be embedded in a JSP
or PHP page. This widget provides the framework for managing widgets
and users, ability to persist the Webtop on client-side using Google
Gears or server-side using backend database, layouts and other
functionality. In JSP case, the widget uses JPA for performing all the
CRUD operations with the back-end MySQL database. The resulting WAR
file is deployed on GlassFish
(can be any other Servlet container as well). If you are interested in
a Java version of Webtop then the recommended path is:
- Create services & widgets using NetBeans
- Deploy them on GlassFish
- jMaki webtop for widget deployment & customization
I attended few more talks and took notes in some of them to share:
- Can we fix the Web ?
- Accelerate Ajax development with Appcelerator
- REST & Ajax Reconciled
- Understanding the Top Web 2.0 Attack Vectors
- Building Web 2.0 Applications with Project Zero
- OpenAjax Widgets & Gadgets
Can we fix the Web ?
This was an early morning talk (7:30am) and I reached few minutes late. But it was basically talking about JavaScript vulnerabilities such as
- Script injection
- No difference between user & guest scripts
- Scripts exempt from same-origin policy
- No modularity (global access to everything on the page)
Doug recommended 3-step plan to fix the Web:
- Safe JavaScript subset
- JSLint.com provides a safe subset of JavaScript that removes all features that are unsafe or suspect such as no global vars or functions
- Google Caja & Cajita provide a similar subet but they use transformation instead of validation
- Minor browser improvements
- Scripts are exempt from same-origin policy. This allows a dynamic <script> tag to make a GET request from a server. Instead use JSONRequest (part of json.org).
- ES4 (the upcoming JavaScript standard) is not good enough because it maintains backwards compatibility and adds complexity.
- Major browser improvements
- Replace JavaScript & DOM in browsers. The approach is to start with JSLint and add safe features as required.
- The Object Capability System (where objects are given explicit access to be used) needs to be enforced to make it secure.
The second talk was on Accelerate Ajax development with Appcelerator by Appcelerator CEO.
The talk started with a "not too long back" introduction of the technology space. Well, it started with 1991 and the timeline (and associated technology advances in that year) kept shuffling 1995, 1989, 2001 .... and so on. Jeff talked about how/why Tim Berners Lee invented WWW and covered a myriad of terms after that including but not limited to - Web 1.0, Netscape, Mosaic, marc Andreeeseen (sp?), Java, java Web Start, Applets, W3C, CGI, J2EE, JCP, C#, JBoss, SOA, JavaFX, Silverlight, AIR and many others. For a 50 minute talk, that was quite a long introduction.
After that introduction, he word "Ajax" was mentioned almost 30 minutes (8:51am to be precise) in the talk. And then the word "Appcelerator" was mentioned at 9:06am. Finally, I realized that I'm in the right talk ;)
Appcelerator like to pitch themselves as RIA + SOA company and allows true decoupling of the rich client from it's services. Their services is very similar to jMaki but they use event handling + Ajax + DHTML to achieve it. They also run on Ruby, PHP, Java and other languages.
All in all, it was a good walk through the memory lane!
The next one was REST & Ajax Reconciled.
The talk explained the basic concepts of REST - Resource, URI, Representation, URL & Methods (GET, PUT, POST & DELETE). It also explained the idempotency and safety of each method type. Overall a good decent introduction.
Then it explained the limitations with current web-based forms:
- The URIs in the action attribute cannot be changed dynamically
- Most browsers recognize only GET/POST methods
- Limited ecodings - for example generating JSON encoding requires extra work.
- Does it have resource-based approach ?
- Acknowledges existing of representation ?
- need multiple of them
- Solid engineering & community support ?
- Apache Cocoon - based on XML pipelines & URL patterns, powerful but steep learning curve
- RESTlet - Like Servlet for REST, good for existing model
- Apache Sling - Based on JCR with server-side scripting support
The speaker recommended Apache Sling with µjax for all REST + Ajax needs. But I'd strongly encourage you to have a look at Jersey. The JSON representation generated out of Jersey can now be directly consumed by jMaki as described here - a true combination of REST & Ajax :)
And then the last talk where I took notes is Understanding the Top Web 2.0 Attack Vectors. I'll provides notes from the last 5 slides of the talk which essentially captured the essence. These slides talked about fundamental issues with Ajax and described concerns and possible attacks in each issue. I'll need to understand some of these attacks better myself but at least I have a list to begin with :)
Here you go:
- Client-side
- Concerns
- Transparency
- Cross-domain communication
- Exposed business logic (View Source)
- Local & Offline data storage
- Attacks
- Cross-site scripting, DNS Rebinding
- Business logic bypass
- Variable tampering
- Protocol hijacking
- Function clobbering
- JavaScript hijacking
- Protocols
- Concerns - new protocols on top of HTTP
- SOAP
- XML-RPC
- REST
- Attacks
- Traditional
- Man-in-the-middle
- Spoofing
- Recursive Payloads
- Schema Poisoning
- Information Sources
- Concerns
- Integrity
- Transient
- Diverse (RSS, Blogs, Email, ...)
- Attacks
- Untrusted content
- Poisoned Cache (HTTP Response Splitting Vulnerability)
- DNS Issues
- Information Structure
- Concerns - Variations of data structure
- RSS
- Atom
- JSON
- Serialized data
- Attacks
- Malicious injection
- Parser implementations
- Server-side Issues
- Concerns
- Architecture Weaknesses
- Multiple languages & implementations
- Increase & fragmented attack surfaces
- Unknown request origin
- Authorization & Authentication in complex environment
- Attacks
- Traditional
- Information disclosure, Logical attributes, Denial-of-service
- Command Injection
- LDAP, SQL, XPath etc.
OpenAjax Alliance talk about Gadgets & Widgets was nice. The alliance is working on creating standards for widget metadata, communication across widgets and other similar tasks. The goal is to enable successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies.
Dave Ferraiolo (from OpenAjax) particularly expressed thanks to jMaki for deriving the first set of Open Ajax Data Model specs from jMaki data models.
That's it!
Check out some of the pictures:
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The complete album is available at:
I had to leave at the end of Day 2 because of unfavorable health condition. But I'm glad at least I could deliver my talks :) Now I need to be back-in-shape before my upcoming trip next Tuesday!
Technorati: conf ajaxworld newyork glassfish netbeans ria sun web2.0 jmaki
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[2]
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Tuesday March 18, 2008
Ajax World East 2008 - Day 1 Report
Ajax World East 2008 started earlier today.
I delievered my "Web 2.0 Application development using jMaki" and the
slides are available here.
There were several demos shown in the talk (using NetBeans and GlassFish)
and they are all accessible at the links mentiond below:
Anyway I attended 3 more talks today and took notes to share:
- Picking the Right Technology for Enterprise Rich Internet Applications
- Performance Tuning your Ajax Applications
- Performance Paradigm of a Mashup World
The first talk I attended was: Picking the Right Technology for Enterprise Rich Internet Applications. I got little late and the session was packed with attendees standing way outside the room so I joined them.
- Seamless deployment on client
- High penetration of runtime
- Web browser independence
- Fast client/server communication protocol
- Robust security
| Pros of Ajax | Cons of Ajax |
| No deployment required | Ajax apps are browser depdendent |
| 100+ Frameworks | 100+ Frameworks |
| Open Source, no need to purchase software license | Expensive due to long cycle, skilled developers demand top rate |
| JavaScript is an interpreted language, entire source code can be viewed using "View Source" | |
| Network communication speed is not optimizedf for Ajax requests |
And then basically it talked about the three technologies and their pros & cons are well captured in the slides.
The second session I attended was Performance Tuning your Ajax Applications. This was an interesting session and I learned a few tricks. Interstingly we have implemented quite a few of these performance enhancements in jMaki already.
Improving the performance of Ajax applications require tuning the following parameters:
- Number of requests
- Reduce number of JavaScript files that are loaded. This is the most important since each request to the backend adds extra cost. Even when the scripts are cached, the browser still makes a request (unless Since-Modified header is set correctly).
- Typical approaches are to concatenate the files at dev time or at runtime based upon request.
- Dev time approaches
- Ant - concat all JS files using <concat> task
- Dojo - Run Rhino over all provide/requires and then concatenate the files
- Command-line
- Run time approaches - Concatenation happens depending upon the request. Cons are:
- Server-side dependent
- Makes it harder to distribute code
- Server is loaded as concatenation happens on server (mitigated with caching)
- Works for <15 JS files
- Does not track dependency
- Size of requests
- Remove white spaces and comments (Packer, Dojo, YCompresser, SafeCompress, ShrinkSafe are some of the tools)
- Shorten the variable names
- Gzip the code
- Semicolon is optional but needed if you remove EOL (careful when compressing the code)
- Drastically reduces the file size (e.g. Apache XAP reduced the file size from 330 kb to 70 kb)
- Lots of gzip tools
- Need to put appropriate headers so that browsers recognize gzipped content
- Coding Style
- Single line "if" and "for" do not need "{ }"
- Combine var declarations into a single var such as var x=1, y = 2;
- Use JavaScript style object
- Time of requests
- Time of initial code completion
- Minimize the time that is executed @ start up
- Bring the data once the initial page is loaded
- Show images telling users that something is going on
- Distracts user from the time it's taking
- Other tips
- Don't write your own parser - use the native parsers
- "If" statement optimization
- Use the native facilities like getElementById() or getElementByTagName()
- Consider different approaches of DOM creation
- Tail Recursion
- Setting the value in innerHTML
- Consider JSON over DOM for object graph traversal - JSON could be much faster
My third talk of the day was Performance Paradigm of a Mashup World.
This talk given by Vice President of Webmetrics and laid a special emphasis on "Collaborative Monitoring" for performance measuring any mashup. This process involves not only monitoring your own application, but also setting up agents that measure performance with other services being invoked in the mashup, their further partners and so on. It also talked about a layered approach of using:
- Standard monitoring - HTML page load time, DNS request processing time, etc.
- Pixel Mapping monitoring - required mainly for GUI intensive application
- Web services monitoring - Used for partner monitoring
- Know your apps
- Learn where the points are in your ecosystem
- Measure your perspective
- Monitor your APIs
- Collaborate within your organization
- Collaborate with your partners & customers
Check out some of the pictures:
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The expo hall opens tomorrow and Sun's booth is right between the ballroom and the main door to expo hall, can't miss us ;)
The complete album is available at:
The Internet connection at the Roosevelt hotel is painfully slow inspite of charging $14.95/night where as most of the "modern" hotels offer free wireless :(
Technorati: conf ajaxworld newyork glassfish netbeans ria sun web2.0 jmaki
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[1]
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Monday March 17, 2008
Ajax World New York 2008 - This Week
Sun Microsystems is a
Gold sponsor of Ajax
World East 2008. The event kick starts in New York City
tomorrow and you can see the complete agenda here.
From Sun speakers, you'll hear how jMaki, GlassFish Comet,
GlassFish
and NetBeans
provide an easy-to-use and industry-grade platform to develop and
deploy Rich
Internet Applications. Here is the list of Sun sessions:
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Here is my wish list of sessions that I'd like to attend:
It's only a wish list cause I'll be spending time at Sun booth in the Expo Floor as well and this is New York City ;)
See ya there!
Technorati: conf sun ajaxworld jmaki glassfish mashups comet netbeans ria
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[1]
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Sunday March 16, 2008
Travel Schedule - Next 5 weeks
Here is my travel schedule for next 5 weeks:
| Mar 17-21 | Ajax World, New York | Web Application Development using jMaki |
| Mar 25-26 | The Server Side Java Symposium, Las Vegas | Rails powered by GlassFish & jMaki |
| Mar 27 | Developer Update, St Louis Westport DoubleTree, FREE event | Open Source Web Services stack in GlassFish |
| Mar 28 | Developer Update, Kansas City, FREE event | Rich Internet Applications and GlassFish |
| Apr 16-19 | FISL, Brazil | Web 2.0 Application Development
using jMaki and Asynchronous Ajax for Revolutionary Web Applications |
Stop by and say hello if you are present at any of the events. You'll hear about different GlassFish technologies:
- How Metro provides enterprise-grade open source Web services stack for meeting all your needs
- How jMaki allows you to create Rich Internet Applications
- How Rails applications can be powered by GlassFish & jMaki
- Asynchronous Ajax that allows you to scale your applications tremendously
- And any other topic that you are interested in :)
Technorati: conf glassfish metro webservices netbeans jmaki ajax newyork lasvegas stlouis kansascity brazil fisl ajaxworld tssjs
Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[2]
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Friday March 14, 2008
GlassFish and JRuby @ Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG - Mar 18, 2008
Vivek will be talking on JRuby support in GlassFish in Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG on Mar 18. The coordinates are:
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Date | Mar 18,. 2008 |
| Time | 6:30 - 8:30pm | |
| Location | Google, Inc. (map) Tunis Conference Room, (Bldg. 43) 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA |
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Cost | FREE |
| Register (optional) | Here to participate in a free give-away drawing |
The complete agenda for the evening is:
18:30-19:00 Arrive & mingle
19:00-19:45 Scala
19:45-20:30 JRuby
Here is the current status of JRuby/GlassFish:
- GlassFish v3 gem is ver 0.1.1 and is already getting good endorsements.
- JRuby module can be easily installed using GlassFish v2 Update Center. Screencast #web9 explains all the steps in detail on how to create a standalone and shared WARs that can be deployed on GlassFish.
Vivek leads the effort for different scripting languages in GlassFish so feel free to ask him any related question :)
Thanks to Kevin & Van for giving us the opportunity to talk!
Technorati: conf jruby ruby rubyonrails glassfish svjug webjugPosted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[1]
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Thursday March 13, 2008
GlassFish v3 gem 0.1.2 released
Pramod announced the release of GlassFish
v3 Gem ver
0.1.2. The focus of this release is bugfixes:
- IssueTracker #4228: Duplicate entries for Scaffold generated by Rails 2.0.2
- IssueTracker #3966: Blank page returned if no Rails instance is available
- RubyForge #17970: All requests are Ajax requests
- RubyForge #18162: observe_field for Ajax capablites work only once
You can verify if have 0.1.1 version by giving the command:
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Macintosh-187:jruby-1.1RC2 arungupta$ bin/jruby -S gem list -d glassfish
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
glassfish (0.1.1)
GlassFish V3 Application Server for JRuby
Macintosh-187:jruby-1.1RC2
arungupta$ bin/jruby -S gem
update glassfish |
And then again verify using the following command:
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Macintosh-187:jruby-1.1RC2 arungupta$ bin/jruby -S gem list -d glassfish
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
glassfish (0.1.2, 0.1.1)
GlassFish V3 Application Server for JRuby
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bin/jruby -S gem uninstall GlassFish
bin/jruby -S gem install glassfish
Please use the gem and send us feedback on GlassFish forums, dev@glassfish or gem mailing list.
File issues in JIRA or RubyForge or GlassFish Issue Tracker.
Technorati: glassfish v3 jruby ruby rubyonrails gem
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[4]
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This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
