Archive for April, 2010
Tuesday 27 April 2010 @ 9:36 am
SQL Puzzles and Answers
Back in the early and mid-1990s, I wrote regular magazine columns in Database Programming & Design and later in DBMS magazine. The gimmick I used to attract reader responses was to end each column with a SQL programming puzzle. Ten years later, those two magazines were consolidated into Intelligent Enterprise. My SQL puzzles moved to
some smaller publications and then finally faded away. Today, I throw out a puzzle or two on the www.dbazine.com Web site and other places on the Internet rather than in print media. Over the years, college students had all kinds of programming contests that used the procedural language du jour—C, Pascal, then Java and C++ today. There is not much for database programmers to test themselves against, except my little puzzle book.
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SQL Puzzles and Answers
Sunday 25 April 2010 @ 9:32 am
Smart Card Applications
Smart card technology has continued to develop unobtrusively in the meantime, and a paradigm shift has occurred in parallel with this development. Technology has vanished into the background as a driver for smart card applications, and its role as a guide to the future has been taken over by the applications. User needs now occupy the focus of
attention. This is quite a normal cycle in the course of technology development, as has been seen repeatedly in this form and in similar forms. This new aspect of the situation inspired me to write this book, as the current trend is
to use smart cards on account of their positive characteristics instead of simply because they exist.
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Smart Card Applications
Thursday 22 April 2010 @ 9:48 am
Learning Flex
Flex is the next step in the development of RIAs. The phrase rich Internet applications was coined by Macromedia (now Adobe) in 2002 to account for the trend in more expressive applications on the web. In the beginning, HTML documents on the web were just that, documents. They were text and, later, images and multimedia. This client-server paradigm meant a user, by typing a URL in their browser, would request a document. The web being so far-reaching, savvy folks quickly learned to create server-based applications, programs, which a user could access online. Think of all those forms you’ve filled out, where you type your name and address and hit the submit button. After a few moments, you’re greeted with an entirely new page telling you your form was submitted (or that you had some errors you have to fix first). This was a client-server model, where a “thin” client (a browser) requested content and sent it back to a server for processing. To create dynamic HTML pages, a server had to create the HTML and send it to the client, which would read it like any other page. This took time. Then, with the advent of JavaScript came the power to offload some application workload onto the client. For instance, when configuring an item in an online store, it used to be necessary send all calculations like shipping or sales tax back to the server. With scripting, it was possible to calculate that information right on the client machine and update the layout of the page based on user interaction. Dubbed a “thick” client in contrast to the thin client, a user’s computer needed to be a bit more powerful in order to run the scripts and re-render the page.
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Learning Flex
Wednesday 21 April 2010 @ 9:44 am
Joomla Start to Finish
As web developers, we have to get smarter about marketing ourselves and what skillsets we bring to the table to solve our client’s problems. We need to understand what our client does in their organization and how they serve their clients in order to understand what technology can do to solve their problems. Most technical books cover button-clicking really well.
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Joomla Start to Finish
Tuesday 20 April 2010 @ 9:56 am
Professional Blackberry
The RIM BlackBerry has become synonymous with always-on, real-time wireless e-mail. Other companies provide similar solutions, but they are a very distant second to the wide acceptance of the BlackBerry. BlackBerry usage is virtually exploding right before our eyes, and in some cities around the world, you see a BlackBerry user every few steps. There is even a new affliction that has been termed “BlackBerry Thumb,” which is a repetitive stress injury to the thumbs from using them in ways in which they were never meant to be used. The BlackBerry can be used for real-time push e-mail, but it also supports real-time wireless synchronization of Personal Information Manager (PIM) data and has the capability to connect the user to systems back in the office in a very secure manner. The aim of this book is to cover two main topics that relate to the BlackBerry environment. In the first section, we start off by discussing how the BlackBerry works and the different components that make up the BlackBerry environment. We then move on to discussing how to install a BlackBerry server and how to prepare for a BlackBerry pilot. Finally, we discuss how to roll out BlackBerrys and the desktop software (if you need it) and how to maintain your BlackBerry environment.
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Professional Blackberry
Tuesday 20 April 2010 @ 9:42 am
Hello! Silverlight 3
Silverlight is a case of the right technology at the right time. This is a time of convergence. Companies want to be able to leverage the experience of their developers when developing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Developers want to write applications using the development tools and languages that they are comfortable with. Desktop application developers who previously may have felt that web development was out of reach can feel at home developing Silverlight applications. For Windows client developers writing a web application has been kind of like writing in a dialect that is not completely familiar to them. The stateless model of web applications and the session management model is something that Microsoft tried to hide away when they created ASP.NET, but it’s still not quite like writing a desktop application. If you want to do anything interesting with the user interface it usually requires you to write Javascript on the client side and many more hours of development than it would take to do the same thing in a desktop application.
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Hello! Silverlight 3
Tuesday 13 April 2010 @ 9:57 am
Flex on Java
In 1995, Sun introduced the first Java platform and with it birthed the “applet.” The applet allowed Java applications to run inside the browser with rich functionality and all the benefits of the Java framework, including connecting to the server side. The applet became hugely popular for a couple of years but then its popularity waned. The applet adoption rate dropped mainly because of problems surrounding the browser plugin. Building features in an applet from scratch or even other rich implementations can be expensive compared to the
simplicity of using the Flex framework.
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Flex on Java
Monday 12 April 2010 @ 9:51 am
WordPress in Depth
In less than a decade, WordPress has become the most important tool around for blogging, which itself is the channel for one of the great uncensored, unedited, unrestrained outpourings of creativity in human history. WordPress blogs often serve as a home for breaking news or insightful comments that affect other media. As such, WordPress is important to people who don’t like blogs or who don’t even like computers. WordPress is a serious and tremendously flexible tool—and also a framework for creating more tools. WordPress blogs include some of the biggest websites around, as well as spur-of-the-moment creations that attract a few posts, perhaps a few comments, and then go the way of the dodo. Along with the blogs themselves, one of the amazing things is the power of blogs as a network, referring to each other, with blog entries and comments forming a mesh—well, a web, actually—of comment, criticism, and encouragement. (Even a criticism can serve as a form of encouragement, inspiring a blogger to answer a complaint or to post a better entry next time.)
In less than a decade, WordPress has become the most important toolaround for blogging, which itself is the channel for one of the greatuncensored, unedited, unrestrained outpourings of creativity in humanhistory. WordPress blogs often serve as a home for breaking news orinsightful comments that affect other media. As such, WordPress isimportant to people who don’t like blogs or who don’t even likecomputers.WordPress is a serious and tremendously flexible tool—and also a frameworkfor creating more tools. WordPress blogs include some of thebiggest websites around, as well as spur-of-the-moment creations thatattract a few posts, perhaps a few comments, and then go the way ofthe dodo.Along with the blogs themselves, one of the amazing things is thepower of blogs as a network, referring to each other, with blog entriesand comments forming a mesh—well, a web, actually—of comment,criticism, and encouragement. (Even a criticism can serve as a form ofencouragement, inspiring a blogger to answer a complaint or to post abetter entry next time.)
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WordPress in Depth
Monday 12 April 2010 @ 9:50 am
VMWare vSphere 4 Administration
For those of us who have been working in the virtualization industry since its earliest days, it’s hard to imagine what datacenters were like without virtualization. Still there are many organizations that have yet to adopt virtualization within their datacenter. With the release of VMware vSphere 4, VMware’s flagship enterprise-class virtualization solution, VMware aims to change that reality. However, even though virtualization has many benefits—not the least of which include reducing your hardware footprint, enabling faster server provisioning, and simplifying disaster recovery—some people feel that virtualization also has a steep learning curve. IT professionals who want to become more familiar with virtualization need to learn about terms like VMotion, Storage VMotion, VMware Fault Tolerance, and VMkernel interfaces. All these new terms and new technologies can seem confusing to someone not familiar with how all the pieces fit together. In addition, virtualization sometimes forces IT professionals to think differently about how to solve old challenges. The “traditional” way of doing things often isn’t the best way of handling something after you’ve virtualized your datacenter.
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VMWare vSphere 4 Administration
