Last week I started a project to create a new book for sofwate engineers: “Introduction to Programming with Java”. The book will focus on the fundamentals of computer programming rather than on the Java language. This is not a book about Java. This is a book about the concepts of computer programming. It is intended for beginners and will be written in Bulgarian language.
The Book Contents
Below is the table of contents:
Chapter 0: Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction to Programming
Chapter 2: Primitive Types and Variables
Chapter 3: Operators and Expressions
Chapter 4: Console Input Output
Chapter 5: Conditional Statements
Chapter 6: Loops
Chapter 7: Arrays
Chapter 8: Numeral Systems
Chapter 9: Methods and Recursion
Chapter 10: Creating and Using Objects
Chapter 11: Exceptions Handling
Chapter 12: Strings
Chapter 13: Data Structures (Lists, Trees and Hash Tables)
Chapter 14: Using Text Files
Chapter 15: Defining Own Classes
Chapter 16: Object Oriented Programming Principles
Chapter 17: High Quality Programming Code
Chapter 18: Practical Exercises
The Idea
The idea for writing this book came because lots of people ask me constantly “I am beginner and I want to learn programming. Which book is good to start with?”. I don’t have good answer to this questions. I don’t know good book in Bulgarian for starting programming. Writing sucg book will fill the gap on the market.
Open Source - Free for Anyone
The book will be distributed as PDF document freely like the open source software. It will be sold also in a hardware form on the price of the paper.
The Team
Until today (25 July) already 23 people joined the team: Svetlin Nakov, Panayot Dobrikov, Boris Chervenkov, Vladimir Tsanev, Mario Peshev, Marian Nenchev, Todor Balabanov, Alexander Dobrev, teodor Stoev, Danail Alexiev, George Penchev, Nikolay Vasilev, Lachezar Bozhkov, Ivaylo Ivanov, Tsvyatko Konov, Vesko Kolev, Ivan Davidov, Lachezar Tsekov, Hristo Todorov, Marin Todorov, Rumiana Topalska, Radoslav Ivanov, Plamen Tabakov.
The main sponsor of the project is the National Academy for Software Development (NASD). It donated its lectures and all other training materials from the course “Introduction to Programming with Java” to the community and these materials will serve as skeleton for the entire book contents. NASD also supported the project by providing his employee Svetlin Nakov as project manager and providing few authors and editors.
Expected Publish Date
We will try to complete the book in September 2008 and we hope we can.
Platforms for Enterprise Development, Web Services and SOA
Enterprise applications are complex distributed software systems designed to meet the requirements and needs of large organizations. Typically enterprise systems are running inside enterprise platforms such as Java EE and Microsoft .NET and drive the entire business processes within the organizations.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a relatively new approach to building enterprise applications based on the concept of developing, publishing and consuming loosely coupled software components called “services”.
Web services and their complete protocol stack (HTTP / SOAP / WSDL) provide standards based infrastructure for building SOA solutions that is supported by virtually any enterprise platform.
Large industry vendors like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP provide platforms for enterprise applications supporting solid infrastructure for building, deploying, running and managing large multitier and SOA applications.
In this issue of the IT Boxing Championship the fans of the worlds leading Java EE and Microsoft .NET platforms will dispute which platform is better.
Venue
The event will be held on 25 June 2008, starting from 18:00 h in Park-hotel Moscow, Sofia, hall Moscow. The hall capacity is 350 people.
Agenda
Time
Topic
Speakers
18:00-18:20
Presenting the “IT Boxing Championship” initiative, the dispute topic, teams and rules
Svetlin Nakov,
The Referee Team
18:20-18:40
Web Services Interoperability between Java and .NET
The Referee Team
18:40-19:00
Technical talk #1
The Java Team
19:00-19:20
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) Overview
The .NET Team
19:20-19:40
Break
19:40-20:00
Technical talk #3
The Java Team
20:00-20:20
Building Applications with WCF and WWF - Demo
The .NET Team
20:20-21:00
Open dispute and direct fight between the teams
The Java Team
The .NET Team
The Referee Team
21:00-21:10
Voting, announcing the results and awarding the winners
All visitors vote
Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and its Web Services and SOA Stack
Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) is a widely used platform for server side development in the Java programming language. Java EE and is an industry standard for implementing enterprise-class distributed systems and service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications. It provides solid architecture and programming model for development and execution of Web applications, Web services, distributed applications, components, services and SOA solutions.
Java EE is designed for enterprise systems and natively supports the latest Web services standards (W3C and OASIS) and provides solid infrastructure for SOA applications.
Java EE applications run in an application server such as JBoss, IBM WebSphere, SAP Netweaver and Oracle Containers for Java EE, which implement the Java EE specification and provide many additional services.
Microsoft .NET Platform and its Web Services and SOA Stack
Microsoft .NET is a leading industry platform for developing enterprise Web applications, Web services and SOA solutions. Its heart, the .NET Framework provides a stable infrastructure, programming model and execution environment for developing and running applications on Windows servers, clients, and mobile or embedded devices.
.NET Framework with its Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) provides a built-in infrastructure of technologies for building connected systems and workflow enabled applications on Windows. It implements the most recent Web services standards and provides easy-to-use SOA environment.
Teams
3 teams take part in the event:
The Java Team - stands up for the Java EE Platform
The .NET Team - stands up for the .NET Platform
The Referees Team - technologically neutral, moderate the discussion
The Java Team
Nikolay Nedyalkov is senior software engineer, lecturer, consultant and project leader with strong experience in Java, Java EE, .NET, database and Web development. He is technical director of the eBG.bg electronic payments portal and technical and business consultant in few other companies. Nikolay is president of the Association for Information Security (ISECA) and works in lots of public and government security projects. He has been lecturer in many courses in Sofia University and New Bulgarian University like: Information Security, Network Security, Software Engineering with Java, Writing Secure Code, Internet Programming with Java and others.
Vladimir Savchenko is a development manager in SAP Labs Bulgaria in the area of Services Oriented Architecture. He has been part of the design and architecture of SAP’s Java Web Services Framework and now participates in the design of SAP’s Enterprise Service Bus.
Emil Alexandrov is development manager in SAP Labs Bulgaria. Worked with various Java tehnologies his current focus is on SOA story of SAP and more specific Registry/Repository and Monitoring topics.
The .NET Team
Vladimir Tchalkov is a founder and CEO of Crossroad Ltd, MVP and Microsoft Regional Director since 2004. Vladimir has 13 years of experience as a project manager, architect and developer. Vladimir has managed multiple projects for development of enterprise applications and e-Government solutions. His professional experience is focused on .NET development, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft BizTalk Server. Vladimir is frequently a speaker on many technical seminars and conferences - Microsoft Days 2002-2006 in Bulgaria, Sofia .NET user group, and many others. He was rated No. 1 by the audience of Microsoft Days 4 times.
Martin Kulov is founder of kulov.net, provider of news, events and valuable resources for software development community in Bulgaria and close region. Martin is member of INETA Speakers Bureau, MVP, MCT, MCSD.NET, and MCPD. His blog can be found at http://www.codeattest.com/blogs/martin.
Stefan Dobrev is co-owner of Avaxo Ltd., an experienced .NET developer and distinguished speaker at various Microsoft events for developers. Visit his blog here: http://blogs.vizibility.net/sdobrev/.
Deyan Varchev is experienced .NET developer and a speaker at various Microsoft events for developers. Currently he is co-owner of Avaxo Ltd. where handles complex .NET and Web projects. Visit his blog here: http://blog.varchev.net/.
Galin Iliev is a senior software engineer with solid experience in .NET and Microsoft technologies. He has MCPD and MCSD.NET certifications. He is Microsoft certified trainer. Now Galin works as freelance developer. Visit his blog here: http://www.galcho.com/blog/.
The Referees Team
Svetlin Nakov is software engineer with more than 10 years of experience in the development of Java, .NET, Web and Windows applications, software engineering consultant and trainer, author of 4 books and above 20 technical articles and 50 presentations. He is one of the founders and currently chairman of the Bulgarian Association of Software Developers (BASD), director training and consulting activities in the National Academy for Software Development (NASD) and one of the founders of the Bulgarian Java User Group (BGJUG), a .NET group leader (BGNETUG) and author of open source projects. Visit his blog here: http://www.nakov.com/blog/.
Nikolay Dokovski is senior software engineer in SAP Labs Bulgaria and JSF 2.0 expert group member (JSR 314). He is a member of the SAP NetWeaver JST Web Container team, mainly involved in the development of the Java EE compliant Web container in the SAP NetWeaver platform.
Julian Sirakov is senior software engineer with solid experience in Java, .NET and other platforms. Currently he is Member of the Technical Staff (MTS) in VMWare Inc.
Free Event
The event is free and the hall is large, so please come with your friends!
As part of my work in the National Academy for Software Development (NASD) I am deeply involved in the organization of an interesting event for C++ developers: the First Bulgarian C++ Conference. I am excited of being able to establish a C++ users group in Bulgaria and to organize the technical part of the conference. I attracted very skillful speakers for the event and I am happy to officially announce it.
The conference pass (including lectures, meals, accomodation, entertainments, etc.) is free for all senior C++ developers, who work as C++ software engineers as their primary job in the last 3-4 years and have at least 5 years of experience in the IT industry. All others can attend the conference lectures for free but should cover their accomodation and meals themselves. The lecture hall will be opened for all registered visitors. See the conference registration page for more details.
Conference Program
The conference program is focused on the hot topics for the C++ development tehnologies: the new C++ standard C++0x, the “concepts” in the new C++ as extenstion of templates, the new Boost library, techniques for effective C++ programming and memory management, techniques for optimizing C++ performance, game development in C++ and DirectX, the weak points of C++, as well as some methodologies for C++ engineering like model-driven development. See the conference sessions page for more details.
Speakers
The speakers are distinguished C++ professionals working for many years in the software industry, with solid experience as software engineers and lecturers. Visit the conference speakers page for more information.
After 5 months development my .NET engineering team launched an unique service in Internet - online venues rental Web portal (www.evenues.com).
eVenues is a new online service that aggregates available meeting room space and connects prospective “space renters” with “space providers”. Today, many companies have meeting room space that sits vacant for hours/days. By enabling companies to post their available space on the internet for rent, eVenues can help either companies or individuals locate available meeting room space at a moment’s notice.
We implemented eVenues.com project with the latest technologies from Microsoft: .NET Framework 3.5, C# 3.0, ASP.NET 3.5, SQL Server 2005, LINQ and LINQ to SQL. I am happy to announce that these technologies are stable enough for production use (which was somehow risky in the beginning of the project).
During the development we used NUnit for unit testing, MS Build for build automation, CruiseControl.NET for continuous integration, Selenium for test automation, JMeter for performance measures and few other tools. All code was written in Visual Studio 2008. We use Subversion as source control repository and GForge Tracker as issue tracking software and bug tracker. Our development process tends to follow the best practices from agile processes like SCRUM but we don’t follow strictly and classical methodology.
We delivered successfully our first project in .NET version 3.5 and I believe we made the right solution by leveraging the latest technologies from Microsoft (instead of the good old .NET 2.0). I am waiting for the ADO.NET Entity framework and the other nice features in the next version of .NET Framework.
Posted by nakov as .net, news, blog at 8:13 PM EEST
I gave two talks at the Microsoft Days 2008 in InterExpo Center Sofia on 24 and 25 April:
What is New in ASP.NET 3.5?
This session focused on the exiting recently introduced features and technologies in ASP.NET 3.5. Starting from ASP.NET and LINQ integration and ASP.NET dynamic data, the I went through the new ASP.NET MVC framework (ala Ruby on Rails) and further through the ASP.NET AJAX and the AJAX Control Toolkit and finally presented the new ASP.NET controls for Silverlight. I presented just few slides and all the rest was a rich set of live demonstrations.
Best Practices for Optimizing Transactional Code in SQL Server 2008
Transaction management is the most important technique to handle concurrent access and data consistence in the database systems. In this session I talked about optimistic and pessimistic concurrency, database transactions and isolation and explained how SQL Server 2008 handles transactions and isolation by locking and row versioning. The talk started with a deep overview of the traditional isolation levels (read uncommitted, read committed, repeatable read and serializable) and locking mechanisms in the database and presented the “snapshot” isolation level in SQL Server which ensures transaction level data consistency while providing better concurrency with less locking.
Last month I was invited by Microsoft to an interview in their largest european development center in Dublin. It was exciting trip and real challenge to see the Microsoft development live. I was excited of their professionalism in all directions:
Professional organization - phone interviews, invitation, flight, accomodation, etc.
Nearly perfect development process - like I read in the software engineering books
Very skillful developers and manager that interview me
Really professional way of conducting interviews
Challengeable product development
I was most excited on the people and process. I think this is what makes Microsoft so successfull: brilliant people and solid engineering process.
Microsoft had a small fault. They didn’t ask me to sing any NDA agreement, so I can share all the interview questions to help all other candidates that want to join Microsoft.
Interview Questions @ Microsoft Dublin
I had 5 interviewers asking me lots of software engineering questions. The questions were very adequate for the team leader position that was my objective (”program manager” position in Microsoft is senior technical position, like team leader in a typical software development company). Interviewers was not only asking me to explain some concept. They gave me a blackboard to write some code and to see how I am attacking the problems, what types of pictures I draw, how my thinking flows, etc.
I remember most of the questions and the answers I gave. I hope my answers were good because I was approved and Microsoft sent me an offer few days after the interview. Below are the questions with my answers:
Question 1: You need to architecture the security for a bank software. What shall you do?
There is not exact answer here. This is about thinking: follow the exisitng standards in the banking sectors, establish global security policy, secure the network infrastructure, secureg the application servers, secure the database, establish auditing policy, securing the operators workstations, secure the Internet and mobile banking, etc. Think about authentication (smart cards), authorization, secure protocols, etc.
Question 2: You are given a string. You want to reverse the words inside it. Example “this is a string” –> “string a is this”. Design an algorithm and implement it. You are not allowed to use String.Split. After you are done with the code, test it. What will you test? What tests you will write?
Elegant solution in 2 steps:
1) Reverse whole the string char by char.
2) Reverse again the characters in each word.
You need to write a method Reverse(string s, int startPos, int endPos).
Test normal cases first (middle of the word, beginning of the word, end of the word, 1 character only, all leters in the string). Check bounds (e.g. invalid range). Test it with Unicode symbols (consisting of several chars). Perform stress test (50 MB string).
Write a method ReverseWords(string s). Test it with usual cases (few words with single space between), with a single word, with an empty string, with words with several separators between. Test it with string containing words with capital letters.
Question 3: What is the difference between black box and white box testing?
Black box testing is testing without seeing the code. Just looking for incorrect bahaviour.
White box testing is about inspecting the code and guessing what can go wrong with it. Look inside arrays (border problems), loops (off by 1 problems), pointers, memory management (allocate / free memory), etc.
Question 4: What is cross-site scripting (XSS)?
In Web application XSS is when text coming from the user is printed in the HTMl document without being escaped. This can cause injecting JavaScript code in the client’s web browser, accessing the session cookies, logging keyboard, and sensitive data (like credi card numbers).
Question 5: What is SQL injection?
SQL injection is vunerability comming from dynamic SQL created by concatenating strings with an input comming from the user, e.g. string cmd = “SELECT * from USERS where LOGIN=’” + login + “‘ and PASS=’” + password + “‘”. if username has value “‘ OR 1=1 ‘;”, any login / password will work. To avoid SQL injection use parametric commands or at least SQL escaping.
Question 6: What is the most challengeable issue with multithreading?
Maybe this is the synchronization and avoiding deadlocks.
Question 7: Explain about deadlocks. How to avoid them.
Deadlock arise when 2 or more resources wait for each other. To avoid it, be careful. Allocate resources always in the same order.
Question 8: Do you know some classical synchronization problem?
The most important classical problem is “producer-consumer”. You have several producers and several consumers. Producers produce some kinf of production from time to time and consumer consume the production from time to time. We have limited buffer for the production. When the buffer is full, producers wait until space is freed. When the buffer is empty, the consumers wait until some producers put something inside.
Practical use of the producer-consumer pattern is sending 1 000 000 emails (production) with 25 working threads (consumers).
Question 9: You need to design a large distributed system system with Web and mobile interface. Through the Web customers subscribe for stock quotes (choosing a ticker and time interval) and get notified by SMS at their mobile phones about the price for given tickers and the requested intervals. A web service for getting the price for given ticker is considered already existing.
Use 3-tier architecture (ASP.NET, C# business tier, SQL Server database). Use a queue of tasks in the business tier and a pool of working threads (e.g. 100 threads) that execute the tasks. A task has 2 steps (query for the ticker price and send SMS). These steps are executed synchronously (with reasonable timeout).
We have another thread that performs SQL query in the database to get the subscriptions matching the current time and appending tasks for SMS notification.
We consider the SMS gateway is an external system.
Question 10: How you secure the stock quote notification system?
We need to secure all its parts:
1) The user registration process - need to verify phone number with confirmation code sent by SMS. Need to keep the password with salted hash. Need to keep the communication through HTTPs / SSL.
2) The application server with business logic. Secure the host, put reasonable limitations to avoid flooding the server.
3) Secure the database (e.g. Windows authentication without using passwords).
4) Secure the network (e.g. use IPSEC)
5) Secure the access to the Web service (WS Security).
6) Secure the mobile phone (e.g. sending encrypted SMS messages and decrypt them with a proprietary software running on the phone).
Question 11: How you write a distributed Web crawler (Web spider)? Think about Windows Live Search which crawls the Internet every day.
You have a queue of URLs to be processed and asynchronous sockets that process the URLs in the queue. Each processing has several states and you describe them in a state machine. Using threads with blocking sockets will not scale. You can still use multiple threads if you have multiple CPUs. The Web crawler should be stateleass and keep its state in the DB. This will allow good scalability.
A big problem is how to distribute the database. It is very, very large database. The key here is to use partitioning, e.g. by site domain. Take the site domain, compute a hash code and distribute the data between the DB nodes based on the hash code. No database server can store all the pages in Internet, so you should use thousands of DB servers and partitioning.
Question 12: You have a set of pairs of characters that gives a partial ordering between the characters. Each pair (a, b) means that a should be before b. Write a program that displays a sequence of characters that keeps the partial ordering (topolocial sorting).
We have 2 algorithms:
1) Calculate the number of the direct predecessors for each character. Find a character with no predecessors, print it and remove it. Removing reduces the number of predecessors for all its children. Repeat until all characters are printed. If you find a situation where every character has at least 1 predecessor, this means a loop inside the graph (print “no solution”). Use Dictionary<string, int> for keeping the number of predecessors for each character. Use a Dictionary<string, List<char>> to keep the children for each character. Use PriorityQueue<char, int> to keep the characters by usign their number of predecessors as priority. The running time will be O(max(N*log N, M)) where N is the number of characters and M is the number of pairs.
2) Create a graph from the pairs. Use recursive DFS traversal starting from a random vertice and print the vertices when returning from the recursion. Repeat the above until finished. The topological sorting will be printed in reversed order. The running time is O(N + M).
Question 13: You are given a coconut. You have large building (n floors). If you throw the coconut from the first floor, if can be croken or not. If not you can throw it from the second floor. With n attempts you can find the maximal floor keeping the coconut intact.
Now you have 2 coconuts. How many attempts you will need to find the maximal floor?
It is a puzzle-like problem. You can use the first coconut and throw it from floors: sqrt(n), 2*sqrt(n), …, sqrt(n) * sqrt(n). This will take sqrt(n) attempts. After that you will have an interval of sqrt(n) floors that can be attempted sequentially with the second coconut. It takes totally 2*sqrt(n) attempts.
Question 14: You have 1000 campaigns for advertisments. For each of them you have the returns of investments for every day in a fixed period of time in the past (e.g. 1 year). The goal is to visualize all the campaigns in a single graphics or different UI form so the user can easily see which campaigns are most effective.
If you visualize only one campaign, you can use a classical bar-chart or pie-chart to show the efficiency at weekly or monthly basis. If you visualize all campaigns for a fixed date, week or month, you can also use classical bar-chart or pie-chart. The problem is how to combine the above.
One solution is to use a bar for each campaign and use different colors for each week in each bar. For example the first week is black, followed by the second week, which is 90% black, followed by the third week which is 80% black, etc. Finally we will have a sequence of bars and the most dark bars will shows best campaigns while the most bright bars will show the worst campaingns.
I knew that I was approved even at the interview. It was a good sign that the manager of the development in Microsoft Dublin for the Windows Live platform Dan Teodosiu personally invited me in his office at the end of the interview day to give me few additional questions and to present me the projects in his department. Dan is extremely smart person - PhD from Stanford University, technical director and co-owner of a company acquired by Microsoft few years ago. It was really pleasure for me to meet him.
There were 2 teams in Dublin that wanted to have me onboard: the edge computing team working on Windows Live and the Office Tube team working on video recording and sharing functionality for the Microsoft Office. I met the manager of the Office Tube team at the end of the interview day to discuss their products and development process.
I was Offered a Senior Position @ Microsoft Dublin
Few days later I was offered senior software engineering position at Microsoft in Dublin. I was approved and the recruiters started to talk with me about my rellocation in Dublin. Few days later I received the official offer from Microsoft. It was good enough for the average Dublin citizen but not good enough for me.
I Rejected Working at Microsoft Dublin
Yes, I rejected the Microsoft’s offer to work in their development center in Dublin. The reason was that their offer was not good enough. The offer was better than the avegare for the IT industry in Dublin. It was good offer for a software engineer and if I got it 5-6 years ago I would probably accept it.
I was working as software engineer for more than 12 years. I am currentlty CTO and co-owner of a small software development, training and consulting company and I am a team leader of 3 software projects in the same time (two Java and one .NET project). In the same time I am a head of the training activities and I manage directlty more than 10 engineers and of course I am paid several times better than the average for the industry. In the same time I am part-time professor in Sofia University. I am about to finish my PhD in computational linguistics. I have share in few other software companies. All of this was a result of many years of hard working @ 12+ hours / day.
In Bulgaria I was famous, very well paid, working at own company with no boss, managing development teams and having very good perspective for development. To leave my current position, I needed really amazingly good offer. I got good offer, but not amazingly good. That’s why I rejected it.
My Experience at Interviews with Microsoft and Google
Few months ago I was interviewed for a software engineer in Google Zurich. If I need to compare Microsoft and Google, I should tell it in short: Google sux! Here are my reasons for this:
1) Google interview were not professional. It was like Olympiad in Informatics. Google asked me only about algorithms and data structures, nothing about software technologies and software engineering. It was obvious that they do not care that I had 12 years software engineering experience. They just ignored this. The only think Google wants to know about their candidates are their algorithms and analytical thinking skills. Nothing about technology, nothing about engineering.
2) Google employ everybody as junior developer, ignoring the existing experience. It is nice to work in Google if it is your first job, really nice, but if you have 12 years of experience with lots of languages, technologies and platforms, at lots of senior positions, you should expect higher position in Google, right?
3) Microsoft have really good interview process. People working in Microsoft are relly very smart and skillful. Their process is far ahead of Google. Their quality of development is far ahead of Google. Their management is ahead of Google and their recruitment is ahead of Google.
Microsoft is Better Place to Work than Google
At my interviews I was asking my interviewers in both Microsoft and Google a lot about the development process, engineering and technologies. I was asking also my colleagues working in these companies. I found for myself that Microsoft is better organized, managed and structured. Microsoft do software development in more professional way than Google. Their engineers are better. Their development process is better. Their products are better. Their technologies are better. Their interviews are better. Google was like a kindergarden - young and not experienced enough people, an office full of fun and entertainment, interviews typical for junior people and lack of traditions in development of high quality software products.
Posted by nakov as .net, news, blog at 1:02 AM EET
The Java team won the second IT Boxing match on Web technologies on 6 March 2008 in Sofia.
The battle was merciless: 24 contestants in 4 teams (.NET, Java, PHP and Ruby) fighted for proving their technology better in 9 technical talks with live demonstrations. The teams presented ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Echo2, Google Web Toolkit, JavaServer Facaes and other Java EE technologies, PHP, Symfony framework and Ruby on Rails along with lots of demonstrations and discussion.
Finally the visitors voted and the results states:
The topic of this event is “Web Development Technologies: ASP.NET vs. Java & JSF vs. PHP vs. Ruby”. The .NET team will present the ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC and the new ASP.NET extensions in .NET Framework 3.5. The Java team will stand up for JavaServer Faces (JSF), Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Echo Framework and other Java Web development frameworks. The PHP team will stand up for the Web frameworks in PHP, especially the Symphony framework. The Ruby team will stand for Ruby on Rails.
Venue
The event will be held on 6 March 2008, starting from 17:30 h in Park-hotel Moscow, Sofia, hall Moscow. The hall capacity is 350 people.
Sponsor
The event is sponsored by Telerik, a leading world wide vendor of User Interface (UI) components for ASP.NET and Windows Forms, and .NET Reporting solutions.
Agenda
Time
Topic
Speakers
17:30-17:50
Presenting the “IT Boxing Championship” initiative, the dispute topic,teams and rules
Svetlin Nakov,The Referee Team
17:50-18:10
Technical talk #1: ASP.NET AJAX
Alex Thissen,The .NET Team
18:10-18:30
Technical talk #2: Echo Framework
Peter Milev,The Java Team
18:30-18:50
Technical talk #3: PHP and PHP Web Frameworks
Peter Vukadinov,The PHP Team
18:50-19:10
Technical talk #4: ASP.NET MVCFramework
Alex Thissen,The .NET Team
19:10-19:30
Technical talk #5: Google Web Toolkit - Dynamic Web on Java(Script)
Jordan Jordanov,The Java Team
19:30-19:50
Break
19:50-20:10
Technical talk #6: Symphony Framework for PHP
Peter Vukadinov,The PHP Team
20:10-20:30
Technical talk #7: ASP.NET
The .NET Team
20:30-20:50
Technical talk #8: JavaServer Faces (JSF)
Nikolai Dokovski,The Java Team
20:50-21:10
Technical talk #9: Smashing Rails
Sava Chankov,The Ruby Team
21:10-22:20
Open dispute and direct fight between the teams
The .NET TeamThe PHP TeamThe Java Team The Ruby TeamThe RefereeTeam
22:20-22:30
Voting, announcing the results and awarding the winners
All visitors vote
ASP.NET
ASP.NET is a set of Web development technologies provided by Microsoft as part of .NET Framework. It is used by developers to create dynamic Web applications and Web services. ASP.NET provides component-based architecture with comprehensive page rendering and execution model that relies on the concepts of the event-driven development. ASP.NET supports the concept of separation between the code and UI presentation and supports custom components, data binding and master pages. Developers can use C#, VB.NET and other .NET languages to create ASP.NET Web applications. ASP.NET is the best Web technology, isn’t it? If you don’t agree, come to fight at the ring.
ASP.NET AJAX
ASP.NET has a really strong story for AJAX. The AJAX implementation supports both a server centric and a client centric programming model. On the server new AJAX controls extend the Page Framework and offer the well-known control based and event-driven way of working. The AJAX controls take care of partial rendering of Web pages. Microsoft has released an impressive cross-browser compatible AJAX library on the client side. It allows you to do full client-side JavaScript development, and adds object orientation with inheritance, a type system including reflection and namespaces. And to top it all, the AJAX library is royalty-free and you can use and change it however you like. Surely no other AJAX framework can put up against this much power and survive a 12 round fight!
ASP.NET MVC Framework
Microsoft goes into a new direction of web application development with the introduction of the Model-View-Controller framework for ASP.NET. The benefits of the MVC approach include the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (data, presentation and actions), and also facilitates test driven development (TDD) and define page navigation rules. Microsoft’s MVC implementation is all about extensibility and flexibility. You have a free choice of the type of controller, the way URLs are routed and how views are created. The MVC Framework leverages the ASP.NET runtime and should be easy to learn for existing ASP.NET programmers, but also those coming from other runtimes and frameworks. All in all, the ASP.NET MVC Framework is sure to pack a punch. Will the combination of ASP.NET and MVC bring a quick knockout?
Java Web Technologies
The Java Enterprise platform (Java EE) provides solid foundation for development of Web applications and Web services. It introduces the concept of Web containers and Web applications. Java Web applications are built on the top of Servlet/JSP standards which serve as basis for the more complicated Web technologies. The Servlet API provides the basic execution model for the Web applications. The JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology provides additionally custom tags and tag libraries and has built-in expression language.
JavaServer Faces (JSF)
As a natural extension to the Servlet/JSP standards JavaServer Faces (JSF) provides standard component based architecture for Web applications. It provides reusable UI components and comprehensive rendering and execution model. Developers can benefit of using event driven development, data binding, control validation and page navigation rules. JSF is naturally extended to support AJAX with partial rendering and asynchronous execution and update of controls on the page. Shall the JSF gain a victory over the opponents as a technical effort or the Java team fill fall into boxing combat? Be sure to come and see.
Google Web Toolkit (GWT)
This session intends to reveal some of the benefits of GWT as UI Framework. Nowadays having a dynamic web UI is a must. Java programming is always preferred compared with pure HTML and Java Script. So combining both can really boost productivity and in the same way give us the opportunity to have a nice and flexible UI. The session will also include the usage of GWT in a real SAP project so that everybody can get a feeling for the product. Somebody mentioned JavaScript and AJAX support in .NET and PHP? No need of fight: GWT does not just use JavaScript and AJAX; those are in its blood.
Echo2 Framework
Echo2 is a platform for building Web applications that approach the capabilities of rich clients. The applications are developed using a component-oriented and event-driven API, eliminating the need to deal with HTML, JavaScript and the “page-based” nature of Web browsers. Echo2 applications are by their nature AJAX-enabled. To the developer, Echo2 works just like a user interface toolkit with and presents very simple approach to write efficient Web applications. Any AJAX pugilists?
PHP and PHP Web Frameworks
Some developers believe that PHP code is always low quality and PHP does not have good frameworks and standards for enterprise development. Is this true? What makes PHP the most widely used Web development language?
PHP frameworks are hot topic in the Web development community. Some of the most popular frameworks are: ZendFramework, Symfony, Codelighter, CakePHP, eZ Components but this list can not be either accurate or comprehensive.
PHP does not need to fight or dispute with the rest. It is the largest community and keeps the largest market share in Web technologies, isn’t it?
Symphony Framework for PHP
Symfony is a complete PHP framework designed to optimize the development of Web applications. It contains numerous tools and classes aimed at shortening the development time of a complex Web applications. Additionaly, it automates common tasks so that the developer can focus entierly on the specifics of the application. Some of the key features are: MVC separation, simple templating and helpers, cache management, smart URLs, scaffolding, multilingualism and I18N support, AJAX support and built-in unit and functional testing framework. Does anybody think Symphony is not better than ASP.NET and JSF? We shall see.
Smashing Rails
Since its inception several years ago Ruby on Rails has steadily garnered a lot of attention. The rolling stock seems not to be hype-powered only in shunting established technologies. Rather than presenting Rails the Ruby team decided to let it speak on its own. Ruby on Rails will squash the other Web technologies. Come to see this.
Teams
5 teams and 23 contestants take part in the event. The teams:
The .NET Team (Alex Thissen from INETA, Branimir Giurov from SofiaDev, Stefan Dobrev from Avaxo, Deyan Varchev from Avaxo, Galin Iliev, Martin Kulov and Emil Stoychev) - stands up for the ASP.NET Web technologies
The Java Team (Nikolay Dokovski from SAP Labs Bulgaria, Jordan Jordanov from SAP Labs Bulgaria, Peter Milev, Nikolay Nedyalkov from ISECA, Vesko Arnaudov from VMWare, Naiden Gochev from ProxiAD) - stands up for the Java Web technologies like JSF, GWT, Echo, etc.
The PHP Team (Peter Vukadinov from pi consult and Valery Gantchev) - stands up for the PHP Web technologies
The Ruby Team (Sava Chankov from Tutuf, Petyo Ivanov from 3atwork, Stanislav Bozhkov from svejo.net, Stanislav Peshterliev and Dimitar Ivanov) - stands up for the Ruby and Rails technologies
The Referees Team (Svetlin Nakov from BASD, Dimitar Kapitanov from Telerik and Mihail Stoynov) - technologically neutral, moderate the discussion
Free Event
The event is free and the hall is large, so please come with your friends! Everyone will get small gifts from our sponsors.
With a few collagues I teach a course in Design Patterns in Sofia University for the summer semester of 2007/2008. We will cover the classical GoF patterns (creational, functional and behavioral) and as well as some additional topics like architectural patterns (like MVC). Our curriculum is based on the classical book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”:
Creational Patterns
Abstract Factory groups object factories that have a common theme.
Builder constructs complex objects by separating construction and representation.
Factory Method creates objects without specifying the exact class to create.
Prototype creates objects by cloning an existing object.
Singleton restricts object creation for a class to only one instance.
Structural Patterns
Adapter allows classes with incompatible interfaces to work together by wrapping its own interface around that of an already existing class.
Bridge decouples an abstraction from its implementation so that the two can vary independently.
Composite composes one-or-more similar objects so that they can be manipulated as one object.
Decorator dynamically adds/overrides behaviour in an existing method of an object.
Facade provides a simplified interface to a large body of code.
Flyweight reduces the cost of creating and manipulating a large number of similar objects.
Proxy provides a placeholder for another object to control access, reduce cost, and reduce complexity.
Behavioral Patterns
Chain of responsibility delegates commands to a chain of processing objects.
Command creates objects which encapsulate actions and parameters.
Interpreter implements a specialized language.
Iterator accesses the elements of an object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation.
Mediator allows loose coupling between classes by being the only class that has detailed knowledge of their methods.
Memento provides the ability to restore an object to its previous state (undo).
Observer is a publish/subscribe pattern which allows a number of observer objects to see an event.
State allows an object to alter its behavior when its internal state changes.
Strategy allows one of a family of algorithms to be selected on-the-fly at runtime.
Template method defines the skeleton of an algorithm as an abstract class, allowing its subclasses to provide concrete behavior.
Visitor separates an algorithm from an object structure by moving the hierarchy of methods into one object.
Architectural Patterns:
Layers / Multi-tiered systems
Model-View-Controller
Visit the official site of the Design Patterns course for lecture materials, enrollment, news and forum: http://patterns.dev.bg/.
The next IT Boxing event is coming. The date is 6 March 2008. TThe venue is the same: Sofia, Park-hotel Moscow. The topic is “Web technologies” and the team will present the hottest Web technologies from .NET, Java and PHP.
Talks will be split into short sessions (20 minutes) and the focus will be on the demonstrations rather than theory.
The match we will have 3 teams:
1) The .NET team will have on the board a famous International speaker - Alex Thissen from INETA. Alex will come for the event from The Netherlands to talk about ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC. I have confirmations from other famous speakers: Branimir Giurov, Galin Iliev, Martin Kulov, Stefan Dobrev, Deyan Varchev.
2) The Java team will be lead by Nikolay Dokovski, a JSF industry expert, working for SAP A.G. He will defend the JavaServer Faces technology along with hid team.
3) The PHP team will stand for proving that PHP is a strong platform for Enterprise Web applications. Speaker will be Peter Vukadinov from Varna.
I gave two talks at the Microsoft Days 2008 in InterExpo Center Sofia on 24 and 25 April:
Last month I was invited by Microsoft to an interview in their largest european development center in Dublin. It was exciting trip and real challenge to see the Microsoft development live. I was excited of their professionalism in all directions:
The topic of this event is “Web Development Technologies: ASP.NET vs. Java & JSF vs. PHP vs. Ruby”. The .NET team will present the ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC and the new ASP.NET extensions in .NET Framework 3.5. The Java team will stand up for JavaServer Faces (JSF), Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Echo Framework and other Java Web development frameworks. The PHP team will stand up for the Web frameworks in PHP, especially the Symphony framework. The Ruby team will stand for Ruby on Rails.
