JSF 2 provides two new scopes on top of the standard Servlet scopes (request, session, application). One of them is the view scope. View scope was covered in Managed beans article. The other scope is Flash which I’m going to cover here. Let’s start with a very simple example. Managed bean: @ManagedBean(name = "bean") public class [...]

read more

In Part 4 I discussed the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse and how it allows you to view, create, and manage JPA entity relationships. The Entity Editor provides a centralized view of all entity relationships, allows you to modify entity properties, and allows you to navigate between the object model, mapping associations, and database schema layers. In Part 5, I will explore persistence settings. The persistence.xml file defines the context for JPA persistence. In this step, you will use the JPA Persistence Configuration Editor to explore the persistence.xml file for your JPA web project.

read more

If your focus is on Federal IT you have no doubt long realized there are an incredible number of conferences and events in this domain. In August 2009 we established the Federal Technology Events Calendar, and we are still maintaining that as a reference and an aid to long range planning. Since then we have found another great reference site to government events, called GovEvents.com . We strongly recommend anyone building a schedule of future events or anyone holding events use the GovEvents.com site to help deconflict and optimize your schedule. We still maintain our reference calendar and plan on keeping it open. But its point and purpose is much simpler. This calendar shows events we are personally involved with. These are events we are helping to plan, speaking at, attending, or interested in for other reasons. Please take a moment to review the calendar and let us know what you think. We would especially appreciate knowing if you think there are other events we should be tracking. This calendar uses Google Calendar technologies so it is fast and easy to maintain, which means it should be easy to keep it up to date. You can see the calendar at [...] Related posts:

1. Announcing the Federal Technology Events Calender
2. Three Events of Federal CTO Interest: Will You Be At These?
3. Some “Must Attend” Events in the Federal IT Space

read more

I am 99.9% confident that I’ve spent many hours trying to do in a complex way something that javascript (perhaps with jquery) lets us do with a single line of compressed code. But, I couldn’t find that line. Besides, I’m a hobbyist which means the puzzle is usually more fun than the solution. But this [...]

read more

Google Docs offers a hosted storage service for storing files in the cloud. Gladinet, a software vendor, has a solution called Gladinet Cloud Desktop that makes it easy to sync to Google Docs from Windows Explorer. In fact, Gladinet Cloud Desktop turns Windows Explorer into a cloud storage portal that can easily sync to Google Docs from other storage services or upload files from your desktop to any storage service you choose. Gladinet achieves this through a complete Google Doc integration with your file system.

read more

The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) will be at Robocup2010 to debut OLIVIA and LUCAS, the first social robots to be unveiled in Singapore, from 20 to 25 June 2010 at Suntec City Level 4.

read more

The RichFaces team has made a major step toward RichFaces 4 by releasing Alpha 2 version. I'm hoping to see GA in September. Keep in mind that not all components have been migrated to version 4 yet. The components that are available right now are listed below. Some highlights in RichFaces 4 Alpha 2[...]

read more

Sabre Travel Network, the leading provider of high performance solutions for the travel industry, today announced the global launch of Sabre Red, an innovative total travel solution designed to help travel agencies drive customer loyalty and power business performance, resulting in increased revenues, improved efficiency and reduced costs.

read more

Sabre Travel Network, le leader mondial de solutions hautement performantes appliquées au voyage, a annoncé aujourd'hui le lancement de Sabre Red, une solution révolutionnaire pour dynamiser la relation client, stimuler la croissance, générer davantage de revenus et contrôler les coûts de manière experte.

read more

Sabre Travel Network, azienda leader a livello mondiale nella fornitura di soluzioni tecnologicamente avanzate e ad altissima performance dedicate all’industria dei viaggi, ha annunciato oggi il rilascio di Sabre Red, la nuova soluzione, studiata per aumentare la fidelizzazione del cliente e ottimizzare la performance dell'agenzia, attraverso l’incremento dei profitti e il controllo dei costi.

read more

This is a 5-minute guide to creating a wizard inside a modal panel. We are going to use a4j:include together with rich:modalPanel. Start page (start.xhtml): <h:form> <a4j:commandLink oncomplete="#{rich:component('panel')}.show();" value="Open" reRender="panel"/> </h:form>   <h:panelGrid id="result"> <h:outputText value="#{bean.color}" /> <h:outputText value="#{bean.number}" style="COLOR: #{bean.color}"/> </h:panelGrid>   <rich:modalPanel id="panel"> <f:facet name="header">Wizard</f:facet> <f:facet name="controls"> <a href="#" onclick="#{rich:component('panel')}.hide();">Close</a> </f:facet> [...]

read more

I spent too much of yesterday and today trying to placate EPub, the God of Finickiness. EPub (which the creators would prefer I spelled EPUB, but I figure there’s no need to shout) is the ebook format that iPad and many other readers like. I have a young adult novel that I give away in [...]

read more

The Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation for the state of Maryland needed a better way to complete their data transfer and XML translation tasks on the IBM i. GoAnywhere Director met all their requirements and continues to overcome every challenge as Federal and State Laws and requirements change. The main challenge for DLLR was transferring sensitive data in a secure and reliable fashion. In addition, each DLLR “trading partner” required different file formats such as fixed width, Excel, CSV or the increasingly popular XML format.

read more

DVD to Coach Legal Departments on Cost Savings and Opportunities Related to Bringing E-Discovery Processes in House

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM- May 28, 2010 - ZyLAB, a leading provider of e-discovery and information management solutions, today announced that due to the overwhelming success at the IQPC, Information Retention & E-Disclosure Management Summit last week, it has released a new educational DVD entitled "Bringing E-Discovery In-House." As a recognised thought leader and provider of e-discovery solutions by multiple industry analysts, ZyLAB has put together this DVD to outline the benefits of bringing e-discovery in-house. The DVD includes videos, podcasts and whitepapers from ZyLAB experts, end-users and industry leaders.

To obtain a copy visit: http://www.zylab.com/dvd/

A few of the DVD highlights include:

• A video on information management in high-volume legal proceedings presented by Mr. Gonzalo De Cesare of the United Nations. In this video he provides insight into challenges the UN War tribunals faced regarding information management. During the war crime investigations enormous amounts of information had to be analysed. An e-discovery and e-disclosure system was set up for a community of defense attorneys and prosecutors all over the world. Learn how they could find, navigate and understand the complete evidence collection.

• A whitepaper developed in collaboration with George Socha, Founder of EDRM, that provides a straightforward, pragmatic overview on how legal professionals and organizations must be able to interpret e-discovery within the context of actual expected processes, inherent risks, and the available technical solutions that can support relevant activities.

• Podcasts on topics such as "How Text Mining Steers Investigations and E-Discovery," "How Data Visualisation Enhances your Search," and "The importance of XML to Proper Information Management."

"We have taken years of experience in providing e-discovery solutions to organisations around the world and have developed a DVD that encapsulates this knowledge to share with the community," said Johannes C. Scholtes, Chief Strategy Officer for ZyLAB. "Many organisations are fearful of bringing an e-discovery solution in-house because they think it is complex and expensive. It is our goal to educate organisations on how to efficiently manage the most expensive and tedious elements of litigation in-house with automated tools. The reality is that organisations can implement easy-to-use e-discovery tools that will save them significant amounts of money."

About ZyLAB
ZyLAB's modular e-discovery and enterprise information management solutions enable organisations to manage all data, in any format, to mitigate risk, reduce costs, investigate matters and elicit business productivity and intelligence. For 25 years ZyLAB has been a market leader due to its unique ability to provide modular solutions to meet specific customer requirements as well as deliver advanced capabilities for multi language support, searching, content analytics, document reviewing, and e-mail and records management. The ZyLAB eDiscovery & Production system is directly aligned with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) and features modules for forensic sound collection, culling, advanced e-mail conversion (Exchange and Lotus Notes) and legal review. ZyLAB's products and services are used on an enterprise level by corporations, government agencies, courts, and law firms, as well as on specific projects for legal services, auditing, and accounting providers. ZyLAB systems are also available in a Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) model.

Currently the company has sold 1.7 million user licenses through more than 9,000 installations. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, we also serve our local markets from our regional offices in London, New York, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Paris, and Singapore. To learn more about ZyLAB visit www.zylab.com or visit our blog at http://zylab.wordpress.com/.

###

The IQPC, Information Retention & E-Disclosure Management Summit was held on 17 - 19 May, 2010 at Dexter House, Tower Hill, London UK
http://www.informationretention.co.uk/Event.aspx?id=260668

For further information, please contact:
Christian Sharp / Alex Brooks
Rocket PR
Tel: +44 (0)845 370 7024
E-mail: ZyLAB@rocketcomms.net

read more

To better understand the components offered by MS Azure, we registered for MS Azure Platform and browsed through the three components. SQL Azure turned out to be the easiest one to configure and do something useful with, so we built a mashup that utilizes MS SQL Azure as a centeral repository for SOA Testing. In this article, we share our impressions of SQL Azure and how to automate SOA quality assurance by building test cases that use data from a SQL Azure instance.

read more

It's simple to setup the validation of a signed SAML 2.0 assertion in a Vordel XML Gateway. In a circuit, chain together (1) an "XML Signature Verification" filter (which you can find in the

read more

Managing an application release and its distribution is a complex piece of the development process. A release may pass every test in QA, then quickly go haywire when in production. Components can get left behind, destination targets are missed or files get installed in the wrong locations with no easy way to roll back. Download this eBook from Aldon and learn how to how to make your efforts feel like a walk in the park and not a day on the battlefield.

read more

There are two types of Web applications: those that care about their discoverability and those that don’t.
If you are developing a Web application in Flash or Flex for, say, financial advisers (FA) of a brokerage house or salesmen of an insurance company, discoverability is not a concern because FA’s or salesmen of your firm will be told, “Go to so-and-so URL and use so-and-so application”. We can happily say that both FA’s and salesmen have discover their RIA.

If you are developing a consumer-oriented RIA , you want random people to discover their pizzeria, department store, medical office or a car dealership.  Why a doctor needs a Web site? Mainly to be discovered by people from the neihborhood if someone will google for a family physician. You can say that some doctors also use Web site to post some useful articles or medical form for their existing customers. True. But still, the main reason for investing into development of a Web site is to increase visibility.

Recently, I wrote a blog about iPhone and Flash , and half of this blog was about excellent Google indexing of the plain HTML information about services of our company.
Today, I’ve read an article by Armando Roggio titled “Best practices for Search-Optimized Flash Development” . This article was supposed to give you a feeling that Google really knows how to peek inside your swf file.  The author states, “Need proof? Run this search on Google right now, filetype:swf + “comic books.””

Sure enough, if you’ll do it, the search will return several .swf files that have the words “comic books” hardcoded inside.  But most of the RIA bring the content dynamically and rightly so. A well designed RIA arrives to the client with the code that makes the screen pretty. The information about the upcoming sale of your local Ford dealer or recall of millions Toyota cars is not hardcoded into the Web site, but is dynamically downloaded from the server.  This creates a nice separation of responsibilities – people who create the content of the site don’t have to modify the Web site every time they want to announce a weekend sale at Ford dealerships.

Will Google index and find dynamically loaded content? I don’t think so.

Mr. Roggio quotes in his article executives of Adobe and Google stating how they collaborate and work hard on improving the situation.  I’m sure they do, but so far I don’t see the results.  

That article also states the following:
“In fact on June 18, 2009, Google announced that it could load external Flash resources, including text, HTML, XML, additional SWFs, and more. This feature means that you can create a Flash application that draws its content from a structured and external XML document.” And a little later the author states, “As of this past summer, Google can and does retrieve this external files.”

I love Google and use it a hundred times a day, but this announcement (if it really was made by Google) is simply not true, and I can easily prove it to you.

Once again, I’ll direct you to the Flash based Web site of our company . Now I’ll reveal some insider’s information.  Our Web site is written in ActionScript 3, but the content of every view you see there comes from external XML files.

For example, if I decide to change the information on the Home view, there is no need to recompile the Web site. I can just use Notepad, TextEdit, Vi, or any other available plain text editor to modify the content of the home.xml file that is being downloded as soon as the compiled SWF file arrives to the Web browser.
Let’s an experiment. The Home view of our Web site starts with the following long statement:

“Do you want your RIA application to be done right the first time? We've built lots of great RIA applications for our clients. Our teams of Flex developers are geographically located in the USA and Eastern Europe. “

Now, copy/paste this long text fragment (with or without double quotes) to Google’s search field. Hit Search. Do you see Farata Systems anywhere in the vicinities? I don’t.
This Web site was deployed about three years ago, and this poor little text we’ve been using in this experiments hasn’t been changed for a couple of years either waiting for any search engine to notice and index it.

You may ask, “Did you use deep linking available in Flex to provide unique URL’s for different views of the in your Web site helping search engines to index the content?” No I didn’t. Our Web site was created in ActionScript long time ago to be as light as possible.

But I know a firm with a complex commercial Web site written in Flex that did use deep linking feature,  but it didn’t help. They are considering re-developing the Web site in HTML/JavaScript. Unfortunately, this won’t help, unless they will put the entire content of the Web site inside HTML (but this is not possible and stupid). Using AJAX won’t make them happy if they decide to keep the content dynamically loaded.
If you’ve developed a large Web application with deep linking Flex feature and have good results in terms of Web analytics, I’d love to hear from you.  

Now the happy end.

I’ll continue recommending Flex and Flash as the platform of choice for developing of the enterprise RIA.  Don’t pay attention to those who predict that HTML5 will kill Flash. It won’t happen for another 10 years, and we need to develop and deploy our RIA today. The fact that someone can purchase H.264 patent licensing royalties and stream the video has very little to do with a robust and well written platform for enterprise RIA such as Flash.

But if your cousine Vinnie asks you to develop a Web site for his new Italian restaurant, use Flash very carefully - mainly for embedding interactive widgets here and there.

read more

Although a good problem to have - business growth at Professional Veterinary Products (PVP) presented new challenges, especially in a dynamic supply-chain environment that requires secure and fast data exchange with thousands of suppliers and clients. New requests for different data formats and ad-hoc reports were dramatically increasing from their trading partners, requiring PVP to either hire more development resources or find a commercial off-the-shelf solution.

read more

I have never met Gordon Moore. But his law? Well, Moore’s Law is my best friend. My entire career, it helped to make my work run faster. On more than one occasion, I think it may have saved my job. I like Moore’s Law a lot. Moore’s Law has had a big impact on XML acceleration. [...]

read more