west drags web 2.0

Times of recession and it’s about business  survival. Stories of cost cutting, layoffs, no funding for research, frozen development etc…, are closely related to corporates and governance. Ok enough of those boring lines of corporate lecture. Do we see web 2.0 getting affected by these uncertainties of the business world. As a close observer of the web, i could see some sort of dizziness in the world of web development.

I don’t want to talk big players like Google and Micorosoft as they already established some sort of revenue model out of web, but i am worried about the startups. Since most of them being funded by west, aspiring startups might go for a halt for some time. I should say post 2006, the world of web saw many new ideas like Flikr, Facebook , Youtube etc.., Do they evolve as a model ?

So, how long do we wait. Wheres are those budding mobile VAS providers. Can this ecosystem sustain the tides of economic crisis ?

Another important question is: will web 2.0 take a turn someway or take a temporary halt ?

Ubuntu lappy

Wow. I really liked ubuntu. It may not be for geeks(but a contrasting info later) but it is definitely for a desktop user. And more importantly it has the heritage of the ever powerful Debian. I would definitely call this as GNU/Linux ubuntu. It pretty nicely differentiates between proprietary and non-proprietary software. I loved that part when ubuntu pop up at the first startup saying, do you want to continue with this x properitory driver software be enabled. It would be a less common work for m$ windows user though.

And the gnome desktop with Advanced Display technology shines. The laptop battery indicator is a very nice hack. It looks cool and yet very simple. I would definitely recommend it to friends who eat, drink and live redhat / suse / debian for desktop.

I thought ubuntu might not suit building / hacking gnome applications. But i should say it was in ease for me. I just tried a relatively new java-gnome build. It initially threw some dependency heck. But thanks to apt-get. It was way too cool. I was able to resolve dependencies and install. Wow. What more to ask if you are a hacker. Anyway the complete gnome build would be interesting. But still this is pretty cool.

Liferay portals

Liferay Portal

Wow. What an experience working with a beast of a portal server. It’s around 85 MB in size and does lot of stuffs when it comes to managing portals. No nasty configuration steps and easily deployable with tomcat/jboss bundled. I am waiting to see more application servers integration support. It also supports pretty good extended environment to compile our applications adding portlets.

I must say open source community is now into a new and different channel of thought. And this one is pretty big. It’s a java portal but still it should be disturbing all the perl and python developers.

I must say web developing and content management are pretty big and frequent words used these days. I had the oppurtunity to work in liferay (and still continuing) and i learnt the core idea.

I believe it will serve as a pretty good enterprise platform for content management and applications. Since lightweight java services like Springs, Struts etc creating significant market, liferay is set to get mature with them. Even though i could not work much on configuring liferay i was able to get a feel of it. Especially the themes configuration are made so simple. And not to forget user and portlet permission management. It can be just done in ease.

Once place where one as a liferay administrator can get stuck is with the versions. And it’s generally not so administrator friendly when it comes to debugging errors (apart from those typical java application errors). He/she needs a pretty decent hands on experience and must be able to master the liferay specific portlet configurations.

The portlet based application development are getting fame slowly but i believe one day they would definitely gain more space with more better standards flowing.

Issues regarding liferay and setup are pretty interesting topics to read on. I would like to devote some time in future writing them here. Happy reading.

A simple displaytag grid demo

Display tags are pretty good option when it comes to creating a enterprise class data grid.
The sample code given below is quite a head start for building up a bulky grid.

// Create class that returns a list
package org.ixfree.Displayags;
import java.util.*;
public class GridList {

private List aList;

public List getAList() {
return aList;
}
public void setAList(List list) {
aList = list;
}
public GridList(int i)
{
this.aList = new LinkedList<DataBean>();
}
}

// POJO bean that goes into the list. DataBean in our case.
package org.ixfree.Displayags;
public class DataBean {

private String name;
private String age;

public String getName()
{
return this.name;
}

public String getAge()
{
return this.age;
}

public String setName(String name)
{
this.name = name;
}

public String setAge(String age)
{
this.age = age;
}
}

// Get the libraries reffered
// Sql needed if you wanna get the data out of the table. Ofcourse there are much better ways to do it.
<%@ taglib uri=”http://displaytag.sf.net” prefix=”display”%>
<%@ page import=”java.util.*” %>
<%@ page import=”org.ixfree.Displayags.*” %>
<%@ page import=”java.sql.*” %>

<%
// Make a list of data for populating grid
List<DataBean> list = new GridList(6).getAList();

// .. Get the data into the bean and add it to the list.
// .. Every bean here refers to a row in the grid. Yeppiiie….

// Put the list in the request
request.setAttribute( “storedList”,list);
%>

// Make it as a XHTML (good for the browser)
<head>
<!– All script and style/references goes here –>

<link href=”ixfreeDemoDisplayTags.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>
</head>
<body>
<!– If you dont want the grid to introduce scroll bar for the window, but ok for the grid –>
<div id=”My_DisplayTag_Grid” style=”width: 800px; height: 360px; overflow: auto” >
<!–
The pageSize is pretty useful when you wanna have pagination
class is just our regular css stuff
headerClass applies to the TH’s

name attribute of the display:table tag does the magic of reading our list.

–>
<display:table name=”storedList” class=”myDisplayTagStyle” id=”displayTable” pagesize=”10″ requestURI=”theCurrentJspPage.jsp”>
<display:column  sortable=”true” property=”name” title=”Name”  class=”myDisplayTagStyle” headerClass=”myDisplayTagStyle”/>
<display:column  sortable=”true” property=”age” title=”Age” class=”myDisplayTagStyle” headerClass=”myDisplayTagStyle” />
</display:table>
</div>
</body>

### ixfreeDemoDisplayTags.css goes this way ###
html
{
scrollbar-base-color: #dddddd;

}

table.myDisplayTagStyle
{
background-color: #dddddd;
}

td.myDisplayTagStyle
{
border-color: black;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
margin: 0;
font-family:Arial Verdana;
font-size:10pt;
overflow: auto;
white-space:nowrap;
padding-top: 6px;
padding-right: 6px;
padding-left: 6px;
padding-bottom: 6px;
}

tr.odd
{
border-color: black;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
margin: 0;
padding: 4px;
background-color: #ffffff;
white-space:nowrap;
}

tr.even
{
border-color: black;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
margin: 0;
padding: 4px;
background-color: #dddddd;
white-space:nowrap;
}

th.myDisplayTagStyle
{
background-color: #dddddd;
border-color: black;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
font-size: 9pt;
white-space: nowrap;
padding-top: 10px;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-left: 10px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
}

interesting ognl

Being JavaScript crazy, i have little excitement when it comes to JSP expressions other non AJAX data rendering. But recently, i managed to understand something called OGNL an Opensource fix for data handling through expressions. OGNL is pretty well utilized in Struts 2 framework as part of the Client segment. OGNL in Struts 2 basically provides a rich set of interfaces to access the call stack which is otherwise called as ActionContext. This makes the data/parameter handling simple and clean.

I believe OSS efforts like these have quite a good chance to find their space in web 2.0. And more importantly Object/data notation need more standardization in the world wide web. One can give a try of Struts 2.0 considering the simplicity and power of OGNL expressions. This OGNL adds to my recent favourites inline  JSON.