But the fact is, the business world runs on batch. Your bank and 401k statements are all generated via batch processes. The e-mails you receive from your favorite stores with coupons in them? Probably sent via batch processes. Even the order in which the repair guy comes to your house to fix your laundry machine is determined by batch processing. In a time when we get our news from Twitter, Goo…
My first experience with a computer was at the age of 15 at a technical high school in the Netherlands where I was introduced to the Sinclair ZX-81. It was a little computer with only 16 KB of memory, but it was amazing and I started programming on it from day one. In 1981 when the hardware and software revolution started, I moved on to an Exidy Sourcer and the Commodore 64, soon followed by my…
Linux has come a long way in the last few years. From relatively humble beginnings, Linux now powers a growing number of Fortune 500 companies. Everything from your cell phone right on up to the largest supercomputing clusters are now built using the Linux kernel and the software distributions built around it. But what really is Linux? What makes it different from any other UNIX-like Operating …
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MRDS) introduces a new way to program robots in the Windows environment. It attempts to bring some order to the chaos that has marred the field of robotics, at least as far as Windows - based applications are concerned. If it meets its objectives, you will see the emergence of a common standard for robotics software in the next few years. This is potentially…
The multicore revolution is at hand. Parallel processing is no longer the exclusive domain of supercomputers or clusters. The entry - level server and even the basic developer workstation have the capacity for hardware - and software - level parallel processing. The question is what does this mean for the software developer and what impact will it have on the software development process? In t…
The life of the Oracle database programmer is in a state of flux. Oracle Corporation is advancing rapidly into the middle and presentation tiers of the enterprise application with an array of new products and technologies. Perhaps more significantly, with the launch of Oracle 8i, more and more enterprise features are being moved into the database, bringing with them a wealth of new programming …
Professional Oracle Programming is intended for application developers who use Oracle as their database. As such, this book does not devote much space to topics which are primarily of interest to database administrators, such as backup and recovery. Most importantly, this book is designed to help a programmer understand the database issues that can have a direct impact on the operation and perf…
RECENT YEARS HAVE SEEN DRAMATIC EXPANSION in the use of mobile computing and social media on the Internet. Organizations show increasing interest in web analytics, and will soon comprehend the importance of engagement and experience management and monitoring. With the increasing value of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the nature of the web as a crucial channel for customer service, sales,…
XMPP Powers a w Ide range of applications including instant messaging, multi-user chat, voice and video conferencing, collaborative spaces, real-time gaming, data synchronization, and even search. Although XMPP started its life as an open, standardized alternative to proprietary instant messaging systems like ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger, it has matured into an extremely robust protocol for al…
This course reader has had an interesting evolutionary history that in some ways mirrors the genesis of the C++ language itself. Just as Bjarne Stroustup’s first version of C++ was implemented on top of a C language base, this reader began its life as Eric Roberts’s textbook Programming Abstractions in C (Addison-Wesley, 1998). In 2002-03, Julie Zelenski updated it for use with the C++ pr…
This book is about ASP.NET AJAX (known in prerelease versions as “Atlas”), a collection of new Microsoft technologies that enables web developers—particularly ASP.NET 2.0 developers—to more easily create web sites with pages that use Ajax. Ajax-style pages provide a richer user interface. Such a page is also more responsive because it can respond immediately to users, and can interact m…
The web application landscape is vast and varied. Microsoft’s ASP.NET Framework— built on top of the mature and robust .NET Framework—is one of the most trusted platforms in the industry. ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft’s latest addition to the world of ASP.NET providing web developers with an alternative development approach that helps you build web applications with ease. The main goal of th…
On top of the .NET infrastructure sits a high-level abstraction of the operating system, designed to facilitate object-oriented software development. This top tier includes ASP.NET and Windows applications. ASP.NET (with AJAX) is one of the world’s most popular ways to create web applications. Although C# is a standalone programming language, it is my premise that the vast majority of the rea…
Microsoft unveiled the .NET Framework in 2000, and in the decade that followed, it became an extremely popular choice for developing software for Windows. While .NET supports many programming languages, it is most strongly associated with the language designed specifically for the platform: C#. C# has grown considerably since its launch. Each new version enabled new program- ming techniques—C…
The C# programming language (pronounced ‘see sharp’) can be used for many kinds of applications, including web sites, desktop applications, games, phone apps, and command line utilities. C# has been center stage for Windows developers for about a decade now, so when Microsoft announced that Windows 8 would introduce a new1 style of application, optimized for touch-based interaction on table…
Clojure is a dynamic programming language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), with a compelling combination of features: • Clojure is elegant. Clojure’s clean, careful design lets you write programs that get right to the essence of a problem, without a lot of clutter and ceremony. • Clojure is Lisp reloaded. Clojure has the power inherent in Lisp but is not constrained by the history of…
We will begin this chapter by briefly exploring the features that make Clojure compelling: • Elegant, expressive code • Lisp’s powerful notion that code is data • Easy, fast Java interoperability • A sequence library that unifies all kinds of data • Functional programming to encourage reusable, correct code • Concurrency without the pain of manual lock management This list of …
You’ve promised the boss that you’ll turn the new powerful multicore pro- cessor into a blazingly fast workhorse for your application. You’d love to exploit the power on hand and beat your competition with a faster, responsive application that provides great user experience. Those gleeful thoughts are interrupted by your colleague’s cry for help—he’s run into yet another syn- chroni…
Developing Drupal code has always been interesting and fun because the APIs change a lot between Drupal releases. Other CMS platforms have adopted a more static API approach, resulting in a much slower innovations. One such Drupal innovation has been the entity paradigm that simplified data manipulation. This enabled developers to build more powerful solutions and liberate their brains to remem…