Thursday, May 14, 2009

Titan Class goes into production



She's finished, well as finished as they always are - which of course means that they are never finished.

I am referring to my work over the past few months which is really just a concerted effort building on years of work. I'm now in a position to track vehicles, containers, you name it.

From a software development perspective there are many things that I'm happy about. I've previously discussed jQuery which really has eased the AJAX programming. From a backend perspective I am using the amazingly functional, scalable and distributable Apache Camel (also discussed in other posts).

One thing with the client-side that has really impressed me is the Google Earth plugin. I hope that you agree that it works very, very well (a link to the site is provided at the end of this post). Some of our potential customers will require their own maps along with their own projections and Google Earth will not handle that (Antarctica for example). However for many scenarios, Google Earth will be great.

Incidentally where we will be required to use specialised maps with funky projections, I have written a Java applet using JavaFX. The applet supports many types of map projections and is based on the work of Proj.4 and friends.

Here is a quick list of the OSS projects I utilised (and even contributed back to in some cases!):

Apache ActiveMQ,
Apache Camel
Apache Directory Server
Apache MINA
Apache Tomcat
Apache Web Server
GEOS
Eclipse
Hibernate
Hibernate Spatial
jQuery
JSON
JTS
JUnit
Linux
Log4J
Maven
PostgresQL
PostGIS
Proj.4
Spring
Subversion
xmlbeans


Go OSS!

Feel free to visit the tracking site and play around with the demo data.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Guice

I found this video introduction on Guice very good. Guice is another Inversion of Control (IoC) container, much like Spring IoC, but with the advantage of coming later. What's particularly interesting about Guice is that it largely forms the basis of JSR-299's IoC.

I'm a big user of Spring IoC and frankly don't have a problem with it. However I can see that Guice could save me some wiring code and, therefore, potentially bugs (not that there are bugs in my code!). I might well consider using Guice for future projects. The outcome of JSR-299 will weigh in heavily on this decision though as I like my code to be as standards-compliant as possible.

One thing that I am comfortable about with Spring though (vs Guice) is that my beans have no knowledge of being injectable; they simply are by being bean conforming. With Guice you must declare what is potentially injectable. I do like the loose coupling between my bean code and the IoC that Spring provides, yet I can see that Guice, by declaring what is injectable, can save some of the wiring code.

I'll guess I'll just have to give Guice a whirl to find out.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

jQuery

I have just completed an Ajax application that uses the jQuery framework. jQuery's promise is to "write less, do more", which I suppose is the objective of most frameworks. Does jQuery deliver though? In a nutshell, yes.


Writing an Ajax application is hard; not because of network paradigms or Javascript, but because each browser brings with it some quirk. Catering for all of these browsers is simply time consuming so, by hard, I really mean time consuming. It is therefore hard to knock out an Ajax application quickly given the shear amount of cross-browser testing that has to be performed.


jQuery does not eliminate cross-browser issues but it certainly minimises them. With my application, the only real short-fall I found with jQuery was its lack of support for dealing with XML documents (not XHTML). This was primarily due to the lack of XML namespace support and I think that this is an area that jQuery should focus on. However it is important to note that the real culprit for the lack of namespace support is Internet Explorer. In essence there is no support for namespaces with IE. I find this extremely difficult to understand... ok, IE 6 with no namespaces is understandable to a degree, but version 7, and worse even version 8 do not support XML namespaces. Microsoft virtually invented SOAP given their backing of it, yet their browsers can't parse SOAP documents accurately (you can ignore the namespaces, but then you ignore the value of namespaces of course).


Here are some other things I found myself having to cater for explicitely...


iframe shims
iframes shims are provided by a jQuery plugin named bgiframe and you can set up jQuery's dialog so that it uses an iframe. Unfortunately IE6 is not the only browser that requires iframes for the purposes of overlaying html objects on OS rendered content (buttons, applets, objects etc.). I therefore found myself having to roll my own. Here's a snippet of what needs to be done in the case of displaying a login dialog when some label is clicked:



var loginDialog = $("#loginDialog").dialog({
autoOpen: false,
close: function() {
loginDialogIframeShim.css("visibility", "hidden");
},
...
});
var loginDialogIframeShim = $(document.createElement("iframe"));
loginDialogIframeShim.attr("frameborder", "0");
loginDialogIframeShim.attr("scrolling", "no");
loginDialogIframeShim.attr("allowtransparency", "false");
loginDialogIframeShim.css("position", "absolute");
loginDialogIframeShim.css("visibility", "hidden");
$("body").append(loginDialogIframeShim);

var login = $("#login").click(function() {
loginDialog.dialog('open');
var loginDialogParent = loginDialog.parent();
var offset = loginDialogParent.offset();
loginDialogIframeShim.css("left", offset.left + "px");
loginDialogIframeShim.css("top", offset.top + "px");
loginDialogIframeShim.css("width", loginDialogParent.outerWidth() + "px");
loginDialogIframeShim.css("height", loginDialogParent.outerHeight() + "px");
loginDialogIframeShim.css("visibility", "visible");
...
The above works well for Windows FF and IE 7 and Mac OS FF and Safari. I haven't tested other browsers.

Datepicker ranges
It would be great to see the Datepicker (which is really great as is) enhanced to support a date range selection.

XmlHttpRequest
While jQuery does a lot to abstract away the peculiarities of browsers with XmlHttpRequest, I did find myself having to encode credentials for Safari. This is because Safari likes to send credentials as part of the URL initially (if that fails then it tries the conventional way using an authorisation header - I do not understand why).


if($.browser.safari) {
requestUsername = encodeURIComponent(requestUsername);
requestPassword = encodeURIComponent(requestPassword);
}

$.ajax({
url: "...",
dataType: "xml",
username: requestUsername,
password: requestPassword,
...


Date/time utilities
In general terms I found these lacking. Quite often with XML one has to convert from ISO8601 to a Javascript date and back. I needed to provide these functions:



function formatISO8601Time(time) {
var timeStr;

var year = time.getUTCFullYear();
timeStr = "" + year;
timeStr += "-";

var month = time.getUTCMonth() + 1;
if (month < 10) {
month = "0" + month;
} else {
month = "" + month;
}
timeStr += month;
timeStr += "-";

var day = time.getUTCDate();
if (day < 10) {
day = "0" + day;
} else {
day = "" + day;
}
timeStr += day;
timeStr += "T";

var hour = time.getUTCHours();
if (hour < 10) {
hour = "0" + hour;
} else {
hour = "" + hour;
}
timeStr += hour;
timeStr += ":";

var minute = time.getUTCMinutes();
if (minute < 10) {
minute = "0" + minute;
} else {
minute = "" + minute;
}
timeStr += minute;
timeStr += ":";

var second = time.getUTCSeconds();
if (second < 10) {
second = "0" + second;
} else {
second = "" + second;
}
timeStr += second;
timeStr += "Z";

return timeStr;
}

function parseISO8601Time(time) {
var date = new Date();

var year = time.substr(0, 4);
var month = time.substr(5, 2);
var day = time.substr(8, 2);
var hour = time.substr(11, 2);
var minute = time.substr(14, 2);
var second = time.substr(17, 2);

date.setUTCFullYear(year);
date.setUTCMonth(month - 1);
date.setUTCDate(day);
date.setUTCHours(hour);
date.setUTCMinutes(minute);
date.setUTCSeconds(second);
date.setUTCMilliseconds(999);

return date;
}

function formatLocalHoursAndMinutes(time) {
var timeStr;

var hour = time.getHours();
if (hour < 10) {
hour = "0" + hour;
} else {
hour = "" + hour;
}
timeStr = hour;

var minute = time.getMinutes();
if (minute < 10) {
minute = "0" + minute;
} else {
minute = "" + minute;
}
timeStr += minute;

timeStr += "h";

return timeStr;
}


XML Namespace utilities


As mentioned before there is very little support namespaces so here's what I had to roll:



function getElementsByTagNameNS(node, namespaceURI, localName) {
var nodeList;

if (node.getElementsByTagNameNS != null) {
nodeList = node.getElementsByTagNameNS(namespaceURI, localName);
} else {
nodeList = node.getElementsByTagName(resolveNS(namespaceURI) + localName);
}

return nodeList;
}

function getAttributeNS(node, namespaceURI, localName) {
var attrVal;

if (node.getAttributeNS != null) {
attrVal = node.getAttributeNS(namespaceURI, localName);
} else {
attrVal = node.getAttribute(resolveNS(namespaceURI) + localName);
}

return attrVal;
}

function isNode(node, namespaceURI, localName) {
var nodeMatched;
if (node.localName != null) {
nodeMatched = (node.namespaceURI == namespaceURI && node.localName == localName);
} else {
nodeMatched = (node.nodeName == (resolveNS(namespaceURI) + localName));
}

return nodeMatched;
}

function resolveNS(namespaceURI) {
var namespacePrefix;
if (namespaceURI == "http://www.yoururigoeshere") {
namespacePrefix = "ns1:";
} else if (namespaceURI == "you are getting the idea now hopefully") {
namespacePrefix = "ns:";
}
return namespacePrefix;
}


Summary
All in all though jQuery saved me a lot of code, particularly around manipulating and traversing my XHTML DOM. The long short of this was that my XHTML page is semantically correct containing absolutely no erroneous divs, style or class declarations i.e. no presentation considerations.

My last Ajax application was a couple of years ago and I must say that using a framework like jQuery has certainly improved programming here. I think we are now seeing some maturity in the browsers and the Javascript framework.

I look forward to continued use of jQuery.