Swarm of XeBees

In one of the Android applications that I was creating the requirement was to have graphs and charts to present the data in a meaningful way to the user. With no direct charting API support in Android to address graphs and charts creation, I explored few other possible solutions.

This blog does not focus on comparing the available solutions but demonstrates the simple implementations using the approaches explored.

I considered three different ways to create charts in Android device

1. Google chart API
2. Achartengine
3. ChartDroid
Read more »

Filed under: Android, Blog, Tools

Please note that this blog assumes that the reader has basic knowledge of OSGi and how to create bundles. If you are a beginner you may like to read the Getting Started with OSGi.

Sometimes in an existing application you may want to use the capabilities of the OSGi framework. For example, in my recent project we had a already built, live web application. A module of the application was offering some services and user could choose from the available list. Each service in this module was in turn a separate product with its own pricing and license. As part of enhancement we had following requirements

1. When a client procures this application (product) he should have the flexibility to procure some or all associated services.
2. If the client has ready made implementation of some related services which he wants to incorporate in the application then that integration should be possible with minimum effort. Read more »

Filed under: Java

It is highly likely that if you have at any point of your development cycle fiddled around with the feature called - wmode, then you have landed into some trouble or the other.

Brief introduction to wmode:

'wmode' stands for Windowless Mode. The wmode parameter is available in the object/embed tags used to place the Flash swf (compiled application) on stage: Read more »

Filed under: Flash, Flex

In web applications we have functionalities like auto suggestions , rating objects, adding to favourites etc which repeat themselves in an application and across applications. So it demands to think about implementing a generic way of rating and adding to user favourites etc and follow DRY principle. Recently in one of my Grails projects we implemented these functionalities in a generic way so that they are reusable and easy to use. Here in this blog, specifically lets look at how we can implement generic auto suggest functionality in Grails. This idea can be extended for other functionalities as well.

Jquery already provides auto suggest functionality. The question here is making functionality generic so that next time we have to use that its a breeze to use. Lets create a tag which can add the necessary jquery code for a text field to have auto suggest capability. Read more »

Filed under: Grails, Groovy, jQuery

I have been working on Grails recently and am amazed with the productivity gains it gives. Grails is great for giving you a kick-start, it uses convention over configuration and gives you things such as ORM, transaction management, dependency injection among others, without you writing a single line of configuration.

I decided to mimic the Grails behavior in a Spring + Hibernate application. To stay on the cutting edge I decided to use Hibernate 3.5 and Spring 3, to top it up I decided to use Hibernate as an implementation of JPA 2. Recently released, Hibernate 3.5 combines the Hibernate Annotations and the Hibernate Entity-Manager projects into Hibernate-Core, so basically its just one jar which provides the full implementation of JPA 2. For advantages of using JPA 2 see the excellent presentation here - http://jazoon.com/portals/0/Content/ArchivWebsite/jazoon.com/jazoon09/download/presentations/8461.pdf
Read more »

Filed under: Hibernate, JPA, Spring