Book review – JBoss AS 5 Development

 
JBoss AS 5 Development
Written by Francesco Marchioni 
Published by Packt Publishing

When I started reading this book my expectations were a little less as I was expecting a “1 + 1 = 2” kinda stuff! But after reading the very first chapter – Installing core components – I realized that this one is going to be different. The story in this book is very simple which even my 11 year old nephew can understand and enjoy. Yes, it’s indeed a story.

The first three chapters tells us what JBoss is, from where to get it, how to install it, how to configure Eclipse & JBoss tools, the JBoss sub-systems, basic deployment configurations, the background story and a lot of things. It’s very detailed, simple. I had real fun reading it. Because we assume a lot of things which we think is right. These three chapters proved me wrong at many places.

The following chapters deal more with EJB 3, JMS, JPA, Web Services, JBoss management, JBoss clustering & security. These chapters try to cover the basics as much as it can. It will be really helpful as the first step towards J2EE/JBoss.

Okay, now it’s time for the final verdict.

This book – with 400+ pages & 14 chapters – is very well written. This is for the common man. This book tells the whole story in the simplest possible way. This book tells us what all things we need to do to master JBoss. It may not help you in mastering JBoss, but can definitely show you a way with all possible sign boards, maps & guides.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I am not an expert in JBoss, EJBs JPA or JTA, but a “modestly aware” coder. Yeah, this will be a first good step towards mastering the art

What I liked about this book
It’s very simple & well-organized.

What I did not like about this book
Lacks depth. I think the target audience is beginners & enthusiasts.

So, do I recommend this?
Yes. I do. It’s going to be an easy & good read.

Check this link for more details.

Useful links
http://www.jboss.org/ – JBoss Home
http://www.jboss.org/jbossas/downloads/ – JBoss downloads
http://www.eclipse.org/ – Eclipse IDE Home
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ – Eclipse downloads

A selenium blog for beginners

Simple Tech Talks is a very good place for Selenium beginners.The author, Jinesh, well categorized the content in to seven simple posts.

Part 1: Why Selenium
Part 2: Why Not Selenium
Part 3: Selenium Flavors (Components)
Part 4: How Does Selenium work
Part 5: Locating the Elements in a Web Page (Objec…
Part 6: Running The Tests
Part 7: Beginners How to Start With??

This is very well written and worth a read for all enthusiasts.

What is selenium?
Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language. Selenium provides a test domain specific language (DSL) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including Java, Ruby, Groovy, Python, PHP, and Perl. Test playback is in most modern web browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms.

Source: Wikipedia

Making Ubuntu look like Windows XP !

Yes. This is a deadly combo

I am so used to Windows XP (and in love with it too) for all good reasons that I wanted my Ubuntu installation also look like XP. I started using Ubuntu in 2007 and I loved it too. But the one thing I hated was their usage of fonts! Everything was so huge and lacked the usability of Win XP.

The only thing we really need to do to make Ubuntu (I’m using Ubuntu 9.04) is to change the system font to Tahoma.

Step 1: Install core Microsoft truetype fonts

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

But this default set of core fonts does not have Tahoma ! So we need to get an archive of the normal and bold versions of the font.You can download it from http://www.stchman.com/tools/MS_fonts/tahoma.zip. And unzip it to your local directory.

Step 2: Install Tahoma

 sudo cp /home/username/mydir/*.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts
sudo fc-cache -f -v
 

fc-cache will rebuild the font cache in the machine to get the new changes reflected.

Step 3: Change the font settings
Go to Ubuntu desktop, right click and select “Change Desktop Background” > “Fonts”. Change the font type to Tahoma 8. And that’s it

The evolution of internet !

I was reading Smashing Magazine and I was really surprised to see the very first web page written by Tim Berners Lee! I don’t need to tell you the kind of impact internet and World wide web do have in out lives. And it all started from this simple page written by Tim.

Read the article here. The article takes us through different stages of internet evolution. Have a nice read.

First web page:
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Article page:
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/the-evolution-of-web-design/

Coding is fun. Really :D

I used to put some stupid test cases to unit-test my code and I usually don’t forget to remove ‘em before review. But last time when my customer reviewed my code, he found the following segment at the end of a Java file. He laughed and asked “Is that true Subin?”

//------------------------ Test methods ---------------------------

static class TestClass
{
 public TestClass(String name)
 {
 this.name = name;
 }

 private String name;

 @Override
 public boolean equals(Object anObject)
 {
 return (true);
 }

 @Override
 public int hashCode()
 {
 return (1);
 }
}

public static void main(String[] args)
{
 Set<TestClass> aSet = new HashSet<TestClass>();
 aSet.add(new TestClass("Subin "));
 aSet.add(new TestClass("is in "));
 aSet.add(new TestClass("a "));
 aSet.add(new TestClass("big "));
 aSet.add(new TestClass("big "));
 aSet.add(new TestClass("trouble"));

 System.out.println(aSet.size());
}