NGO – Great Foundation…..I am a part of it

This Post is divided in to 3 Categories:

Sad part:

I used to spend my weekend either shopping or meeting up with my friends at CCD.

While doing this I used to wonder "what am I doing". Some where back of my mind I had a thought running in the background as to - can't I be more productive or do some thing which will help the society.

Thought Process:

By something I mean what I used to do in my college when I was a part NSS.

We used to visit old age home and spend time with the aged people whose kids

have left them at the time when they are looking out for emotional & financial support from them.

At times we also visited Preet Mandir where we interacted with the kids who don't even know who their parents are.

We visit places like malls, Theaters, pubs & restaurants.

But have we ever visited these places which are into darkness & sadness & tried to get a ray of hope or smiles on their faces.

Mission:

Today I am feeling very fortunate to be a part of NGO – Great Foundation.

Thanks to Jaslene – one of my good friends who met me after 2 year.

She offered me an opportunity to be a part of NGO.

Last Saturday we all committed members meet up with Dr. (Ms) Viney Kirpal the founder of this NGO where she briefed us as to what we will be doing as a member.

We had a round of introduction & a short presentation from every one on there area of interest.

My next post will brief you'll about the goal, mission & activities that will be undertaken by the Great Foundation team.

The meeting was winded up by taking an oath………committing to the code of conduct which will be followed by all of us.

My weekends will be really fruitful – giving me a feeling that I am doing some thing good & giving back some thing to this society.

Trust me it makes you proud of your self when you see your services rendered; help others to make their life more meaningful.

BEA Product Training ( 2nd Week )

Following is the week 21^st to 25^th Jan 2008 Presentation Schedule:

Date	Day	Presenter	Topic	Time
21st Jan	Monday	Mr Vijay	Ant	11.30 am
21st Jan	Monday	Mr Shaik	JavaMail	6.30 pm
22nd Jan	Tuesday	Mr Kamaleshwar	Multicast Protocol	11.30 am
22nd Jan	Tuesday	Mr Sai Krishna	Demo on CVS	5.30 pm
22nd Jan	Tuesday	Mr Sandeep	Demo on Log4j	6.30 pm
23rd Jan	Wednesday	Mr Sam Prabhu	JRockit	6.30 pm
24th Jan	Thursday	Miss Deepika	JASS	6.30 pm
25th Jan	Friday	Mr Balaji	Encryption & Decryption	11.00am
25th Jan	Friday	Miss Jayshree	Demo on ANT	6.30 pm

Session Summary - DBVisualizer

Mr Sandeep the Presenter for DBVisualizer session kept it as simple as he could, as a result the audiences were left with no doubt or question.

He started with introduction:

DbVisualizer is a database tool useful by developers and database administrators to aid maintaining their databases. The tool supports all major operating systems & a wide range of databases.

DbVisualizer is available in two editions:

• DbVisualizer Free - for commercial and non commercial use.

• DbVisualizer Personal - Extends the Free edition with a collection of productivity features (Auto Completion support in the SQL editors

In BEA Weblogic the DBVisualizer is a package which gets installed when we install Weblogic.

To start DBVisualizer we need to see that the Database server is running.

Basic Requirement :

Java 1.4 or above , JDBC 2.0 & database specific Drivers

He showed a Demo on :

How to start the database

View Schemas, tables & records

Add records & delete records

In short supports all SQL & PLSQL Queries।

Best part of DBVisualizer:

• Free
• GUI mode to work with database
• Can work on multiple databases at a time
• Can view relationships among tables
• Can work with functions & procedures
• Generate Reports.

What made me unhappy is that – DBVisualizer is no more supported in WEBlogic 9.x onwards.

As DBVisualizer 6.x is getting released & coming up with more add-on features।
I don’t understand what made BEA exclude it in 9.x version.

Session Summary - Log4J

Having being worked on Log4J attending Mr Vamshi's presentation on Log4J helped me in understanding Log4J utility

Log4J

An open source logging tool developed by Apache. A set of APIs that allows developers to write log statements in their code and configure them externally, using properties files.

Three Aspects of Log4j: Logger, Appender, Layout

He told us that each class in your application can have an individual logger or a common logger. log4j provides a root looger that all of your loggers will inherit from.

To create a logger we need to call a static method of the Logger class that will retrieve a logger for you by name.

When the question came from the audiences as to when what is an Appender?

He smartly answered saying : - Loggers need to know where to send your requests for logging. This is where the appenders come into picture. log4j supports writing to files (FileAppender), to console (ConsoleAppender), to databases (JDBCAppender), to NT event logs (NTEventLogAppender), to SMTP servers (SMTPAppender), to remote servers (SocketAppender), and others.

Loggers follow a parent-child relationship pattern.

There are five levels of logging in log4j:

• DEBUG – fine grained informational events that are most useful to debug an application.
• INFO - messages that highlight the progress of the application
• WARN - potentially harmful situations
• ERROR - error events that might still allow the application to continue running
• FATAL - very severe error events

This became clear when he executed a program just to show how log4j works.

import org.apache.log4j.Logger; import org.apache.log4j.BasicConfigurator; public class HelloWorld { static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger("HelloWorld"); static public void main(String[] args) { BasicConfigurator.configure(); logger.debug("Hello World."); } }

In short log4j prints messages on the console. Very useful for a programmer like me – just to know how things are working on the server and also helps in troubleshooting the errors & silly mistakes :)

He concluded with the slide – Things not to be logged

• Misleading information
• Username & password
• Logging for each request – will reduce the performance

Some important tips given by him:

> Never neglect warning logs

> Separate Request & Transaction log files

Session Summary - Ajax For Beginners

The Session was delivered by Mr. Kalyan.

He started of by briefing us on the basic difference between MVC Model 1 & MVC Model 2.

MVC1, is architecture which does not include struts frame work in it, whereas in case of MVC2 it includes struts frame work.

Apart from that

In MVC1 architecture only one controller is responsible for both business logic and to send control for the other model components.
Where as in MVC2 the business logic is separated from control components. And only one controller is responsible for taking all the requests and responses. And Servlet acts as a controller.

He introduced us to Ajax by saying “Ajax is a catchy name for a type of programming made popular in 2005 by Google. Ajax loosely stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML, but that just sounds like techno jargon to many people.”

The First Question raised by him to the audiens was

Difference between Asynchronous & Synchronous ?

Smart Answer was the difference is equivalent to the difference between Hotmail & Gmail.

One thing that I liked was when he said that if you grade your self

In HTML 2/5 & Javascript 3/5 & in CSS 1/5 you can play with Ajax.

After building the Background for Ajax he discussed some core topics of Ajay.

• Various Browser supports to Ajax
• Page update without using Javascript, PHP and XML but with XMLHttpRequest object
• A brief tour of the important principles of Ajax
• How does Ajax work & gave us an real time scenario where he used Ajax
• How to know whether the browser supports XMLHttpRequest object
• Properties of the XMLHttpRequest (onreadystatechange, readyState, responseText)
• An example He designed an JSP page having only one textbox and as soon as the user will enter the number immediately the tables will be displayed on the same page।

He concluded by saying that Ajax is in demand & has many Advantages but use it only where required.

He also entertained some Questions from the audions.

Q. Advantages of AJAX.

Q. Where to use AJAX & where not to use AJAX

Q. What are the limitation of AJAX

Q. Is DOJO a part of AJAX

In Short:

For me this session was useful as it got my basics clear on as to what is AJAX & at the end of the day when I walked out of the training room a sense of satisfaction that probably I can go through it more in detail & implement it in some of my application & no more AJAX sound scary to me……….:)

BEA Product Training ( 1st Week )

Following is the week ( 15^th to 18^th Jan 2008) Presentation Schedule:

Date	Day	Presenter	Topic	Time
15 – 01 - 08	Tuesday	Mr. Kalyan	Ajax	6.30pm
17 – 01 - 08	Thursday	Mr. Vamshi	Log 4 J	6.30pm
18 – 01 - 08	Friday	Mr. Kalyan	Win CVS	11.00am
18 – 01 - 08	Friday	Mr. Sandeep	DBVisualizer	6.30pm

Coming Soon - Summary of the presentations will be posted.

Special Thanks to Tara Lodh:

This is on behalf of every one I would like to thank you for the excellent training provide to us on BEA Weblogic & also for going out of your way and arranging those extra sessions on various technologies.