Animation on Flash Can Make or Destroy Your Website

  Animation is a term which has become very popular nowadays. The colorful and smooth graphics of various websites attracts viewers. There is almost no end to the amount of creativity you can put in a website by making appropriate use of flash animation. Though it is an attractive venture, animation on flash has its own advantages as well as setbacks. Let us go through the entire process, discussing every detail that is important. Then you will be in a better position to decide whether animation on flash is worthwhile or not. First things first, what is Flash?

   Flash is a multimedia tool. It started off as a vector based graphic tool used for creating animations. It is used to add movie clips, videos, etc. to a website. With more advancement in technology animation on flash can add interactivity in the website making it user friendly.

   So now that we know what is flash, let us ponder upon its advantages.  

Advantages of using animation on flash:

  Websites having animation on flash are more catchy and impressive. They tend to attract more customers to the website owing to their fascinating animations. Many people just watch the entire website because of the eye catching colors and flow of animation. Addresses of websites with extraordinary animation on flash like Mercedes are shared amongst groups just to check out the creativity of the developer which is a good thing when it comes to the business angle.

   Animation on flash offers interactive features to the user. Many websites do not even need the user to click many buttons. The user can just sit and watch the entire website unfold it, graphically, in front of him.   Interactive feature is a great help in websites offering tutorials. The user can go through the tutorial smoothly and then can take self test exercises.

   Animation on flash, when integrated in a website gives the developer the facility to incorporate videos, audio clips in it. You might have come across many websites which play a background score as an advertisement, or have gaming ads at the sidebar in constant motion. This technique not only impresses the viewer but also can be used to attract his attention to the important details and advertisement.

   Flash can be operated across various browsers. This is like the biggest advantage of using animation on flash in your website. Flash is all browsers compatible and interoperable. You can provide links to other browser in your website and the transition is going too smooth. Your site is going to run smoothly and efficiently irrespective of which browser the user has.

   Contrary to the myth that flash animation is just accessory animation, if used properly it can give an entire company presentation within a minute and that too without any human intervention. You just need to prepare a company or even product portfolio as an .swf movie and play it.

  It is available then, as a movie to the audience.

   So this was all about what using animation on flash in your website can earn you. However, it’s not all good. With more and more advancement in technology, flash has overcome many of its drawbacks, but still there are some which can provide a setback to your website. Let us go through them.  

 Setbacks of using animation on flash:

  The performance of a Flash website depends a lot on the speed of internet used by the viewer. Though very high speeds are available nowadays, yet many people still use dial up connections to connect to the internet. This makes their internet .......... Read More HERE

Google Code Jam Africa and Arabia 2011

If you're interested in getting a cool Prize or being considered for an internship at Google Zurich, then you should register and compete in "Google Code Jam Africa and Arabia 2011"

Location: Online
Schedule: http://code.google.com/codejam/africa_arabia/schedule.html
More details: http://code.google.com/codejam/africa_arabia


Source

Business Analyst and Systems Analyst – THEY ARE DIFFERENT

This week I received another request from a recruiter seeking a person to fill a vacant Business Analyst (BA) position. In my role as coordinator of the Australian Computer Society IT Contractors and Consultants Special Interest Group I am often asked by recruiters if I know of any people who are currently looking for work. During the dark days of the dot com bust my answer was always yes, however today (thankfully) my answer is often no.

My approach when I receive a request from a recruiter is to examine some of the details of the role. This helps me in identifying possible candidates. During this examination I am continually amazed about the confused nature of the BA role. The role definition is often a confusing set of requirements which span across technical and non technical areas.
It is not uncommon for a BA role definition seeking detailed knowledge of J2EE or .Net. Sometimes programming skills are mentioned as very desirable. I am often left wondering do they want a Business Analyst or a Systems Analyst.

The term “Systems Analyst” seems to have fallen out of favor in the last 5 years or so, but I don’t think the requirement has gone away. Business Analysts and System Analysts are different roles. They perform very different functions during the software development life cycle. Both roles are needed and both are very important.

The Systems Analyst role attempts to provide a bridge between the business requirements and the technical definition of the IT solution. The Business Analyst role is primarily about documenting and gathering the business requirements. The important point to note that the two roles are complimentary, you need both to make a successful IT project.

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Java Developer Conference 2010

Java Developer Conference 2010

I think this year's JDC will be so great and so interesting.

Do not miss the chance to attend.

My Programmer Personality Type is -- PHTB

I tried the " Programmer Personality Type" test and following is my detailed result:

Your programmer personality type is:

PHTB

You're a Planner.
You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.


You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.


You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.


You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

To try the test yourself, go to the following link:

Programmer Personality Test

Good Luck

Streaming API for XML

Many people are working with web services. Thus, web services is an evolving field that always has new terchnologies and/or APIs to support and ease the way to developing and using web services.

I am introducing here a java API that is supposed to be one of those evolving APIs that help enhance the work with web services and also enhance the work of web services themselves. Actually, I have known about it from a colleague of mine and found it interesting and worth learning about. That is StAX which stands for "Streaming API for XML". StAX is a streaming Java-based, event-driven, pull-parsing API for reading and writing XML documents. StAX enables you to create bidrectional XML parsers that are fast, relatively easy to program, and have a light memory footprint.

StAX is the latest API in the JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) family, and provides an alternative to SAX, DOM, TrAX, and DOM for developers looking to do high-performance stream filtering, processing, and modification, particularly with low memory and limited extensibility requirements. 

To summarize, StAX provides a standard, bidirectional pull parser interface for streaming XML processing, offering a simpler programming model than SAX and more efficient memory management than DOM. StAX enables developers to parse and modify XML streams as events, and to extend XML information models to allow application-specific additions.

Of course I will not be better in explaining the API and listing more details about it than the JEE tutorial from which I have already quoted most of what I mentioned above. You can know more about the API and how to use it in part III, Chapter 18 of the tutorial. I wish you all really find it useful.

SAVEPOINT Problem

Have you used the Database keyword "SAVEPOINT" before? Have you used it within Java?
First of all, I would like to give a brief definition and description for "SAVEPOINT".

"A savepoint is a way of implementing subtransactions (also known as nested transactions) within a relational database management system by indicating a point within a transaction that can be "rolled back to" without affecting any work done in the transaction before the savepoint was created. Multiple savepoints can exist within a single transaction. Savepoints are useful for implementing complex error recovery in database applications — if an error occurs in the midst of a multiple-statement transaction, the application may be able to recover from the error (by rolling back to a savepoint) without needing to abort the entire transaction.

A savepoint can be declared by issuing a SAVEPOINT name statement. All changes made after a savepoint has been declared can be undone by issuing a ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT name command. Issuing RELEASE SAVEPOINT name will cause the named savepoint to be discarded, but will not otherwise affect anything. Issuing the commands ROLLBACK or COMMIT will also discard any savepoints created since the start of the main transaction.

Savepoints are supported in some form or other in database systems like PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, and Firebird. Savepoints are also defined in the SQL standard."

This definition is quoted from wikipedia.

The first time I tried SAVEPOINT on Oracle 9i Database using JDK 1.4 - namely JDK 1.4.2_04 on JDevelope 10g- was about 2 years ago. At that time, I have been encountered with a problem when I tried to use it calling the method setSavePoint() in the java.sql.Connection interface. I also tried it, then, using JDK 5 but do not remember the exact version and faced the same problem. The problem was that I had the run time exception "java.lang.AbstractMethodError" and from the JDK documentation I understood that this can happen in run time only if a definition of some class has incompatibly changed since the currently executing method was last compiled.

I then have posted that issue on SUN forums, but unfortunately had no reply with a solution. You can find this post on the following link
Savepoint Issue
And this is a sample code similar to my own:
String s = "jdbc:oracle:thin:@" + strHostName + ":" + strPortNo + ":" + strDBName;
Class.forName(strDriverName);
Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection(s,strUserName,strPassword);
connection.setAutoCommit(false);
.
.
.
Savepoint save =connection.setSavepoint();
.
.
.

Anyway, the only solution I have done was a little workaround. I just used the "SAVEPOINT" of Oracle Engine itself. All what I have done was something like the follwoing:
Class.forName(strDriverName);
Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection(s,strUserName,strPassword);
connection.setAutoCommit(false);
.
.
.
Statement stmt = connection.createStatement();
for(int i=o; i< someArray.length ; i++)
{
.
.
stmt.execute("SAVEPOINT point"+i);
.
.
}

And then when I wanted to rollback to a specific savepoint I wrote code similar to

stmt.execute("ROLLBACK to point"+2);
This can rollback to the savepoint named "point2".

Cooool. It worked just fine for me.

To be frank, I have not tried to work with SAVEPOINT again lately, maybe because I did not encounter a business case that let me try it again. Also I have never tried it with JDK 6 or any other Oracle JDBC Driver, which I think was the main reason for the problem. But I am eager to know if anyone has recently worked with it, on what JDK version, and whether it has worked well from within the Java code and invocation for the setSavePoint() method of the java.sql.Connection interface and with what Oracle version and Oracle JDBC Driver version.
Waiting for your comments and experience conerning this matter.