Anatoly Krivitsky

For one thing XP is extremely widespread and your clients and/or users probably have it installed on theirs PCs. In fact, most PCs come with XP pre-installed. And makers of peripheral devices and high-speed Internet providers adapt their products and services to work with XP. In most cases it's enough to simply plug a peripheral into an XP computer or to subscribe to a high-speed Internet service to start use it immediately. For many IT professionals it makes sense to work with both Windows XP and Linux. On the other hand, Linux is stable and the Linux community provides you with free high-quality Open Source software. A number of companies also offer non-commercial versions of their products for free that you can try before buying to make sure it's exactly what you need. An example of one such product will be given later in this article. Virtualization Versus Mult... (more)

Using Ext JS, Servlets, JSON, MySQL and Tomcat on Fedora

Java Developer Magazine on Ulitzer These days the popularity of Ext JS (a JavaScript library) is gaining momentum. One of the most popular widgets within Ext JS is the DataGrid. The reason - displaying data from a database is one of the most common tasks of a web application. "Out of the box" the DataGrid has functionality (for instance, ascending or descending sorting and reordering of columns by dragging it) that otherwise would require some effort from developers. Another attractive feature of the DataGrid is that it can use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), which allows you... (more)

Remote Benchmarking with Servlets and JSF

Powerful computers these days (including servers) are cheap compared to the "good old days." In fact, they're even cheap compared to what they cost a couple of years ago. Vendors are selling PCs whose CPUs clock above 3GHz for under $1,400. Their memory and HDD capacity are also impressive. We're basically looking at hardware that can potentially offer the performance of a mainframe for a fraction of a mainframe's price. The operative word is potentially. A gating factor is the set of software- and hardware-related components that sits between a CPU's clock speed and the end use... (more)

Migration of Legacy Scientific and Engineering Applications

There is a market from which a history of computers began - a market of numerical simulations for scientific and engineering applications. Note that these applications usually deal with a high number of mathematical calculations that are impossible without a computer. Historically, this was what provoked the computer's invention. Also, the main purpose of software for this market is to provide results in a reasonable amount of time. Despite a long history, this market is alive and well, and it will be for the foreseeable future. Consider, for instance, the following fields of num... (more)

The Best of Both Worlds

These days the size of almost all the resources available to a programmer (memory volume, CPU speed, etc.) are on the rise except for one: the time required to complete a project, which is shrinking. So it's important to work with tools that are convenient and make you productive. It's also important to keep the cost of software development in check by keeping as much as possible of the investments that were already made. Windows - and currently XP Home and Professional are the most widespread versions - has a huge number of installed copies that can be measured in the hundreds ... (more)