Friday, December 12, 2008

http://www.springframework.org/

Spring Features

Spring is a layered Java/J2EE application platform, based on code published in Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development by Rod Johnson (Wrox, 2002).

Spring includes:

  • The most complete lightweight container, providing centralized, automated configuration and wiring of your application objects. The container is non-invasive, capable of assembling a complex system from a set of loosely-coupled components (POJOs) in a consistent and transparent fashion. The container brings agility and leverage, and improves application testability and scalability by allowing software components to be first developed and tested in isolation, then scaled up for deployment in any environment (J2SE or J2EE).

  • A common abstraction layer for transaction management, allowing for pluggable transaction managers, and making it easy to demarcate transactions without dealing with low-level issues. Generic strategies for JTA and a single JDBC DataSource are included. In contrast to plain JTA or EJB CMT, Spring's transaction support is not tied to J2EE environments.

  • A JDBC abstraction layer that offers a meaningful exception hierarchy (no more pulling vendor codes out of SQLException), simplifies error handling, and greatly reduces the amount of code you'll need to write. You'll never need to write another finally block to use JDBC again. The JDBC-oriented exceptions comply to Spring's generic DAO exception hierarchy.

  • Integration with Toplink, Hibernate, JDO, and iBATIS SQL Maps: in terms of resource holders, DAO implementation support, and transaction strategies. First-class Hibernate support with lots of IoC convenience features, addressing many typical Hibernate integration issues. All of these comply to Spring's generic transaction and DAO exception hierarchies.

  • AOP functionality, fully integrated into Spring configuration management. You can AOP-enable any object managed by Spring, adding aspects such as declarative transaction management. With Spring, you can have declarative transaction management without EJB... even without JTA, if you're using a single database in Tomcat or another web container without JTA support.

  • A flexible MVC web application framework, built on core Spring functionality. This framework is highly configurable via strategy interfaces, and accommodates multiple view technologies like JSP, Velocity, Tiles, iText, and POI. Note that a Spring middle tier can easily be combined with a web tier based on any other web MVC framework, like Struts, WebWork, or Tapestry.

You can use all of Spring's functionality in any J2EE server, and most of it also in non-managed environments. A central focus of Spring is to allow for reusable business and data access objects that are not tied to specific J2EE services. Such objects can be reused across J2EE environments (web or EJB), standalone applications, test environments, etc without any hassle.

Spring's layered architecture gives you a lot of flexibility. All its functionality builds on lower levels. So you can e.g. use the JavaBeans configuration management without using the MVC framework or AOP support. But if you use the web MVC framework or AOP support, you'll find they build on the core Spring configuration, so you can apply your knowledge about it immediately.

http://incubator.apache.org/couchdb/

The CouchDB Project

CouchDB Server Components

Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition language.

CouchDB is written in Erlang, but can be easily accessed from any environment that provides means to make HTTP requests. There are a multitude of third-party client libraries that make this even easier for a variety of programming languages and environments.

See the introduction and the technical overview for more information.

Disclaimer

Apache CouchDB is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Incubator PMC. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.


http://www.sapdesignguild.org/index.asp

About the SAP Design Guild

Updated: 05/28/2008

Dear visitors,

User-centered design of business applications is fundamental to SAP's software approach. Hence the existence of the SAP Design Guild, a Website published by SAP User Experience. This Website is dedicated exclusively to demonstrating this commitment and sharing knowledge with the user interface community at large.

SAP Design Guild Website

The SAP Design Guild is a stage for UI people: Here they can exchange information and opinions on visual and user interface design issues. In addition, SAP offers its design resources here, be it style guides, methods, or insights on how a user-centered development process should be carried out and how the mind change within a company towards user-friendly software can be facilitated.

It comprises five main areas – Home & Services, Resources, Editions, Community, and Goodies – that allow you access to guidelines and articles about user interface design.

  • The Home & Services area provides a lot of useful information around the SAP Design Guild, SAP User Experience, and SAP, including site tips, article lists and job offers in the User Experience area.
  • The Resources section comprises the more or less stable part of the SAP Design Guild, the design resources. Here, visitors can access cookbooks, toolkits and style guides covering every aspect of the software design of the SAP product family.
  • The Editions section presents our editions, which typically appear once or twice a year. Here, contributors from outside and inside SAP dedicate articles to a certain topic that is "hot" in the SAP or UI community.
  • Community is our active stage. There, you will find, for example, an Events page, Editorials, Stories, Design Tidbits, and a Books & People corner.
  • The Goodies section offers link collections, glossaries, a glimpse of the SAP UI history, desktop motives, and other useful stuff.

The aim of this Website is to centralize design expertise and to make it available to everyone. SAP has set the ball rolling by publishing its own knowledge and experience and cordially invites you to share your ideas.

Sincerely, Your SAP Design Guild Team

http://www.freshgenerator.com/

FreshGenerator is a webdesign tool which can create interesting graphic elements used in many web 2.0 sites.

You may use it to create boxes of different styles and colors.

In order to make changes on your image later, store the link listed below the image.

To save the file you've just created, right click on the image and select "Save image as".

Scrum

Scrum is an iterative incremental process of software development commonly used with agile software development. Despite the fact that "Scrum" is not an acronym, some companies implementing the process have been known to adhere to an all capital letter expression of the word, i.e. SCRUM. This may be due to one of Ken Schwaber's early papers capitalizing SCRUM in the title.[1]

Although Scrum was intended to be for management of software development projects, it can be used in running software maintenance teams, or as a program management approach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)



Thursday, December 4, 2008

Google Maps alternative

Ok, is it Yahoo? Is it Microsoft?

noop, it is Navteq, which provides GIS data and Maps.

You can get your FREE API account in http://www.uk.map24.com/. Map24 is the equivalent of Google Maps, but you get the data from the source, with a definitely better quality for some areas (ok, ok, I put an emphasis in Greek Islands, where Google Maps is very poor...). For example, coverage for my island Ithaca (Ithaki, Thiaki, Ιθάκη, Θιάκι), Greece is excellent, in contrast to the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Maps.
See below:

Automatically monitor your web sites, for free

Are your web sites, mail servers etc DOWN?

You can let http://mon.itor.us/ check those machines network availability for free...

Google as an application platform? (not just maps...)

See:

* Google Visualization API, for plotting your data using really impressive Graphics

* Google AJAX Language API, for automatically translate your content into different languages

Find brochures, ebooks, studies etc online

visit http://www.scribd.com/

A plethora of online ebooks and useful documents (you can even download them in PDF format)