Chapter 1 of introduction to Event Processing

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Oracle, Packt, Technology

Tags

book, CEP, Event Processing, Oracle, Packt, review

Although the book’s introduction says that its target audience is developers and architects the first chapter is a very good introduction to the ideas and goals of Complex Event Processing (CEP) for anyone in the IT industry. The chapter explains the ideas and goals of CEP illustrating them with easy to grasp real examples.

Possibly one if the best starts to a Packt book I’ve seen.

If your going to get stuck in with the more practical pieces then I’d start downloading the tools from Oracle as early as possible as there is several GBs of software. You might also consider cheating by downloading a prebuilt VirtualBox with the majority of the software already installed and configured.

Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing – book review

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alexandre Alvis, Event Processing, Oracle, Packt

I shall be reviewing the new Packt book on Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing (details at http://bit.ly/ZTpzCh). The full review will be posted here, but will probably tweet as I go (www.twitter.com/mp3monster). Given one of the authors is Alexandre Alves I have high hopes for the book given what I found when reviewing of his OSGi In Depth book he wrote for Manning.

Buying CDs with MP3 downloads

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by mp3monster in Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

MP3 CD

Over the last few years it has become a common thing for artists (or more precisely record labels on behalf of artists) to offer the advance purchase of CDs with the offer of download of the album in an electronic format (MP3 or FLAC typically).

I have to admit I’ve plumped for the additional cost of this option a couple of time recently, falling for e impatient view that the CD will take time in the post and the download on release date will allow me to hear the album at the 1st opportunity.

But present purchases have just shown me to be a bit of a mug, as the CD has arrived a day or two before the official release date, allowing me to rip the album for myself and loading it onto a USB stick so I can hear it in the car 1st thing Monday morning on my way to work.

So, what is the point of the additional premium? The CD arrives early, it is faster for me to rip the CD myself (in fact modern Blu Ray drives can spin the CD so fast that it takes longer to login to a website for the download than the rip process).

So why not allow advance order purchases to download the MP3 version immediately? The risk of leak – well better to allow the MP3 to be downloaded rather than ripped as it means you can trace the leak by ‘water marking’ the download to a transaction. It can’t be the chat scoring because you can count e physical media (unless the real value is for the record company to count such purchases as 2 copies of the album in the sales stats).

I think going forward I’m going to stick to just physical plus personal ripping.

Java EE With Netbeans Review

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Netbeans JavaEE review

I recently completed a review for Packt Publishing of some course videos on Netbeans 7 with JavaEE, which concentrated particularly at JSF and related technologies such as JPQL. The videos are a natural follow on from the author’s book Java EE 6 Development With NetBeans 7.

I have to say that David Heffelfinger’s videos did a good job of walking through the basics of the technologies and would suggest that they’re worth checking out if you want to quickly get your head around this area of Java.

For more on this kind of thing checkout David’s blog – http://www.ensode.net/roller/dheffelfinger/

Only catch – I don’t know when the videos will get published officially at the moment.

Update:videos likely to be published mid June

JDeveloper & Copying Formatted Text

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by mp3monster in General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

JDeveloper, Plugin, Pretty formatting, XSD

I’ve started to use Oracle’s JDeveloper more and more, not just because I’m working with the AIA (Application Integration Architecture) Foundation Pack but also as an XSD Editor for designing interface definitions.

I’ve spent sometime trying to find a solution that can compete with XML Spy but without the huge price tag. I’ve tried OxygenXML, Eclipse, Visual Studio among others and concluded that its very good for a free tool. Perhaps still not as good as XMLSpy – but thats the difference between an IDE and a dedicated XSD/XML tool.

JDeveloper design view- with a lot of similarities to XMLSpy in presentation

You might think, that to use JDeveloper I have to commit to using the Oracle technology stack (and the big price tag that comes with), but this isn’t the case.

Not to mention Oracle have very much caught up with the Open Source World of Maven, there is a growing library of plugins both Official and Open Source covering a plethora of things from JUnit integration to Python & Groovy language syntaxes.

One of the nice things with XMLSpy and VisualStudio is the ability to copy into other documents the pretty formatted text (colour coded syntax etc) – making schemas or code fragments easier to look at in a document. However out of the box JDeveloper doesn’t do this out of the box. But it would seem that this capability wasn’t just wanted by me, so an extension has been written Chris Hughes that solves this problem called jdev-copyashtml.


<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="ISO-8859-1"?><xs:schemaxmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"><xs:elementname="shiporder"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="orderperson"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="shipto"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="name"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="address"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="city"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="country"type="xs:string"/></xs:sequence></xs:complexType></xs:element><xs:elementname="item"maxOccurs="unbounded"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="title"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="note"type="xs:string"minOccurs="0"/><xs:elementname="quantity"type="xs:positiveInteger"/><xs:elementname="price"type="xs:decimal"/></xs:sequence></xs:complexType></xs:element></xs:sequence><xs:attributename="orderid"type="xs:string"use="required"/></xs:complexType></xs:element></xs:schema>

Once downloaded go to Help –> Check for Updates and step through so you can then choose your download – as shown.

Once installed you’ll need to restart JDeveloper. To then configure to plugin to work as you want go to Tools –> Preferences… Where you should be able to find Copy As HTML/RTF in the left menu tree to get the options to configure the plugin behaviour.

If you’re going from Windows application to another then you want the Rich Text Format setting. After that rather than Ctrl+C its Ctrl+H to copy and carry the pretty formatting/colours etc.