ManishKG@Sun

Wednesday Mar 14, 2007

Difference between Java Application Platform SDK and Java EE SDK

Inder has described this nicely in his blog. I am trying to summarize it as :

JavaEE5 SDK : JavaEE5 implementation (aka Glassfish) + API doc + tutorial + Blueprints + Samples

Java Application Platform SDK : JavaEE5 SDK + PortletContainer + JWDP (it is not JWSDP) + Open ESB + Access Manager

Posted at 03:01PM Mar 14, 2007 by manishkg in Sun | Comments[1]

Thursday Mar 08, 2007

XMLPortletRequest

Subbu (WSRP spec lead) has proposed a new interface called XMLPortletRequest to portlet 2.0 and WSRP2.0 expert group. He has described about this interface in his 2 blogs (part1 and part2).

Posted at 03:27PM Mar 08, 2007 by manishkg in Sun |

Wednesday Mar 07, 2007

Web Services in Java

I was just looking for various Web Services stack available in java. I found that most the JEE application server have their own implementations but few application server also bundles open source implementations. Here is a list of WS stacks

Oracle 10g

If you know any other implementation, please let me know.

Posted at 03:58PM Mar 07, 2007 by manishkg in Sun | Comments[1]

Monday Mar 05, 2007

What is JSR 188

"Write Content Once, Deliver It To Any Device!"

If you are writing web application which can be accessed from different devices (such as desktop browser, mobile devices), your application is required to deliver content according to the device capability. For example, your web page contains images but accessing devices is not supporting the rendering of images OR your web page contains too much data to be handled by the bandwidth of accessing device.

Customizing content for different devices with widely varying capabilities, and for different users, requires significant investments of time and effort.

CC/PP which stands for Composite Capabilities/Preferences Profiles is designed by W3C to help developer in writing such applications. CC/PP is a system to describe what is called as delivery context - a set of attributes to tell what an user agent (web browser) is capable of doing and what are user preferences. The idea is that, upon requesting a web page, browser communicate their CC/PP info to the server. The CC/PP aware server then can adapt the content acording to the device capability.

JSR 188 has created a set of standard java API for providing CC/PP information to any java application.

Here is a good article to know more about Composite Capabilities/Preference Profiles and JSR 188.

Posted at 05:01PM Mar 05, 2007 by manishkg in Sun |

Wednesday Feb 28, 2007

What is new in JSR 286

If you are familiar with Portlet 1.0 and wants to know what is new in Portlet 2.0, here is a summary of new features. This information is based on first draft available here and may change in final draft.

1. Portlet eventing or Inter Portlet Communication (IPC) - Portlet 1.0 have very limited capability of eventing within same portlet application using application session scope. JSR 286 will allow coordination between different portlets across different portlet applications deployed in same portlet container. A new lifecycle phase called processEvent() has been introduced between processAction() and render() phase. New classes such as EventRequest and EventResponse has been added for this purpose.

2. Shared Render Parameters - This is another addition to enhance coordination among portlets within same portlet application.

3. Shared Session Attributes - to share user data among different portlets in different portlet applications (in other words, sharing of data on portal level for a given user)

4. Portlet Filter - Similar to servlet filters, this will allow dynamic interception of requests and responses to transform or use the information contained in the portlet requests or portlet responses. While servlet has only one "Filter" interface, portlet have one "*Filter" interface corresponding to each lifecycle method of portlet.

5. Resource Serving - Provides the ability for a portlet to serve a resource. A new called RESOURCE_SERVING_PHASE has been added for this purpose.

6. Support for Ajax - Similar to IPC and web framework bridges, the support for Ajax in different implementation of Portlet 1.0 is vendor specific. Portlet 2.0 is trying to make a standard for Ajax support.

7. Serving markup fragements - Portlet 2.0 is trying to provide support for an usecase where a fragement of the markup will be returned by the portlet. This will be helpful in providing support for technologies like AJAX.

8. Alignment with WSRP 2.0 - Web Services for Remote Portlet (WSRP) 2.0 specification from OASIS is also in the draft stage and Porltet 2.0 EG is trying to align these 2 specification.

9. Better support for web frameworks - Portlet 2.0 is trying to provide additional means for creating bridge for web frameworks such as JSF, struts, spring etc. Currently these bridges are proprietary for different portal vendors and Portlet 2.0 is trying to make these bridges portable.

Posted at 02:55PM Feb 28, 2007 by manishkg in Sun |

Wednesday Feb 14, 2007

SIP Servlet API

What is SIP : SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is an IETF standard protocol for IP-communication, enabling IP-Telephony gateways, client endpoints, PBXs and other communication systems or devices to communicate with each other. SIP mainly addresses the call setup and tear down mechanisms of sessions and is independent of the transmission of media streams between caller and callee.

JSR 116: The SIP Servlet API v1.0 is a container based approach (modelled on the HTTP servlet paradigm) to developing communication applications utilizing the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) protocol.

SIP Servlet API is based on Java Servlet API and its base servlet javax.servlet.sip.SipServlet extends javax.servlet.GenericServlet class. If we compare SIP with Http servlet, here are some of the differences -

Http SIP
Servlet Class
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet javax.servlet.sip.SipServlet
Session Class
javax.servlet.http.HttpSession javax.servlet.sip.SipSession
Packaging .war file .sar file
Deployment Descriptor
web.xml
sip.xmp
Communication
Synchronous
Asynchronous

JSR 289: SIP Servlet API v1.1

Posted at 10:51AM Feb 14, 2007 by manishkg in Sun | Comments[3]

Tuesday Feb 13, 2007

JSR 170 - Java API for Content Repository

What is a Content Repository - A content repository is a hierarchical content store with support for structured and unstructured content, full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more. It is a generic application "data store" that can be used for storing both text and binary data (images, word processor documents, PDFs, etc.). It can be think of 2 parts - (a) any data store such as RDBMS, XML document or file system and (b) an application to interact with datastore. Information storage and retrieval are 2 most common services provided by any CMS. In addition, they mostly provide advance services like searching, versioning, permissions, locking, hierarchical organization of items and more. Some of the popular CMS vendor are Documentum, Vignette, or FileNet.
Most visible use of CMS is in the organization's portal to provide information to it's empoyee / customer.

JSR 170 - In simple terms, JSR 170 is same for CMS what JDBC is for any RDBMS. Earliar, portal application have to use proprietary API provided by CMS implemenatation and their was vendor locking. JSR-170 tries to solve this problem by standardizing the API that should be used for connecting to any content repository

Package name for JCR api is javax.jcr

One popular implementation of JSR170 is Apache Jackrabbit, the reference implementation.

What is next -

JEE 6 : JSR170 may be included in the next version of Java Enterprise Edition.

JSR 283: Content Repository API 2.0 is in progress and will be released in May 2007.

Some references -

What is Java Content Repository?

JSR-170: What's in it for me?

Posted at 03:26PM Feb 13, 2007 by manishkg in Sun |

Friday Feb 09, 2007

DynaFaces : Ajax extension to JSF

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is one of the latest revolution in web development circles, delivering rich dynamic interfaces within a normal web browser.

To add Ajax capability in JSF components, a new project called DynaFaces is created at java.net.

Here is a good article to get an overview of what Dynamic Faces is all about: New Technologies for Ajax and Web Application Development: Project Dynamic Faces.

Posted at 01:33PM Feb 09, 2007 by manishkg in Sun |

Thursday Dec 07, 2006

WSRP milestone 1 screencast available

As mentioned by RajeshT in his WSRP milestone 1 preview release announcement, the screencast for m1 preview release are now available at Open Source WSRP project site.

Screencast 1 - How to download and build open source WSRP project?

Screencast 2 - How to deploy and test open source WSRP project?

After m1 preview release, the WSRP trunk has been tagged as "milestone-1-preview". Here is the URL to checkout m1 preview release. This tagging is to align WSRP with the open source Portlet Container project, which is also tagged as "milestone-1-preview". The WSRP "milestone-1-preview" tag will work with portlet container "milestone-1-preview" tag.

The source of the Milestone 1 preview build of Portlet Container is now available as zip.

Posted at 05:19PM Dec 07, 2006 by manishkg in Sun |

Friday Aug 25, 2006

What is new in WSRP 2.0

Here is a small information about WSRP 2.0 specification released last month. In new specification, the number of interfaces remain same but new methods are being added in all the interfaces except "Service Description" interface. Following is a list of new operations as well as extensions added in various interface. The method extensions are shown in italics.

Markup Interface:
    getResource(...)
    handleEvevnts(...) [Added for Interportlet communication]
    performBlockingInteraction(...) - Extended to return public navigational state and events generated by interaction

Registration Interface :
    getRegistrationLifetime(...)
    setRegistrationLifetime(...)

Portlet Management Interface :
    getPortletsLifeTime(...)
    setPortletsLifeTime(...)
    copyPortlets(...)
    exportPortlets(...)
    importPortlets(...)
    releaseExport(...)
    setExportLifetime(...)
    getPortletDescription(...) - Extended to include events portlet generates and handles, and public navigational state

Service Description Interface :
getServiceDescription(...) - Extended to include event descriptions and support for optional features (e.g. copy, export, import)

As we can see, Portlet Management interface is the one which is enhanced drastically.

Apart from changes in the interfaces, WSRP2.0 is now a 3 step protocol. An additional step (optional) for distributing events among portlets is being added between performBlockingOperation and getMarkup.

I will write more about WSRP 2.0 soon. Here is the comitee draft, if you want to read more.

Posted at 04:46PM Aug 25, 2006 by manishkg in Sun |

Sun's implementation of OASIS WSRP (V1) has been open sourced

See the Rajesh T's blog for more detail.

Posted at 03:33PM Aug 25, 2006 by manishkg in Sun |

Monday Jul 31, 2006

TCP and Http tunnel

Recently, while working on one web service client application using JAX-RPC, I found the need to see the SOAP message generated by my application and also the response message received by it. So, I want to use some kind of tunnel to intercept TCP messages generated by JAX-RPC. I searched on net and come to know about TCP Tunnel/Monitor application which comes as part of Apache SOAP. I downloaded it and start using it. After a few try, I found that this tunnel is not able to send the messages to the destination site because my computer is behind http proxy and firewall. I tried to set -Dhttp.proxy and -Dhttp.port java options while starting TCP tunnel but still no luck. I again turned to google and found one http tunnel application. I downloaded http tunnel application and set my TCP tunnel to forward request to this http tunnel. The http tunnel is now being set to direct the request to the web service provider. This way, I was able to intercept SOAP messages generated and received by my application.

Posted at 12:56PM Jul 31, 2006 by manishkg in Sun | Comments[2]

Friday Jul 28, 2006

How to publish JSR 168 portlet as Remote Portlet

Here is an "How to do" article on publishing any JSR 168 porlet as a remote portlet in Sun Java System Portal Server 7.

Posted at 11:17AM Jul 28, 2006 by manishkg in Sun |

Tuesday Jul 25, 2006

Efficient way to do things

To find a particular class in all the jars within a folder and its sub folders -

for i in `find . -name "*.jar"`; do echo $i; jar tvf $i | grep TypeMappingRegistry; done

To find entry of a particular class in all the xml within a folder and its sub folders -

for i in `find . -name "*.xml"`; do echo $i; grep qname.jar $i; done > /tmp/out

Posted at 03:34PM Jul 25, 2006 by manishkg in Sun | Comments[1]

Thursday Jul 20, 2006

Good Lesson to learn

Ever heard the story of the giant ship engine that failed?

The ship's owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a youngster. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship's owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed! A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

"What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!"
So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill."

The man sent a bill that read :

            Tapping with a hammer .........................    $ 2.00
        Knowing where to tap ............................. $ 9998.00

Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort in your life makes all the difference

Posted at 02:53PM Jul 20, 2006 by manishkg in Personal | Comments[1]