Java LinkBlog

Java is a language of choice for millions of developers worldwide. In a series of articles I will show simple tips and techniques which make Java extremely powerful and yet simple to use. Today's article is about using regex, a pattern matcher incorporated in Java (from 1.4 I believe).

Here is a sample code (line in bold) to count the number of words in any amount of text. The sample program counts the number of words in the argument to the program. The argument must be quoted to ensure separate words are clubbed together in a single sentence by the operating system.

public class WordCount {
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    System.out.println(java.util.regex.Pattern.compile("[\\w]+").split(args[0].trim()).length);
  }
}

Sun this week will release two servers in its identity management line designed to help corporate users jumpstart federation projects with partners and to aid service providers such as telcos in provisioning users on a massive scale.

The new software offerings are Sun Java System Federation Manager, a server that will help companies hook partners into their secure infrastructure, and a Service Provider Edition of Sun's Identity Manager software for extranet provisioning that includes self-registration, the ability to share account information and auditing tools.

[via Simple Thoughts]

There are long term costs and hassles, and occasional cleanup jobs. I have always enjoyed Scott McNealy's knack for analogies, and this one is really right on. As I have stated in previous occasions, the fact that it's open source, thus free does not automatically make it good. I'm not going to rehash on all the arguments about open source, but focus specifically on this comment from McNealy."

To all blogger, this is an interesting blog post on Lifecycle of blogger. via Kiruba. I think every blogger should read this.

Wow. Today I was adventurous, and I said to myself: "Let's try birt, even that there is no much tutorials and samples available - I only found these screencasts, but I haven't seen them yet.

I downloaded all the packages, and first of all tried to launch the demos, but with few results. Well, not at all, the charting demos goes fine. They throw several exceptions, but most of the samples worked. Here are some screenshots (click on them to enlarge!).

Next, I started Eclipse. I switched to Report perspective, and created a new report. That's good, you can visually design your reports. There is a component palette and a properties view to configure your components. So I added a simple text label.

Next, I went to the data menu and configured a JDBC source. That's great. You can browse through your tables, columns, filter the data, create computable columns, use javascript functions. It seems very powerful! I created a database set with a tabla that was in the database sample (embedded derby database). There is a Data Explorer view, that allow you to see those generated datasets.

But now comes the best part. I created a data widget on the report, and then I drag my database and dropped it directly on the widget. And Birt automatically updated the data and created a grid with the database contents!

And to end, I lanuched a preview in PDF, and BIRT automatically opened acrobat. Well, the preview isn't very beautiful, but I didn't care about formatting. It's only a test.

And all these tasks only took about two minutes! Finally, it seems that there is a very productive Open Soruce reporting environment in Java. I don't agree with the BIRT name, because I don't see business intelligence features anyway, but I have to recognize that it seems a powerful and easy engine.

Struts-Layout tag library 1.1 Released

Struts-Layout is a tag library for Struts which provides skinnable tags that display panels, input fields, form modes,tables, pagers, treeviews, sortable lists, popups, calendars, etc.

Read on http://struts.application-servers.com/