SE News

A tool that provides a quick and easy way to view the messaging performance statistics for WebSphere Application Server (6+) and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus.

The tool is written entirely in Java™ using the PMI (Performance Monitoring Interface) APIs provided by the WebSphere® Application Server. The look and feel of the GUI is provided by the Standard Widget Toolkit, which was developed by the Eclipse foundation.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/sibperf

Deadlock immunity is a property by which programs, once afflicted by a deadlock pattern, develop the ability to avoid future occurrences of that deadlock pattern. Over time, programs with such an “immune system” progressively increase their resistance to deadlocks.

Dimmunix is a tool for giving software systems such an immune system against deadlock, without any assistance from programmers or users. Dimmunix is well suited for general purpose software (desktop and enterprise applications, server software, etc.) and a recent extension allows application communities to collaborate in achieving enhanced immunity.

http://dslab.epfl.ch/proj/dimmunix

Until the 1980s, using a computer program meant memorizing a lot of commands and typing them in a line at a time, only to get lines of text back. The graphical user interface, or GUI, changed that. By representing programs, program functions, and data as two-dimensional images — like icons, buttons and windows — the GUI made intuitive and spatial what had been memory intensive and laborious.

But while the GUI made things easier for computer users, it didn’t make them any easier for computer programmers. Underlying GUI components is a lot of computer code, and usually, building or customizing a program, or getting different programs to work together, still means manipulating that code. Researchers in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab hope to change that, with a system that allows people to write programs using screen shots of GUIs. Ultimately, the system could allow casual computer users to create their own programs without having to master a programming language.

http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/

Codility is an automated test of programming skills necessary in recruitment of software developers. It enables recruiters without specialized IT knowledge, to quickly run automated assessment tests for programming skills. It’s aim is to verify how well the candidate will perform in a day to day job. To test employee with exactly the same tasks he needs to deliver.

With Codility you get:
* Reduced cost of recruitment by up to 90%
* Increased quality of hires
* Statistics comparing your candidates vs market averages

With Codility you can:
* implement first line of candidate screening
* substitute at least one technical interview
* setup tests in 7 programming languages
* set 3 levels of difficulty of programming tests

http://codility.com/

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.

Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.

Dmitry Baranovskiy

http://raphaeljs.com/

Millions of Google users worldwide use JavaScript-intensive applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Like developers everywhere, Googlers want great web apps to be easier to create, so we’ve built many tools to help us develop these (and many other) apps. We’re happy to announce the open sourcing of these tools, and proud to make them available to the web development community.

Closure Compiler is a JavaScript optimizer that compiles web apps down into compact, high-performance JavaScript code. Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. Web developers can pull just what they need from a wide set of reusable UI widgets and controls, as well as lower-level utilities for the DOM, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and much, much more. Closure Templates grew out of a desire for web templates that are precompiled to efficient JavaScript.

Closure Compiler, Closure Library, Closure Templates, and Closure Inspector all started as 20% projects and hundreds of Googlers have contributed thousands of patches. Today, each Closure Tool has grown to be a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind web apps at Google. That’s why we’re particularly excited (and humbled) to open source them to encourage and support web development outside Google. We want to hear what you think, but more importantly, we want to see what you make. So have at it and have fun!

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html

Amazon Relational Database Service is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business. Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

Once the exclusive domain of academics and corporations with large research budgets, intelligent applications that learn from data and user input are becoming more common. The need for machine-learning techniques like clustering, collaborative filtering, and categorization has never been greater, be it for finding commonalities among large groups of people or automatically tagging large volumes of Web content. The Apache Mahout project aims to make building intelligent applications easier and faster. Mahout co-founder Grant Ingersoll introduces the basic concepts of machine learning and then demonstrates how to use Mahout to cluster documents, make recommendations, and organize content.

Grant Ingersoll

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mahout/

Agile software development methodologies such as XP, Scrum, DSDM and Crystal Clear are becoming wildly popular. They map to today’s new technologies, and they allow organizations to react quickly to changing needs. One of the most popular of these is proving to be Scrum. From the rugby term, scrum is a philosophy and development approach that focuses on iteration and close collaboration with the goal of creating increments of ‘shippable’ product every few weeks.

Daptiv Scrum gives agile development teams powerful tools to manage Scrum and gives businesses better visibility into Scrum work. Scrum is a flexible process, so naturally a flexible tool can help you to run the process better. Unlike prescriptive tools that force you into one particular flavor of the Scrum process, Daptiv Scrum lets you choose your flavor and easily configure the solution to work with your process. Daptiv Scrum comes ready with the key roles, applications and artifacts you need to manage Scrum in your organization. Start with the included roles – Product Owner, Scrum Master, Team Member and Executive Stakeholder – or create new custom roles.

http://www.daptiv.com/solutions/daptiv_scrum/index.htm

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

By using Page Speed, you can:
* Make your site faster.
* Keep Internet users engaged with your site.
* Reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs.
* Improve the web!

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Rack provides a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into a single method call.

http://rack.rubyforge.org

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

Rich Hickey

http://clojure.org

Prism is a simple browser that hosts web applications without the normal web browser user interface. Prism is based on a concept called Site Specific Browsers (SSB), an application with an embedded browser designed to work exclusively with a single web application. It doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and accoutrements of a normal web browser. Some people have called it a “distraction free browser” because none of the typical browser chrome is used. An SSB also has a tighter integration with the OS and desktop than a typical web application running through a web browser.

http://prism.mozilla.com/

Welcome to Google App Engine for Java! With App Engine, you can build web applications using standard Java technologies and run them on Google’s scalable infrastructure. The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache. Standards support makes developing your application easy and familiar, and also makes porting your application to and from your own servlet environment straightforward.

The Google Plugin for Eclipse adds new project wizards and debug configurations to your Eclipse IDE for App Engine projects. App Engine for Java makes it especially easy to develop and deploy world-class web applications using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). The Eclipse plugin comes bundled with the App Engine and GWT SDKs.

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview.html

jQuery is a small JavaScript library that makes development of HTML-based client JavaScript drastically easier.

OK, I admit it. For many, many years I hated JavaScript. I hated writing JavaScript code, and I hated the pain that goes along with dealing with different browsers using reams of script code even more. I still hate those same problems, but thanks to a recently-gained better understanding of JavaScript and a small JavaScript client library called jQuery, I no longer dread the days when I have to write client-centric AJAX script code. In fact, I welcome them now! With client logic getting ever more complex and browsers still diverging in features and implementation of features, jQuery and other client libraries provide much needed normalization when working with JavaScript and the HTML DOM.

Rick Strahl

http://www.devx.com/codemag/Article/40923