Since a week I am using Windows 7 and until now, I am really satisfied. Windows 7 feels much faster than Vista and it’s something like a fine tuned Vista.

Here you can read the most notable new features:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

For further information, you will find here a good walkthrough:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/the-geek-blog/what-you-should-expect-from-the-windows-7-beta/

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Today, I encountered a very helpful feature in Eclipse. When I am debugging code, I sometimes want to know, what’s the result of a method is. If the result it’s not assigned to a variable, it gets complicated. Take a look to this example: what is the result of add(17,19)?

public class DemoApplication {
 
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        DemoApplication calc = new DemoApplication();
        System.out.println(calc.divide(calc.add(17, 19), 2));
    }
 
    public int add(int i, int j) {
        return i + j;
    }
 
    public int divide(int i, int j) {
        return i / j;
    }
}

In earlier times, I stepped one step further to get into the method divide. Then I got the result of add(17,19) in my parameter.

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There was a time, OSGi was for me just an “not understandable” abbreviation. Wiki told me, that OSGi is a framework for a dynamic component model. Huh? Is it just a specification or is it an implementation? Didn’t understand it all.

I started about two months with working a little bit with OSGi. I want to write here these parts, which were unclear for me at the beginning. It should be an introduction for everyone, who has never heard about OSGi.

Okay, let’s start.

The setup of OSGi is something like EJB.

1. EJB has a specification from Sun.
2. OSGi has specification from the OSGi Alliance.
3. EJB need’s an application server as a platform (Weblogic, Glassfish, Websphere, JBoss, and so on) to run an “EJB” application.
4. OSGi need’s also a platform to run “OSGi” application. Like an application server, which is implementing the EJB contract, an OSGi platform implements the OSGi framework specification. Currently, there some OSGi implementation out there. The most known are Equinox, Apache Felix or Knopflerfish.

Okay, now, we know, how OSGi is built. But what does it? In one sentence, it is something like a JVM with some extra features. OSGi extends the JVM and a Java program is running on that OSGi Platform instead of running directly on the JVM. OSGi offers some advantages, which I will mention shortly.

 
(Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSGi)

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TeamViewer – eine simple Software für Fernwartung – Desktop Sharing und Remote Support über das Internet.

Weitere Infos: http://www.teamviewer.com/

Unter folgendem Link kann die QuickSupport-Applikation gedownloadet werden – ohne Installation kann anschliessend die heruntergeladene Datei gestartet werden. Sobald mir die ID des Rechners bekannt ist, kann ich via vordefiniertem Passwort auf das System zugreifen.

Zum Download der QuickSupport-Applikation: TeamViewerQS_FabioCortesi

Today, I passed the SCBCD exam! Here some information’s, which helped me to pass the exam:

• Study Guide
  http://java.boot.by/scbcd5-guide/
• Free Training Test:
  http://www.sun.com/training/certification/assessment/

I also wrote some “Factsheets”, which I used to sum up all topics. Besides Factsheet 0, they can also be used as an assistance on the daily EJB 3.0 work.

• Factsheet 0 – some stuff, which is only for the SCBCD relevant
• Factsheet 1 – Stateful and Stateless Session Beans
• Factsheet 2 – MDBs and JMS
• Factsheet 3 – Transactions and Security
• Factsheet 4 – JPA, part 1
• Factsheet 5 – JPA, part 2

If you find any mistakes in the Factsheet, just let me know.

If you want to have a good introduction to the topic EJB 3.0, I can recommend you the book “Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0”. This book can be freely downloaded from TheServerSide.com.

I am currently preparing for the SCBCD 5.0 and in my opinion, it’s better than the book “Enterprise JavaBans 3.0” from O’Reilly. “Mastering EJB 3.0” covers many topics about Java EE much deeper. For example, it mentions poison messages or clustering as  has a very useful overview of all possible annotations in the appendix.

Only the part JPA is not covered as deep as in the O’Reilly book. EmbededId is only mentioned, but not described in detail.

In Eclipse, there is a nice feature to clean up Java code. First, you can change the Clean Up profile (Window – Preferences) and define, how you want the code should look like.

There are interesting clean ups like “Remove unnecessary casts” or to add missing Annotations like “@Override”.

After creating your profile, simply right click to the project and choose Source – Clean up.

Nice feature. If you want to know more about this feature, you will find here more information’s.

http://geekhero.iovene.com/2008/09/01/start-menu/

The standard way to read out the battery life on a Windows Mobile smartphone is a small icon on the top, which has 3 indicators to show, how the battery life is:

This is not really a helpful information. Today, I found a small, simple but incredible program (open source), which is the best battery program I’ve seen so far. It’s called Batti and it’s hosted on Google (http://code.google.com/p/batti/).

This program adds a 2-3 pixel deep line at the top. The line is coloured and has a gradient. With this line, I see know always, how many battery I’ve left. This is just nice.

There are many UML tools out there. But if I want to draw just a simple UML 2.0 diagram without having a heavy model as background, I use Visio. Why? Because it’s just simple.

Unfortunately, the built in UML templates are not quite good. But fortunately, you can download UML 2.0 stencils for Visio from the internet. These stencil are perfectly UML 2.0 conform and helps to draw simple UML diagrams.