REST over SOAP ??? - Raising the same old question

 As I am wandering allover the internet pursuing news about technologies and new ideas, I have found this article on InfoQ raising the same concerns on the same topic I've talked about in a previous blog entry. Have fun reading both :-).

New book about Apache OFBiz from PACKT Publishing

PACKT Publishing has published a new book about Apache Open For Business (Apache OFBiz). The book "Apache OFBiz Development: The Beginner's Tutorial" is targeting newcomers to Apache OFBiz who need to start developing with Apache OFBiz as soon as possible. Additionally the authors provide tips and tricks and they go through some deep details of how to tweak Apache OFBiz for better performance. Here are more details about the book cited from PACKT Publishing book's site:

Written by two leading OFBiz consultants, this hands-on tutorial guides newcomers through the basics of Apache Open For Business, walking them through the creation and customization of real-world business applications.

Apache OFBiz (Open For Business) is versatile open-source enterprise automation software that powers many small and medium sized businesses around the world. It incorporates a number of mature applications such as ERP, e-Commerce, MRP and CRM.

Built around an MVC framework with common logic, data model and process components, Ofbiz allows existing and bespoke applications to be added through a component-based architecture. Ofbiz includes a mature suite of enterprise applications that integrate and automate a company's many business needs.

This easy-to-read book will quickly enable newcomers to get hands-on with OFBiz. It provides an overview of the main modules and employs illustrated examples that show readers how to build exemplary business applications rapidly. Covering the main aspects of the Model-View-Controller framework, the reader will gain a working knowledge of Widgets, Entities, and The Service Engine. The authors also describe how to tweak OFBiz, and offer valuable performance and development tips. By navigating through the flow of OFBiz and providing insight into the thousands of examples that already exist in the core code they have made this book a must-have for anyone looking to get started with OFBiz.

Approach

This is an accessible step-by-step tutorial that introduces readers to the world of OFBiz through practical examples and clear explanations. It will guide you through the framework, teach you to tweak OFBiz and master widgets, entities, and permissions, and give you the knowledge to customize your own bespoke applications.

Who this book is written for

This book is for developers who want to build easily deployed and supported OFBiz applications. No previous knowledge of OFBiz is assumed, but readers should be comfortable in a Java development environment.

It a pleasure of mine to review such book and I will write other blog entries to record my review comments and findings later.
That's not all dear readers, PACKT Publishing has provided me a free chapter for my dear blog readers .

Defining non-empty XML elements

Yesterday I was working on an example XML document and its correspondent XML Schema for another blog entry I am still working on. I found myself in a problem when I tried to define an XML element with non-empty content. I googled and looked up the XML Schema Primer and specs. At last I found a great blog entry describing the same problem and its solution. The blog entry belongs to Neeraj Agrawal's blog. Here it is http://blogs.msdn.com/neerajag/archive/2005/08/12/450723.aspx . Have fun ;).

REST over SOAP ???

As I am subscribed to the mailing list of the W3C Web Services Activity Group, I was surprised this morning when I got a mail sent to the list talking about member submissions for a new set of proposed Web Services specifications related to Web Services and resources access. And I was more and more surprised when I skimmed over those submissions specially the first one in the list, which is the WS-Transfer, and when I read the abstract of that proposed specification I wondered why they are trying to imitate the REST style to be used over SOAP protocol. I am not blogging against or with those set of specifications, on the contrary I am so interested in what they can come out with that activity, this is why I wanted to share my opinion with you all, and as a heads up to more experienced people to take a look and give use their more accurate opinion about such activity and its relation to REST. Actually this is what I am going to do in the coming parts of this blog when I have time to read more into those set of specifications and follow up with the mailing list about the progress of that new activity. I would like to invite you all - people who are really interested like me - to do the same so we can share our visions and try to make things more clear to others not to have a mess of fighting specifications or technologies. I would like us to enlighten the way to others to know exactly what things are and what they can do with each one of it - I mean REST and those set of specifications .

JEE is not difficult

JEE is not difficult, at last someone said it loud. There is a video and a podcast interview with the Java champion Adam Bien, about JEE and the bleeding edge technologies of Java. In the video interview Adam Bien said that JEE is not difficult - as some people may claim - the difficulty comes from the nature of distributed and transactional applications development not from the JEE platform itself, in other words, even if you used another platform or framework you will face the same difficulty because that other framework will try to solve the same problems. He said that developers should learn about distributed, concurrent and transactional systems and architectures first before learning JEE, this way they will understand JEE more and it will be more easy to use.

Note: For part-2 of this great interview listen to this .

Installing an ODBC driver and datasource for MS SQL Server on Linux

In my work in IBM Egypt I have a T60 laptop with RHEL4 installed on it. During our normal work we use a tool which persists data in a MS SQL Server database through ODBC and RHEL4 is not equipped by default with an ODBC driver for MS SQL Server. The implementation of ODBC on RHEL4 is made by unixODBC and from that site I got the MS SQL Server driver which can work with unixODBC. This driver is not provided by unixODBC, it is provided by Easysoft and it is a trial version only. The driver can be downloaded from here [Download] and the installation instructions can be found here [Installation] . It is a straight forward procedure. Have fun ;) .

The beginning

Hi All
This entry I dedicate it to introduce the purpose of this blog. Tadabborat is an plural Arabic word which means the process of thinking or the results of that process, and also it can be used to describe an going through or trying an expriment. And as this blogger I made for sharing my experinces with the Computer Technology either through my offecial work in IBM Egypt or my personal experinces. So please shre those experinces with me and all comments are welcomed :D.