Bandos’ Arcade

Its like this, I am not a huge cricket fan, the matches make me bored along the game. One guy balls, another guy slowly hits and 8 people try to send him to bench (but should mention, when the batsmen hits hard or when others send him to bench its always fun ). Being in Sri Lanka one thing you inherit is the cricket fever, from your grand dad to siblings, they all watch (or maybe play) cricket. The Wills world cup (1996), I just rem from here and there, (I was in grade 5 good times) is one nice memory I have, Sri Lanka winning the big cup and we all were staring at the TV with great joy.

Anyways with all that background story, yesterday I happened to be there at R. Premadasa international cricket stadium to watch the Sri Lanka vs New Zealand T20 match. Folks at work made plans to watch the match for weeks and finally 12 turned up. (This time the numbers were low coz there was a rumor that SL lost the SL vs Pakistan match coz they were there that day) however I took a ticket (Dumindu Threatened me to buy ) and was there few minutes before the game started.

New Zealand batted 1st and the game became fun, with all the cheering, shouting and screaming. The foreigners were good they played 141 for 8 wickets and it was the time for the home players. I was amused, I was not bored in fact I enjoyed it so much and was waiting till our innings start.

The SL inning started after about half an hour with some drops of rain, but it was all good. The fans were shouting.. “Go SRI LANKA”, “Common SANGA / SANA / DILSHAN” and I was among them too. The 1st half of the innings was great, Dilshan played well with a 50 in 23 balls lifting the SL run rate. My hopes were for Jayasuriya coz he was my hero since 96, but he was out with 1 run and it was disappointing. With Sri Lanka’s 3rd wicket (Sangakara) the batsmen kept falling. and there was no one to carry on Dilshan’s run rate. but until the last over we had the chance to win, it was 9 runs with 7 balls, then 8 with 5 and finally 3 with 1. So we lost.

I saw the faces of people around me, all their happy faces are turned dark, and it was sad indeed. But well for me I was happy, (Not for we lost) I enjoyed the match, the time I spent, even the defeat, we gave a good fight. So yeah it was one great experience for a newbie cricket fan.

WSO2 Governance Registry is a big part of wso2 governance product stack. Even though it is primarily aimed at managing, versioning, rating, and commenting on SOA artifacts it can also be used as a simple data store. with the 3.0 version the G-Reg gave support to custom query execution from the client side. This feature helps immensely when you use the registry for non-standard tasks. For me I had to do some pagination work for the comments that belongs to a particular resource, hence my approach was to write few custom quires to get the job done. The code is as follows.

	/**
	 * Returns a chunk of comments
	 *
	 * @param resPath	Path to the comment
	 * @param start		The beginning index
	 * @param size		Size of the chunk
	 * @return			an array of comments
	 */
 public Comment[] getCommentSet(String resPath, int start, int size) {
		Registry registry = null;
		try {
			registry = ; // get an instance of the registry 

			Resource comQuery = registry.newResource();

                        // The Sql Statement
			String sql = "SELECT REG_COMMENT_ID FROM REG_RESOURCE_COMMENT RC, REG_RESOURCE R, REG_PATH P WHERE "
					+ "RC.REG_VERSION=R.REG_VERSION AND "
					+ "R.REG_NAME=? AND "
					+ "P.REG_PATH_VALUE=? AND "
					+ "P.REG_PATH_ID=R.REG_PATH_ID LIMIT ?, ?";

			// Set SQL statement as the resource content
                        comQuery.setContent(sql);

                       // Setting the media type and properties
			comQuery.setMediaType(RegistryConstants.SQL_QUERY_MEDIA_TYPE);
			comQuery.addProperty(RegistryConstants.RESULT_TYPE_PROPERTY_NAME, RegistryConstants.COMMENTS_RESULT_TYPE);

			registry.put("system/myQueries/query", comQuery);
                 String resourceName = "testResource";
                 String pathToResource = "/system/myResources"

			Map params = new HashMap();

                        //Setting the parameters
			params.put("1", resourceName);
			params.put("2", pathToResource);
			params.put("3", start);
			params.put("4", size);

                       // Executing the SQL statement
			Collection qResults = registry.executeQuery("system/myQueries/query", params);

			String[] qPaths = (String[]) qResults.getContent();

			Comment[] comments = new Comment[qPaths.length];
                        // Loading the comment data to comment object array
			for (int i = 0; i < qPaths.length; i++) {
				if (registry.resourceExists(qPaths[i])) {
					comments[i] = (Comment) registry.get(qPaths[i]);
				}
			}

			return comments;

		} catch (Exception e) {
			String errorMsg = "Backend server error - could not get comment set";
			log.error(new MyTestException(errorMsg, e));
			return null;
		}

	}

Yeah simple as that you get your resources set without much effort. A big thank goes to Dimuthu

During this entire summer, WSO2 conducted a series of trainings on SOA best practices, How-Tos and trends, titled “SOA Summer School“. With the dawn of the autumn the series of online summer classes came to an end. With the popular demand, a 3 hour session is going to be held tomorrow the 13th August summarizing the 8 weeks of lessons and highlighting their key areas.





for a better insight I have attached tomorrow’s agenda, and it is conducted by Samisa Abeysinghe, Ruwan Linton, Prabath Siriwardena, Keith Chapman and Nandika Jayawardena. The online trainings are totally free and any one who is interested in SOA and EA can gain a good knowledge of its dynamics.

For last two weeks I was working on some user interface logic and happened to use Yahoo UI library (YUI). The task was to upload an image using Ajax. Since I was new to YUI, I was looking here and there over the net for some references. There were some good ones but thats for PHP back-ends, but mine was a jsp back-end and i didn’t know how to read the object thrown out from the YUI side.

with some more digging I came across nice file handling library in Apache commons (Commons File Upload) and took use of it to do the task. the code is as follows.

I took the above code segment directly from a YUI file upload tutorial hence the credit goes to the author. The jsp back-end using apache commons file upload is as follows.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hi folks, Its been awhile, huh almost 5 months since my last post. I was so darn busy with university finals, my thesis and some extra curricular activities . So yeah its about time to blog again. In few of my older posts i have written few things about SOA (little things i know), UDDI, Web Services and about the ESB concept. I did my bachelor’s thesis in the area of SOA, ( BACKBONE – A Service Oriented Architecture for Public Infrastructure and Service Governance) proposing a SOA reference architecture for maturing governments. For the past nine months of time I’ve been playing with technologies such as Axis 2, Apache CXF, WSIT/Metro, WSO2 ESB, JSF, Spring, Hibernate etc. etc. (All those J2EE stuff )

While I was working on my prototype, composing the services, developing UIs to consume them, connecting the two ends with the WSO2 ESB, resources like IBM library, IEEE explore, ACM library and most importantly WSO2 Oxygen Tank helped me immensely. I was fascinated by the papers and materials offered by WSO2 OT and IBM library for no cost. So Thanks to them I got my thesis done with caliber.

As for any one in their final year of university I my self was looking for a great starting point for my career. I was looking for some deference, not the ordinary software development which exists in many software houses. I was looking for some challenge, where I can explore new things, do research and importantly be part of a great community. For me that starting point was WSO2 (The Open Source SOA Company), and frankly it was a dream come true

Yeah I am living the dream

Good tutorials and resources on Apache CXF How Tos are not easy to digg. I had to spend hours searching and reading to make my small application up and running, Integrating Spring with JSF was pretty straightforward, but when it comes to integrating those two with JSF i got stuck.

So this post is about exposing a web service as a web project using JSF front end / Spring backed and CXF for service invocation

before starting I should mention few valuable resource around the net.

• The CXF documentation (Hope it will be completed soon)
• Make Web Services Transparent with Spring 2.5 and Apache CXF 2.0 by Willie Wheeler
• Introduction to Web services creation using CXF and Spring by Rajeev Hathi and Naveen Balani
• Developing JAX-WS Web Service Clients – netbeans
• Sample Application using JAX-WS, JSF, Spring, and Java by Carol Mcdonal

The web service u used was the publicly available spelling checker which is used in the netbeans tutorial.

The Step by step guide as follows >>

Step 1 :

Create the classes from the WSDL you can use netbeans for this task or WSDL2JAVA command (wsdl2java [URL]) in the shell.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while. Didn’t have time to blog or rather didn’t have much to blog about. Its the final university year, work is crazy. Too much report writing, formatting references and researching about almost everything related to IT. I started my thesis, and was super busy with catching up all those new technologies, testing and code cutting. well its all about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) yeahhh its hot stuff around these days, and mine was to introduce a better architecture with new technologies for public infrastructure re-engineering and service governance.

So yeah guess I will be posting on SOA for a while, and yeah mostly JAVA stuff.

Lat few days i was stuck with some web dev work for archmage. For the 1st time i had to localize a website in sinhala. Hence i had a longing desire to do something on sinhala i was glad. (Also getting payed for it definitely a chance. ) so yeah the site is www.technology.lk still under construction. The site back-end is powered by Joomla CMS and the famous Ecom component virtuemart. I had to prepare a language pack (Sinhala) for virtuemart, not a hard task, yet translating about 200+ words to sinhala is a boring task, so i was googling for an English-Sinhala Translator tool, Found Madura Dictionary. Unfortunately the sinhala words given in madura is not in Unicode. so it was impossible to copy and paste in my language pack php script.

After having a chat with my dear friend sanda, he suggested a FireFox plug-in which was developed by the University of Colombo (UCSC) which does a similar task. the plug-in came with a sqlite database which consisted nearly 50,000 English to sinhala translation words, and in Unicode. I was thrilled to see this. So for my personal satisfaction I just put to gather a small translator tool where you can type an English word and it gives some Sinhala suggestions (in Unicode).

Made it in Java, also wanted to test this new swing look and feel called Substance which did work smoothly. so yeah you can download

this tool and use it, modify it or what ever .

have fun,

p.s. : I will publish the Virtuemart Sinhala language pack in my next post.

Well, not hoping to write about my dreamy vacation, so will just tip off the few productive days. Yeah so i was doing some work for Archmage last few days, gave life to a dead project, played with joomla, wordpress and osCommerce.

After much research and hacking me and few of my friends at Archmage thought of using Joomla and Wordpress as core CMSes for our web development tasks, to make the work more rapid and easy. So yeah am hacking and looking for plugins and modules that i can use on joomla. Since last two weeks i was working on a real estate project and an e-commerce one. i was looking for resources on them. so yeah if you are looking for something similar try Estate Agent Improved for real estate and Virtuemart for E-Commerce. both are nicely made, Joomla plugins. With a little bit of customization they can be used like a charm.

OH and yeah today i gave a new look to my blog. last night i updated to Wordpress 2.5.1 ( yeah I know FINALLY!! ) Edit: I updated it again today (16th June) to WP 2.6 .  Many thanks goes to Andrayogi for a pretty neat template. Added some plugins, had some problems with the DIGG IT icon. My firebug started giving a javascript error “unterminated string literal” and finally found a fix.. well its simple just edit the plugin and add

digg_bodytext = '<?php echo trim(preg_replace('/\s/', ' ', get_the_excerpt())); ?>';

instead of

digg_bodytext = '<?php get_the_excerpt(); ?>';

That will fix the error. yeah so the site looks pretty neat. am sure many over the net uses this theme. even tried some different colors and combinations but thought this is the best combination so kept it in original.

Soo yeah will write some thing with more value soon.

cheers !

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