Jay's Blog

Basic Localization support in Java Programs

2012-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00

How to add Localization support in your Java application?

1). Add following properties file to your project, depending on your language support requirements:

MessagesBundle_en_US.properties

MessagesBundle_fr_FR.properties

MessagesBundle_de_DE.properties

If you are not sure of locale specific properties file name, Netbeans provides easy addition of locale by right-clicking on your properties file, and select 'customize'. Choose specific language, country and Netbeans will appropriately rename the file.

2). Define the Locale:

Locale applocale = new Locale("en", "US");

3). Create a ResourceBundle:

ResourceBundle messages = ResourceBundle.getBundle("MessagesBundle", applocale);

Netbeans will appropriately choose the properties file using the locale specified.

4). Fetch the text from the ResourceBundle:

String heading = messages.getString("app.heading");

Sample MessagesBundle_en_US.properties:

app.heading=Linked List Demo

Sample MessagesBundle_fr_FR.properties:

app.heading=Démo liste chaînée

References:

Java Internationalization FAQ - from Oracle
Java Internationalization - Oracle Learning Trail

Java Melody

2011-12-29T16:16:00.001-05:00

Java Melody is a monitoring application, written in Java, and designed for Java or Java EE application servers in QA and production environments.

It is not a tool to simulate requests from users, it is a tool to measure and calculate statistics on real operation of an application depending on the usage of the application by users.

Java Melody is open source and production ready. It is easy to integrate with most web applications and is lightweight.

Benefits of using Java Melody:

gives facts about average response times and number of executions
make decisions when trends are bad, before problems become too serious
optimize based on more limiting response times
find root causes of response times
verify real improvement after optimizations.

It includes summary charts showing evolution over the time of the following indicators:

Number of executions, mean execution times and percentage of errors of HTTP requests, SQL requests, JSP pages or methods of business facades (if EJB, Sprint or Guice is used).
Java memory
CPU usage
Number of user sessions
Number of JDBC connections

These charts can be viewed on current day, week, month, year or custom period.

Java Melody also includes statistics of predefined counters (currently HTTP requests, SQL requests, JSP pages and methods of business facades wtih:

A summary indicating the overall number of executions, the average execution time, the CPU time and the percentage of errors.
And the percentage of time spent in the requests for which the average time exceeds a configurable threshold.
And the complete list of requests, aggregated without dynamic parameters with, for each, the number of executions, the mean execution time, the mean CPU time, the percentage of errors and an evolution chart of execution time over time.
Furthermore, each HTTP request indicates the size of the flow response, the mean number of SQL executions and the mean SQL time.

Steps to Setup Java Melody on Apache Tomcat 6:

1. Download Java Melody from http://code.google.com/p/javamelody/

2. Place ‘javamelody-1.33.0.jar’ and ‘jrobin-1.5.9.jar’ in WEB-INF\lib folder of your web app.

3. Add following tags into WEB-INF\web.xml file of your web app:

<filter>
        <filter-name>monitoring</filter-name>
        <filter-class>net.bull.javamelody.MonitoringFilter</filter-class>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>monitoring</filter-name>
           <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>
    <listener>
        <listener-class>net.bull.javamelody.SessionListener</listener-class>
    </listener>

4. Restart Tomcat service.

5. Open web browser, and type in following URL:

http://serverip:port/webappcontext/monitoring

Update ‘serverip’, ‘port’ and ‘webappcontext’ with your server and application speicfic detail.

And here you go ! Java Melody shows server snapshot in awesome graphs :)

References:

SOLR: Open Source Search Platform

2011-11-14T15:16:00.001-05:00

SOLR is world's blazing fast open source search platform, designed on top of widely used and very popular open source Lucene Search API.

This is one of the best platform to use in your next search application, whether it is web based or built using desktop technologies like Java Swing or .NET.

In this post, I will explain step-by-step how to setup Solr in quick easy way.

Step 1: Download latest version of Solr from any of the mirror site available on this URL: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/

On windows system, you will download zip archive of the application.

Solr download directory

Step 2:

References:

Getting Started - Apache Solr
Presentation Video: Getting Started - Apache Solr
Solr Wiki
Download Solr
Solr Version Control
Lucid Imagination: This website provides search platform built on Apache Solr/Lucene.

Sending HTML in JSON

2011-08-28T10:17:00.000-04:00

Search for "Sending HTML in JSON" on the internet, and you will get thousands of links however I tried the tips and advice from several programmers, and couldn't make this to work.

Problem: JSON is a text-data transfer protocol. I was trying to read article contents (which are saved in HTML format in database) from server and send it to client using JSON. However, this HTML text consits of several special characters (newline, html formatting tags etc) which are not allowed in JSON format. In short, my JSON data was becoming invalid because of HTML contents.

Solution: Send HTML data in JSON field by prefixing it with " < !DOCTYPLE html >< /html >" and append "< /html >" at the end of the field value, as shown in following example:

"htmltext":"< !DOCTYPE >< html >< p >Indexing using Apache Lucene< /p >In this article we will discuss about how indexing works in Lucene ... < a href= \" http: //www.blogger.com/%22articles//lucene.jsp/%22 \" / >Indexing using Apache Lucene < /a >< /html >"

In order to validate if the generated JSON data is valid or not, I use JSON Validator/Formmatter.

Note: I have added spaces deliberately in above code example, to prevent blogger to place hyperlinks or remove html tags !

I hope this article will be useful to someone, facility problem similar to above.

Tools for Software Troubleshooting

2011-08-12T09:43:00.001-04:00

Here is the list of commonly used open-source software tools. These tools are useful for code editing, file comparison, WYSIWYG HTML Editor, disk usage analyzer, writing notes, decompiling Java class files etc. I hope this list will help someone who is searching for such tools, and yes, comments are always welcome :)

Sr No	Tool	Purpose
1	Notepad++	* Code editing. * XML code viewing/editing. * Supports several programming languages.
2	WinMerge	File comparison tool.
3	Kompozer	KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.
4	jDiskReport	Disk usage analysis tool.
5	xMind	Tool for brainstorming, and drawing tree structure to show ideas and processes.
6	JD GUI	Java Decompiler. Decompiles CLASS files and shows JAVA code.
7	GIMP	GNU Image Manipulation Program. Very useful for creating icons, banners, and background images as well as styling texts etc.

Screenshots:

Notepad++

WinMerge

Kompozer

jDiskReport

xMind

JD GUI

GIMP

Sleep deprived !

2011-02-24T00:14:00.001-05:00

Feeling like I have a lot to do in this life. I want to learn new things, and new technologies.

Sometimes get so tired that even though I have so much to do and the day is already ended, don't feel like sleeping at night.

Unpredictable customers

2010-09-25T18:48:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I come across very frustrated clients (who are mostly medical professionals), who are mostly NOT interested in learning new things about the software or the technology. Most of them are already unhappy or stressed, and starts venting that frustration on tech support specialists.

If the problem is not resolved, they keep on calling every day or every hour asking for the updates, however if the issue is resolved they even don't care to give a call or email giving permission to close the case.

Happy Summer

2010-06-06T21:30:00.000-04:00

Welcoming Summer, after long bad weather of Massachusetts winter :)

First snow of 2009

2009-10-25T16:50:00.000-04:00

This year, snow showed little early, started in October. Generally, it starts during the Christmas time.

However, it doesn't make any difference to us. We always like snow, and we enjoyed taking the pictures of white puffs which was falling from the sky.

I am placing few of the nice shots here ... hope you will enjoy it ...

Love :)

ABBian friends

2008-07-11T10:22:00.001-04:00

Vinesh Kapadia

Friends call him "vin kaps" ... one of the lively and most wanted friend for all ... he is very charming, yet a very simple person, and knows how to be professional when the situation demands ...

He handles difficult situations very easily ... Nobody will every know what is going on in his head, till the time he says "Race is Over !! " .... I don't remember one thing he used to say, something like "Race Begins !" or something like that ...

When I remember the time spent together in the office, and very few short moments outside makes me feel happy that I have this very good friend with me ...

Tea and snacks at the cafeteria, or at the 'laari' outside the ABB campus, going to the main canteen for lunch during heavy rains (with my so called 'costliest' raincoat), getting his bike (so called superbike, Pulsar !!) to the garage for puncture repairing, ...... there is a long list of memories I have which I don't want to forget ever in my life ...

Yogin Joshi

This is Mr. Yogin Joshi, and we all call him "Maharaj". He is one of the most experienced guy and the one who has a very good sense of humor. He enjoys being with the R&D center and we enjoy being with him J. Whatever be the reason, he makes call for a parteee … and always leads the team for managing those types of events in the office ;).

My Work @ ABB

2007-07-18T03:55:00.000-04:00

Hello,

I worked with ABB Ltd., Baroda as Software Engineer. Software which I developed was for the Overcurrent Numerical Relays to be used for transformer and transmission line protection. The software tools I used for the project was Keil uVision 3 as IDE for project management, and C language for programming.

The hardware of the Relay consisted of ARM7 CPU based Philips' LPC 2138 Microcontroller, along with other peripherals such as Serial EEPROM (for storing configuration and other datalog information), supervisory circuit and watchdog, etc.

That's it, in brief, about my work at ABB.