All in One Bookmarklet with a reusable javascript function

This bookmarklet is not for meant to bookmark the post’s on other’s blogs into your bookmarks account but it is for other’s to bookmark your post into their bookmarks account. Doesn’t that sound pretty exciting !!

This bookmarklet has been designed in such a manner that it can used for any blog aggregator or a bookmarks account and I have made a javascript function which can be reused if you want a bookmarking site which is not yet supported in this bookmarklet. I have managed it to support for 20 bookmark accounts till now. These include del.icio.us, digg, reddit, furl, google bookmarks, yahoo! myWeb, spurl, blinklist, newsvine, netscape, technorati, simpy, netvouz, rawsugar, blinkbits, ma.gnolia, blogmarks, feedmelinks, wists and shadows.

Ever seen Apache Tomcat alive?

The world is a pretty funny place to live in and day by day it becomes even more funnier. Who could have ever imagined that a day we would get to see Tomcat come alive.

Well its quite an irony to say that our good ol’ server came to life. For the non concerned it was here and very much alive indeed ! Now, don’t fret at what am I saying. Its’ all over the papers about the marriage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and the newly formed acronym “TomKat”

Amazing I would say, I have been enlightened somewhat by TomKat as I am seeing it alive in its humane form and as I work on it daily I see the holy interaction by which I get connected to Mr. Cruise and Ms. Holmes.

I was imagining the future of TomKat, the child they have brought together in this little world. Of course they have named the child but what if another child sees its day tomorrow. It could be a boy, it could be a girl.

If the child would be a boy I would suggest a name…. “Apache“, which seems very macho to me. So in short, it would be the birth of Apache Tomkat. Only if “Mr. Tom Cruise” would have been “Mr. Tom Server”, it would have been much prettier to see Apache Tomkat Server come alive, my most loved one!!

It would have been a family that would have lived happily ever after in their home sweet home. Guess what would you would have read on the sign board of their home?
TOMKAT_HOME!!

But hey, it could have been a baby girl and so the name would have to be somewhat cheesy and cute and more likeable, let’s say umm… something like.. yess.. Catalina. (Katie and Catalina go in rythm, don’t you think so?). And when she would grow up, daddy dearest would have bought her another home sweet home… CATALINA_HOME (no guesses for that, whatsoever).

Phew! what a wonderful world this is and it gets more wonderful when you see the abstract things which you sometimes fury upon shape up in reality. That reminds me of an old joke I have heard when I was a kid.

Why didn’t Brooke Shield wasn’t willing to marry Mr. James Bond?
Because she didn’t like the feeling of being called Ms. Brooke Bond.

Bookmarklet Combo - Del.icio.us and Digg

I have designed a bookmarklet combo for those having del.icio.us and digg accounts and want readers of their blogs to easily post the liked articles into their respective del.icio.us and digg accounts. It was a result of my necessity though !! This bookmarklet is unique in comparison to the ones which you must have come accross somewhere else on the net. It is immensely useful for those having free blog accounts like me with any blog provider and do not have the privelige to access the server side widgets or scripts.

Advantages :

1. It simultaneously generates links for both del.icio.us and digg accounts
2. The links have the del.icio.us and digg icons already embedded
3. Gives a prompt for easy copy pasting the links in your posts

Creating the bookmarklet:

1. In Firefox enable the bookmarks toolbar, if you haven’t, through view > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar
2. In the bookmarks toolbar right click and select “new bookmark“
3. Copy the entire text from here in the “location” field and type “del+digg” in the “name” field. Hit “OK“. Your bookmarklet is now ready to be used.

Using the bookmarklet :

1. Write a blog post and publish it (You have to first publish before using the bookmarklet)
2. Visit your post through the permalink provided for it.
3. Now click on the bookmarklet and copy the text from the prompt to your clipboard
4. Edit the post
5. Now simply paste the copied text in the HTML view for the post content at the end.
6. Save the changes made and you are done.

I have done the same steps as above for this post and you can the see the results here below. So now you can bookmark my post to your del.icio.us accounts or digg them right through this blog.
Happy digging !!

del.icio.us | digg it

Method is better than Field

It’s always beneficial when you venture out in the open source community for designing some module or api which could be reused apart from yourself by the rest of the community to, learn some designing guidelines to make it a fully flexible, and backward compatible api. I always wanted to know how interface based design worked, the way Sun Microsystems implement their api’s and Netbeans.org provides some nice fundamentals for doing so.

It is better to use methods (usually getters and setters) to access fields than to expose them directly. The first reason is that a call to a method can do a lot of additional things, but in contrast an access to a field can only read or write the value. When using getters one can for example do lazy initialization, synchronize the access or compose the value using some computation algorithm. Setters on the other hand allow checks for correctness of assigned value or notification of listeners when the change happens.

read more | digg story

Implementing RPC literal style web service in BEA Weblogic 8.1

Implementing an RPC Literal web service can be a tricky business in BEA Weblogic 8.1. By default the web service which you implement is generated in a RPC Encoded style. In order to create a RPC web service you would probably have to undergo a 2 way procedure as I did in order to get your web service working in RPC Literal style.

First open your web service file (with the extension .jws) in the design mode and open the property editor panel. Click on the header of the web service and change the soap-style of the web service from document to literal. Now run the .jws file in the test browser of Workshop and go to the overview tab. Click on the “complete WSDL” to get the WSDL generated for the web service. You would notice that the binding of the SOAP messages is now in the RPC style. But still the messages are communicated in the encoded format and not in the literal format and encoded is not a WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 compliant.

In order to make your web service compliant to Basic Profile you would have to change the style from encoded to literal. But there isn’t any option for it in the property editor panel provided in Workshop. In order to get a work around solution for this save the WSDL from the test browser to your local drive. Open the saved WSDL in a text editor and change all the instances of “encoded” to “literal” manually. Now go back to Workshop and import this WSDL in your web service project. In the Property Editor for your web service in Workshop choose file and click the 3 dots (…). It would provide you a prompt for associcating a custom WSDL to your web service. In this put the relative path of the imported WSDL starting from your web service project folder alongwith the extension. (eg. wsdl / foo.wsdl).

This wont affect in any way your current logic implemented in the .jws file and when you now run the file in test browser and access your web service it will be communicating in the RPC literal style.

Meebo’s new avataar

Meebo is finally out of its Alpha version and has made quite a lot of upgrades on its alpha version. Meebo, right from its launch has been consistently growing on its reputation as the famous web based yahoo messenger for most of the folks who wished they could chat from their office where messenger couldn’t be installed. Meebo has struck on its right course by supporting the 4 major e-messengers viz. Yahoo, AIM, MSN and JabberTalk. This integrated e-messenger which has been one of my favorites right from the moment I had used it now comes with a pop-out messenger feature which make its resemblance to the desktop Yahoo messenger including the drag and drop users into different groups. Its become more richer in its UI and also now supports chat logs much akin to Yahoo. I suppose meebo will be the most wanted messenger as its much easier to open up a web page, log into your favorite account and start chatting. Who would want to waste time in downloading and installing the desktop ones!!

Note: I am all the more pleased because wordpress comes with a built in widget for using meebo and you can even chat with me now right while reading my blog with the integration of my meebo in the sidebar to the right.

Choosing the right AJAX Framework

The most difficult part when it comes to start working in the AJAX environment is choosing the right framework or toolkit from the thousands available and moreover which fits the best in your list of requirements. Surely it is no simpler as making a cake but having a right approach for making a choice will help solve your purpose. As part of the competitaive market I have always chosen to get my working analogies close to the ones reigning in the commercial spectrum. It might be a dream of a zillions of developers like me to get an experience in the right kind of environment which might help to serve well in the near future rather than spending time in fancying about petty interests.

I had tried my getting hands on DWR toolkit by getahead as my works relies on Java but it wasnt at all helpful as I wasnt able to figure out how to integrate the usage of DWR with JSP / Servlets which left me with little hope of getting my web application AJAX enabled. This is the aspect which can be the most frustrating for a programmer who is left listless when he cannot produce the desired thing after having knowledge in it.

The right manner to do here would be choosing something which is neutral and not dedicated to a particular technology because learning DWR or GWT which are dependent on the JAVA technology wont help if you are keen to switch platforms in the near future. Its better to get abreast of the ones which are built in JAVAScript as it would serve purpose in any technology. I found a good review at here, although a bit brief for helping a developer to decide which framework will be better for working in AJAX. Another article out here states the usage of proprietary IDE’s to save time over HTML and Javascript coding but still shelling out more from your pockets for small purposes is not the right thing to do. I think making a move to DOJO would be more a practical approach but still I am trying out what would give me a more market value.