Separation of Concerns

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP), something which you might be familiar with if you are a Spring/Hibernate lover. It is definitely something new to me.

I spent some of my weekends looking for AOP articles and books. Graham O'Regan's article demonstrates how powerful AOP is and how it can be easily done using AspectWerkz. Naveen Balani's article shows you how Spring does it so that you do not need to add similar lines of code to obtain a Hibernate session to begin a transaction. Spring also

Just as you might not have an idea what AOP is:

It is a solution to the problem of creating clean and well-encapsulated without extraneous functionality.

Explained by Joseph and Nicholas in the book "Mastering AspectJ – Aspect-Oriented Programming in Java". You can find a sample chapter of the book from this link. The introduction explains how Object Oriented programming (OOP) came into play when procedural and functional programming turned ugly and how AOP fills in the blanks of OOP.

Some keywords of AOP are: Advice, Aspect, Cross-cutting concerns, Join points, Point-cut

I am not too sure how AOP can be applied to complicated frameworks such as webMethods. I certainly not a big fan of writing codes to deal with the core API to open and close connection for every transaction that I make. I got around this in my earliest webMethods related project by writing some Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs), Data Access Objects (DAOs) and Data Transfer Objects (DTOs). But they still took me quite some time and I would not know how complicated they could be if someone raised some new concerns.

I am new to Mule but I certainly love how lightweight it is and its support for regular POJOs and Spring embedment.

- yc, aspected

Pidgin was Gaim

Something might have slipped through the cracks of my RSS reader (or simply I wasn't free to read them these days), that I didn't realized that Gaim isn't there anymore. I went to http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ yesterday night, something that I do occasionally as I've been following the development of the version 2.x, shocked by its new name and the change of look-and-feel. As you can read from Wikipedia, all the changes were due to the settlement with AOL, which includes: Gaim would become Pidgin, libgaim would become libpurple, and gaim-text would become finch. The name Pidgin was chosen in reference to the term "pidgin", which describes communication between people who do not share a common language. The name "purple" refers to "prpl", the internal libgaim name for an IM protocol. Gaim 2.0 Beta 6 was the last version to be called Gaim, and Beta 7 was the first version to be called Pidgin. The final version was released on the 3rd of May. Anyway, if you're interested, please follow the links below: Pidgin Official Website: http://www.pidgin.im/ Pidgin Blogs: http://www.pidgin.im/pidgin/news/blogs Download Pidgin: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=235&package_id=230234&release_id=505814 Have fun! - yc, sleepy

Get into OpenID!

I have been seeing an increasing frequency of the term OpenID online these days, blogs, wikis, devnets, ..

Interestingly, while browsing my del.icio.us network yesterday, I came across a free anonymous/temporary OpenID provider at:

• http://www.jkg.in/openid

Something of similar concept with My Trash Mail. I have some chats with Sarah as well the same night about the crappy social networks surrounding us these days. However, there are some good ones which help driving one's personal growth and goals,

• My 43 Things to Do
• My 43 People to Meet
• My Consumption

So I created a goal that is to get into OpenID. If you are not familiar with the concept, it is basically a distributed and decentralized single sign on (SSO) solution. You will be given an OpenID which is basically a URL, e.g.

• http://yclian.opinity.com

This URL can be used as an authentication mechanism for other accounts you have in the Internet, such as your blogs, social networks, emails, websites. With OpenID, as long as you are signed on, you will be signed into any other of your accounts automatically.

If you are interested to read more about it and what's going on behind the scene, please refer to:

• http://www.openid.net/wiki/ (wiki)
  
• http://www.openidenabled.com (for developers)
  

You may create multiple OpenIDs as you may not like to use the same identity for different purposes, for instance, separating social network and business ID. Here are a few OpenID providers which can give you a good start:

• MyOpenID
• Opinity
• VeriSign
• Virtual Identity

I have also come across Atlassian Developer Blog about their SSO tool "Crowd" will be OpenID-enabled in the end of May. That sounds interesting.

As OpenID is growing in a high momentum, we will be seeing more and more companies and sites to support it in the very near future, such as Digg, Microsoft, ...

Stay tuned.

- yc, opened

Sexy Web-Design Trick

Here is something I shared with my colleagues previously in company's internal blog. Something quite useful to a web- designer or developer.

var tables = document.getElementsByTagName("table");

for(var i = 0; i < tables.length; i++){ tables[i].style.border = "2px dotted #000000"; tables[i].style.padding = "4px"; };

var divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div");

for(var i = 0; i < divs.length; i++){ divs[i].style.border = "1px dashed #dddddd"; divs[i].style.padding = "4px"; };

I'm using this as a Firefox bookmark, here's an example:



- yc, stoning

Sisu

Sisu, principle of high power of will which should make you to achieve anything, a unique Finnish quality.

You can be an excellent driver, pole sitter and even race winner, but you are just not the world-champion racer. That's Felipe Massa, a talented Brazilian kid who has improved and gained a lot from being the partner of Schumi in 2006.

But if you look at the way Michael Schumacher signed off in Sao Paulo, Kimi Raikkonen's and Fernando Alonso's fighting spirit and sharpness on the track, you know what they are truly made of. Lewis Hamilton is another one, calm under pressure.

You?

- yc, upbeat

Wikis

So.. I'm looking for a hosted wiki solution. Atlassian Cohotion could be a good one as I'm particularly familiar with Confluence, however, I'm looking for a free one and it'd be a good idea to know how other competitors in the market look like.

Spent some time wandering around and got these created:

• Wetpaint (Personal), http://yclian.wetpaint.com/
  
  Its signup page is neat, simply attractive. It looks more like a blog with multiple-page creation. Template can be switched easily like Blogger.
  
  
• BrainKeeper (Enterprise), https://yclian.brainkeeper.net/
  
  Newly entered in the wiki competition I guess. A Confluence clone with completely different UI.
  
  
• PeanutButterWiki (Personal), http://yclian.pbwiki.com/
  
  Not yummy.
  
  
• MindTouch (Enterprise), http://yclian.wik.is/
  
  Way too complex. I was lost using it.

I also took a look at Jive's ClearSpace, a solid and finely built product. It impressed me and I believe they can be a very strong competitor in the wiki market..

Soon or already.

- yc, sleepy

For the last time

No one really likes switching accounts here and there, esp. emails and blogs. I made up the decision to in Saturday arvo, created new hotmail, flixter, digg, delicious and blog.

Prior to that, all my accounts were standardized to the screen name "yuenqi". Which was started around 5 years ago. I used to create all account under the name "exlian" when I was firstly introduced to world wide web, esp. personal homepage and guessbook. Then emerged to using some names with "strife" within it around the time I was active in IRC.

"yuenqi" was alright, but I still thought that I needed a change, one which represents the real me, to friends, to biz, and to other peeps in the WWW.

Note: I have two blogs [1] [2] which I started to maintain again these days, however I'll stop posting at them but here.

- yc