• I found this book a bit more than a usual pocket guide.
• If you are a beginner and don’t know anything about AIR, then this book is the best bet.
• The chapters were well organized to take you from novice stage to advanced stage in AIR.
• Covers ADOBE AIR 1.0
• Chapter I and II of this book teaches you many information and technical details about the AIR which might lots of time if you have to get it from Internet.
• The authors have given lots of code snippets while explaining a topic instead of lots of theoretical text. Some thing that programmers always look for.
• This book also gives an insight about Webkit engine, architecture of AIR and the security model of AIR
  The most interesting part in this book is the “Mini cookbook”.
• The mini cookbook chapter contains worked out samples with complete code explanation. It includes samples that can help you understand (from AIR perspective) Application Chrome, Windowing, File API, File Pickers, Service and Server Monitoring, Online/Offline, Drag-and-Drop, Embedded Database, Command-Line Arguments, Networking, Sound.
• This book is worth buying for its content coverage and its also very cheap.

Book name: Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers – Pocket Guide
Edition: April 2008
Author’ s: Mike Chambers, Daniel Dura and Kevin Hoyt
Publisher’s: Oreilly, Amazon, OnAir (free pdf) .

With my recent experience on Agile-Scrum based projects, I started realizing how important is “Attitude” of the person involved in an agile team.

Some might say attitude is important in any kind of projects (say Waterfall based projects). I feel that compared to waterfall based projects, agile project team requires lots of collaboration and interaction between the team members, team member with the product owner, product owner with stakeholders and so on.

The attitude of an agile team member is crucial during the entire project time. Timely feedback from the customer is the heart of the agile project to be successful.
IMHO, the readiness of the customer to give quality feedback to the development team and the ability of the development team work on that feedback is pretty much depends on attitude.

The author of the book “Code Craft: The Practice of Writing Excellent Code” Pete Goodliffe and the author of the book “Agile Java: Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development were also giving stress on how important is attitude on a small discussion in Javaranch.

There is a clear main theme. My observation is that there is one thing that sets “exceptional” programmers apart from merely “adequate” (let alone “poor”) programmers.

It’s this: their attitude.

They *care* about programming. They *care* about programming well.

If a programmer has the correct attitude to the task, all other things will follow.

Think about the great programmers you’ve met along the way.

The author of the book “Practices of an Agile Developer” Venkat Subramanium mentions about the importance of attitude while he was coaching a team in Holland.

The team, the project, and the setting are what I would define as ideal for agility. The project has everything that’s needed to succeed a highly motivated team (that’s an understatement), superb attitude of each one on board, a fantastic work area (what a great lab, we have about ten people all working in this open space and the five eight hour days felt like five minutes, no interruptions or distractions, we had undivided focus on project), and an organization with leaders committed to succeed.

James Shore’s in his blog also mentions about attitude from the continuous integration perspective Continuous Integration is an Attitude, Not a Tool

Contrary to popular belief, continuous integration is an attitude, not a tool. It’s a shared agreement by the team that:
1.When we get the latest code from the repository, it will always build successfully and pass all tests.
2.We will check in our code every two to four hours.

If you have read my recent blog “Make Scrum team sync and happy“, you might understand how important is the attitude of a Scrum master towards his/her team member.

Conclusion:
I believe it is not very easy to change ones attitude overnight, it do requires lots of support from the entire team, ability to accept constructive criticism, willingness to cooperate and openness.
If you some have other interesting point or facts about this topic, please post it as a comment.

This will be the first ever one day agile conference to happen in NCR, India (National Capital Region).

Two of my colleagues from Xebia india, Mayur Gupta and Saket Vishal will be presenting a paper on A Case Study on Distributed Agile Project from Developer’s perspective and Leveraging Agile in Waterfall Projects respectively.

My friend Deepak Mittal from IntelliGrape will also be presenting a paper on Metrics for an Agile Project.

Pete Deemer from Yahoo India will give keynote speech.

Cool!.. Right ??
The purpose of this conference was to address this interest and provide a comprehensive overview of the current State-of-the-Art, as well as State-of-the-Practice, for Agile Methods.
Target Audience
– Practitioners: who will be interested in the discussion of the different methods and their applications
– Researchers: who may want to focus on the empirical studies and lessons learned
– Educators: looking to teach and learn more about Agile Methods

If you want know more about this conference, check the link http://agileindia.org/agilencr08/index.

Scrum is facilitated by a ScrumMaster, whose primary job is to remove impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal. The ScrumMaster is not the leader of the team (as they are self-organizing) but acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The ScrumMaster ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The ScrumMaster is the enforcer of rules and sprints of practice.

According to Scrum checklist book the definition of Team is

The team does everything to win the game – to deliver the product. The team is cross-functional. That means the full know-how to realize the product is located in the team. The team needs to understand the vision and Sprint Goals of the Product Owner in order to deliver potentially shippable product increments.

Few other things that i learned/referred/observed as a Scrum master for the Team were…

• Trust your team member and delegate the tasks to that person
  Unless you do it, the team member wont feel the responsibility and ownership.
• Have big ears to listen to them.
  Do you need an explanation for this ?
• Understand the team member problems in the project
  Dont force them to do some tasks, it wont produce quality output. Understand his/her problem and see how you can help for it and make them feel comfortable before that person picks up that problematic tasks.
• Sometimes, take them out for lunch.
  How frequent you can go is depends on your company wallet strength though.
• If a team member makes a repeated mistakes – talk to him/her directly to the face.
  Dont do backbiting, be bold and straight enough to point the mistakes with facts in-hand.
• Be open minded and open enough to accepts the mistakes pointed by your team members.
  Yes, this helps you to grow on the right direction as a SM and as a person
• If you get a chance, watch the Chak de movie.
  Yes, i am not kidding. You will learn so many things about important is team spirit, leadership, patience, power to win, plannings, estimation, team co-ordination and so on.
• Okay to Good to Great
  While Toyota Way reckons to hire only Talented people, if you happen to have a team member who is not fit enough for the project. Spend bit more time with that person. Have a seperate daily tasklists for that person and gently monitor that person. Dont make that person feel bad about his/her incompetence. Depending on your project timeline, give extra time for him/her to improve further. If you feel you are spending too much time for that person alone, then better get ride of that person from the project.
• Read Chapter 3 from the book “Agile project managment” by Jim Highsmith
  Jim explains about “building adaptive teams” by Getting the Right people, Articulating the product vision, Encouraging Interaction, Participatory decision making, Insisting on accountability, Streering-Not controlling and Self-disipline.
  Well, i wont say i was able to follow everything, but i did manage to reach some.

The above were my findings with the experience i have, so if you happen to find something wrong or different, please post it as your comment.

We took some resources from Adobe Dev Net site and eventually found a cool article explaining how Flex Data Services works with Spring using Spring Remoting features and so on.
We were quite amazed with the UI capabilities of Flex with its server side integration. If you look at that article now, its start with a disclaimer saying “Effective with the release of Adobe LiveCycle ES, the Adobe Flex Data Services 2 server product has been rebranded as a Solution Component of LiveCycle ES.”

I did heard about Adobe Livecyle ES before but at that time it was called as Adode Document server. Adobe keeps changing its product name for reasons only they can understand & agree, but the point is that the architecture and the concept of the
Adobe LiveCycle ES is getting very matured and stunning.

What is Adobe LiveCycle ES ?

Adobe® LiveCycle® ES (Enterprise Suite) software is an integrated J2EE server solution that blends electronic forms, process management, document security, and document generation to help you create and deliver rich and engaging applications that reduce paperwork, accelerate decision-making, and help ensure regulatory compliance.
Read more from http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/

Ok, now what Flex has to do with LiveCycle ES ?
Just have a look at the below diagram showing the technology summary of LiveCycle ES.

[Image linked directly from the site Avoka]

If you look at it carefully and if you are a vivid Java developer, you might have noted that the server-side of LiveCycle is based on J2EE.
LiveCycle reckons using Flex or PDF as its UI.
What!…PDF as an UI?, but how can it provide a rich interface that Flex or HTML can give ?
Yes. Have a look at Adobe LiveCycle Designer .
What is Adobe LiveCycle Designer

Using Adobe® LiveCycle® Designer ES software, you can create form and document templates that combine high-fidelity presentation with XML data handling. This gives you the ability to create dynamic forms that closely mirror the paper forms they will replace. A unified design environment with an intuitive graphic interface makes it easy to quickly design and maintain templates, define business logic, and preview them in real time before they are deployed.
Read more at http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/designer/

While you can use Flex for ‘shopping cart’ kind of user interactions, you can use PDF (precisely called Interactive PDF) for form filling and submission interactions.

Well!, Where this can be useful and why this sounds like a complex solution ?
Actually no. The Flex and PDF is just a small part of the LiveCycle ES and the other components in LiveCycle ES together provide solution for Enterprise Business Process Automation, RIA, eForms, Financial Services, Governments, Manufacturing and so on.

IMHO, one of the marketing factor for LiveCycle ES product is PDF. Be it manufacturing business process or Financial or eBusiness, you might require to produce a paper during the workflow.
for example Commercial Invoice, receipts, Purchase order and so on. PDF is the best way to reproduce a paper document in electronic format.
Adobe Reader is installed in 80% of PC (as per Adobe). This enables the end users of LiveCycle ES, especially the SME’s to participate in workflow as a client using free Adobe Reader.

If possible I will try to cover more details about the LiveCycle ES components on my next blog.;)

Few of the other “How to” samples (like Ajax addition, addition, echo, stripes layout reuse) that were documented in Stripes framework wiki page were also included in this sample code.

Downloading and running the sample code.

1. Click simplewebapp.tar to download the Spring with Stripes sample code based on Maven
2. Untar the downloaded tar file to a known location
3. You will see a folder structure simillar to the image shown below
   
4. Go to extracted folder “simplewebapp” and analyse the pom.xml file content, especially the stripes and spring dependency nodes

   ...........pom.xml.....
   
    
   	junit
   	junit
   	3.8.1
   	test
    
    
   	net.sourceforge.stripes
   	stripes
   	1.4
    
    
   	org.springframework
   	spring
   	2.0.6
    
    
   	commons-logging
   	commons-logging
   	1.1
    
   
   ..............
   

5. Run the maven commands with goals like install or package to build the application. Example mvn clean package
6. The pom.xml has already plugin reference for Jetty and Tomcat. If you want to quickly build, run and view the sample code, then use the maven goal jetty:run or tomcat:run. Example, executing mvn clean jetty:run, will clean, build and deploy the application on an inplace Jetty server.
   Hit the browser with url http:/localhost:8080 to view the sample code home or index page. Sample home or index page is shown below
   

Thats it.
If you happen to face some problem on the using the given sample code, then please let me know by adding a comment to this post. I will try to reply for that.

What is iText?
iText is a library that allows you to generate PDF files on the fly.
iText enhance web- and other applications with dynamic PDF document generation and/or manipulation.

While the primary target for both of these applications is to generate PDF documents, these two were entirely different Java libraries.
Below is my short comparison on when to use which,

Apache FOP

• If you want to have a fine grained control over the presentation and the layout of the PDF.
  Why ? FOP is based on MVC pattern and its uses XSL:FO specification
• If your input data is heavily based on XML.
  Why? Fop main objective is to convert XML to PDF using XSL:FO. While iText have XML2PDF functionality, FOP together with Xalan has much higher control over parsing the XML and rendering the PDF
• Apart from PDF, RTF & HTML, If you want to support more output formats like PNG, SVG, TXT and so on.
• If you DONT want to generate PDF that contains 1000+ pages on every instance.
  Why? Apache FOP is known for slow processing power. It wont really fit for the cases where you might need to process and create 1000+ pages in a very short time.
• If you want to have a externally configurable control over the output format of the PDF.
  Why? You can keep the style sheet (xsl:fo or xslt) out from your classes or package and tell FOP to use this xsl:fo or xslt while rendering PDF
• If you want to have a PDF view accessibility for all your web pages in a web application.
  Why? Check out the http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/ site and see how they have integrated Apache Forrest with Apache FOP

iText

• If you want to generate PDF on the fly and if you want to add support for annotations, AcroForms, digital signature
• If you want to generate 100+ PDF which also contains 1000+ pages.
  Why? iText is very reliable from processing perspective and its pretty fast in generating the PDF’s
• If you want to post-process, manipulate existing PDF documents.
  Why? Because even Apache FOP reckons using iText for this purpose
• If you want to encrypt your PDF file
  Why? iText libraries were pretty well designed for this
• While fetching & displaying the database tables on screen (say web or client application), if you want to have instance support for XML, PDF, Excel, CSV outputs.
  Why ? Checkout DisplayTag features and see how it is using iText for PDF

How is it like writing a simple HelloWorld text printed PDF document generation using iText ?

Document document = new Document();

PdfWriter.getInstance(document,
			new FileOutputStream("HelloWorld.pdf"));

document.open();
document.add(new Paragraph("Hello World"));
document.close();

To see complete code, click http://itext.ugent.be/library/com/lowagie/examples/general/HelloWorld.java

How is it like writing a simple HelloWorld text printed PDF document generation using Apache FOP ?

FopFactory fopFactory = FopFactory.newInstance();

FOUserAgent foUserAgent = fopFactory.newFOUserAgent();

OutputStream out = new java.io.FileOutputStream(pdffile);
out = new java.io.BufferedOutputStream(out);

  Fop fop = fopFactory.newFop(MimeConstants.MIME_PDF, foUserAgent, out);

  TransformerFactory factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
  Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer(new StreamSource(new File(xsltfileloc)));

  Source src = new StreamSource(new File(xmlfileloc));
  Result res = new SAXResult(fop.getDefaultHandler());

  transformer.transform(src, res);

For brevity, i have not included the input xml and xslt (xsl:fo) code snippets.
To see the complete code, click FopSource/examples/…/…/ExampleXM2PDF.java

Note :
Well, the above points were based on my experience and exposure, if you have something new or see something misinterpreted, then please posts it as your comment.

I come from south part of India and like many Indians, I went to abroad (Australia) to pursue my Master degree in IT. (I still don’t know why US embassy in Chennai rejected my student visa ). Spent nearly 2 years in Australia, then I got a job to work in Geneva, Switzerland for United Nations. Lived in Switzerland for 5 years. I was also travelling a lot for work purpose and covered almost 12 countries in that 7+ years (lucky me). So the point is, I got used to the some of the good things in abroad life like quality environment, work timings and company culture, respect for nature, road infrastructure, and easy accessibility for document clearance and so on. The other side is always green, don’t they?

There is nothing like your mother land. After being married for 1.5 years, one fine day me and my wife decided to move back to India from Switzerland. It was not an easy decision for us as I was worried how I am going to fit myself back to Indian work culture. In India competition is very high, so you need to keep proving yourself in your work, education and so on. This will obviously lead to politics in work environment. So I took a great care on choosing my future company in India. I have posted my resume in Naukri and Timesjob. Within few hours I got plenty of interview calls. Funny though, many companies were very suspicious why I want to come back to India. Within few weeks I rounded with job opportunities from Google, IBM, Franklin Templeton and Xebia. I took Xebia offer for many good reasons, especially for its technical offerings on Spring Hibernate Maven Agile and so on.

Xebia is located in Gurgaon, North India and so people in Gurgaon mainly speak Hindi. Now, as I come from south India, in particular from Tamilnadu, I don’t even know a bit of Hindi and I also don’t know anyone in Gurgaon before. That’s created another challenge for me. Before moving to India, I did some background work on house rental cost, lifestyle, living expense, internet facilities and so on. Xebia gave their company email access to me in-prior, so I also started bugging my new colleagues for tips and suggestions. Anurag, Jyoti, Piryanshu and Vikas gave me lots of tips. With these tips in mind and with big confidence in heart, I landed in Gurgaon on Feb 25th 2007.

Within the first 3 weeks, i managed to find a 3BHK apartment with the help of www.99acres.com. A new friend cum brother called Mr. Sutharman helped me a lot in getting the new telephone and internet connection from BSNL. He also helped me in buying furniture’s from a store in Delhi. Managed to get a cooking gas connection within 2 days from ‘Uruvasi gas agency’. Company opened a bank account in ABN AMRO and the bank gave me the ATM card within 1 month. Contrary to what I had experienced 8 years back, BSNL operators were after me on making sure that I get the telephone connection. Uruvasi gas agency delivered the gas cylinder very quickly and they were angry with me for NOT being at home when they came earlier twice.
Every day at least one person knocked my home for Ironing service, gardening, maid service, car washing and so on. I use to negotiate the price and talk to them by waving my hands and head all around (oh!.. still today I do it).

I was amazed to see the growth of India after 8 years. Gurgaon is full of high raise buildings, big malls, BPO and IT companies. If you want to see the developed India then come and see Gurgaon. Having said that be careful while driving in India, road rage is part of daily news in news papers. While officially we drive in left hand side, in the suburb areas we also like to drive in the middle of the road, and sometime even in the right side. The municipal corporation is now building 1 feet divider to avoid this problem. See!… India is changing and growing. Many information were available in internet now and online shopping sites were also growing a lot. Still today I never paid any bribe to get some work done in Gurgaon with the Governmental sectors. See!… India is shining as well.

If you are thinking about moving back to India and if you have some specific question or doubt in mind, then please post it here, I will try to answer for it.

In a typical web application, it is common to have a login screen, registration screen, content storage in database, security and most importantly testing.

When building a Java web application, we might start adding one jar file after another to implement a particular user story.
For example, if i want to have ACEGI security for my web app, I might download ACEGI jar, map and configure it in web.xml and security.xml files.

What if, there exists a toolkit that already provides these common features to us. ?

For instance…

ACEGI security
Hibernate integration
AJAX templates
Switchable CSS framework
Unit test
Layout reuse
PDF support
Excel support and so on…

Yes!. Appfuse can provide the above listed features and many more as a cool Maven bundle. All the hassels for getting the base setup for your web application has been done already. All it requires is understanding the Appfuse structure and making use of it.

If you are interested, you can also checkout the Appfuse roadmap for various frameworks supports.

Fullsize image link1

Fullsize image link2

One of my last project was based on Appfuse 2.0. We blindly took the risk of basing our project on Appfuse, and Appfuse never turned us down.

Installing Appfuse is easy for people who have basic knowledge of Maven 2. We took the Spring MVC Basic archetype of Appfuse, as the team already had good expertise on Spring/Hibernate/Junit.

The Spring MVC Basic archetype was made with excellent set of framework and libraries, some of them include Hibernate, JUnit, Spring MVC,DisplayTag, DWR and so on. The good thing is, its also supports most of commonly used databases.

It took very short time to add a new spring-mvc jsp page, a spring controller and the related test cases.
It took hardly no time to add our own language extension for internationalization, because Appfuse comes with ready made templates.

At one point, we wanted to extend the user registration form, spring controller and the database. I was able to do it with the help of documentation provided on the Appfuse website.

It takes a while to understand the whole structure of the project, but I dont feel it wasted my time on learning it’s structure.
Heavily based on many external jars files so you never know when they will become obsolete.One can also argue that is not the problem of Appfuse but the individual package. We faced some compatibility issues on using the jars but later we managed to correct them using our pom.xml

I strongly recommend to the spring developers to look in to the Appfuse application before you start developing your own set of common features and requirements for your web application.
This helps you not to re-invent wheel and saves time and effort.

The mailing list/user community is very active in answering the queries. The Appfuse team is also very active in keeping their application at par with new changes in the technology.
Apart from Spring MVC archetype, Appfuse also has its archetype for JSF, Struts and Tapestry. Checkout Appfuse website for more info about online demos, tutorials and release roadmap.

Conclusion

The learning curve is not that steep, but once you learn it, you will have top-notch technologies binded to your application.
While the Appfuse homepage provides a good documentation and video tutorials, it would be nice to have book written on it.
Matt Raible!.. Will you write a book