Swarm of XeBees

XML Parsing on iPhone/iPad - Is that something your current sprint revolves around? Well if it does, this blog might help you. While parsing XMLs on device, we need to look into factors like performance and memory consumption. While googling, i found couple of XML parsing APIs including Apple's native NSXMLParser. NSXMLParser looked like this is all i need. But my requirement was also to 'write' xmls making sure that i do not compromise on performance and memory. On googling more i found couple of APIs which can provide me XML writing capabilities. I chose to explore libXML2 and KissXML.

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Filed under: Blog, cocoa touch, iPhone, Objective C

During my last project, I was given a task to choose one of the best tools for performance testing among open source tools available in market.  After evaluation and little research I came up with JMeter. I have thought of writing a small blog for those who are new to performance testing and are confused of which tool to use. It’s pretty common that whenever we start looking out for any tool we keep few things in our mind that it should record and playback, allow easy parametrization, generate detailed reports, should be able to simulate a heavy load on a server, analyze overall performance, etc . JMeter would not disappoint you in that sense because it has more than above mentioned features. There are important features of JMeter which have been listed down in this blog. Let's start from first thing which is its installation. It is very easy to install which requires only Java set up on your machine since it is a Java based tool.

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Filed under: Agile Testing, Performance, performance testing

As US senators mull over the SOPA(Stopping Online Piracy Act) and PIPA(Protecting Intellectual Property Act) bills, the world stands witness to a historic moment. Almost all big IT companies like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Mozilla, Godaddy, etc are speaking in one unanimous voice against SOPA and Internet Censorship. The draconian provisions of SOPA/PIPA are bound to create the deathbed of internet freedom and free speech, and if a careful reading of the proposed legislation is done, one realizes that it is likely to have the same impact on India.
In the disguise of protecting copyrights and stopping piracy its completely clear that the US government is trying to assert its control over the free flow of information on internet  which is some time uncomfortable to them. Giving power to Attorney General to direct search engines like Google to filter particular search results, or asking an ISP to manipulate their DNS  to filter specific IP addresses just at whims and fancies of government all the threatening to accessing information. Read more »

Filed under: Blog, e-Commerce, General, Security

Xebia India takes great pride in paying high amount of attention to writing QUALITY code. “Doing it Right” is almost a religion here. For us the buck does not stop at showing a demo of working software to the client, but also ensuring the underlying code is written in the best possible manner using best known software development practices.

To achieve this, it needs a different kind of a culture in the organization that encourages people to go after Quality. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Most developers at Xebia will agree that we have a slightly different approach to work (Some call it our culture). A lot of developers joining Xebia India experience these differences first hand & in due course of time, unknowingly they end up picking up these practices themselves. In this article, I list below some changes & practices that I have picked up in the last 2 odd years of my relatively short stay here that helped me be a better programmer.

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Filed under: Extreme Programming, Uncategorized

I use Spring Roo to create sample applications for me. Spring Roo uses JSR 303 (Bean Validation) to validate the entities for invalid values. Today I created a very simple application -- a simple PasteBin clone where you can anonymously create post or share text snippets. I wanted to validate that field post should not contain any Unsafe HTML content in it. So I decided to use Hibernate SafeHtml validator to validate the input field. This post will first show you how to use @SafeHtml validator in an Spring application and then we will deploy the application to OpenShift Express. Read more »

Filed under: Cloud, openshift