It has been a long time, I was planning to hit on Node.js, but I got stuck with other topics and somehow it slipped my mind. Few days back, I thought to give it a try and check what Node.js offers. I like the idea of using JavaScript to write code for Node.js (After all thats my first programming language and the most fav. language 
).
The first baby step with “Hello World” and writing your own web server, made me comfortable and I realised its so much of fun to write code for nodejs as you have to just learn the APIs and start modularizing them. As soon as I started making the progress, I found an example making use of Node.js’s custom module “connect”.
Nodejs and custom modules on windows
Books that help to write better code
I have been reading lot of books on various frameworks and technologies from my college days. I am always fascinated by new technologies and frameworks that help to ease developer’s life by writing less and manageable code. While all these years, I was spending too much time on reading syntaxes and APIs exposed by various languages and frameworks, from last 2 months, things have taken different turn. I put too much emphasis on using design patterns, but I was introduced to quite a few good books by my seniors and I was really surprised, the way these books have changed my thoughtprocess. No, I dont mean stop using design patterns or blah blah… but before start using all those geeky words like scalability, design patterns and other stuffs, you need to first learn to write clean code. Yes! here are some of the best books, I have been reading.
Firefox 22 Installer – usability
It was just like a regular day and I was going through few sites, suddenly I felt to checkout if there is any new version of Firefox has came up (I check bi-weekly). And yeah, there was new version available. As usual, I tried to upgrade using the Help > About firefox menu and it showed that there is new version is availble. While usually it updates the firefox without doing much and just by opening About box, but this time it failed. So to get the latest version, I tried to download it manually. Hmm… and then I was bit shocked by the installer.
Is it wise to use unsafe – Hidden secret of Java
I have been visiting quite a few sites and going through few forums, when I stumbled upon an article talking about the hidden weapon of Java, not made publicly known due to some reasons. But it is claimed that many of the Java internals and third party softwares do use this API to gain monstrous power.
While we have learned from academic days that heap space is home for Java objects, it is a place where the objects come to life and die. JVM with its GC algorithm makes the kill and creates space for new objects. While in the process of moving objects from various places (eden, young generator etc), it sometimes may bring down the application performance to its knees and can prove costly affair.
Whlie GC has been seen as life savior for people who dont want to worry about memory management, it also imposed restriction in terms of no control over deciding fate of the object as when it will get garbage collected. While this may not sound so serious problem as people end up allocating higher heap space for JVM (without realising the fact that it is actually hampering performance), some felt it bit uncomfortable (geeks from C, C++ playing with memory functions).
Unusual Graphs with JavaScript – Infovis Toolkit
I was looking for a tree based graph displaying library possibly in JavaScript. The purpose of this library was to purely demonstrate pure technical things but instead of just collapse and expand functionality, I needed something more which will catch user attention. While going through nearly 70-80 libraries, I found an interesting library which almost hit the bulls-eye.
This library provides quite an interesting implementation of tree, graph based implementations which can be used at various places in an application. I will be using this library in one of the implementation I am assigned to, but I would suggest you to have a look at it. It is worth giving a shot.
Apache Forrest – Document Generation
I have been working on document generation utility and decided to explore what options are already available. The features I was looking into the framework were
1. Less learning curve
2. Extendable
3. Various Output Formats
4. Pluggable with Java
5. Open Source and Freeware
6. Should have popular community
Spring XML extension
Few days back came across fantastic feature of Spring framework – Extensible XML authoring. I was in a need of introducing my own custom tags in Spring bean configuration file and found Spring provides a very easy mechanism to handle this requirement. I wont get into the details of how to do this as the Spring site does it pretty well.
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/extensible-xml.html
Quick Fix : QTP Debugger is disabled
I was facing this problem for a long time and thanks to my laziness, I didn’t spent much time on finding out the answer until it pinched me badly. The debug options in QTP installation was disabled and I was not able to set the breakpoints. The problem is not with QTP installation neither with OS settings and in my case, I didn’t install Microsoft Script Debugger. 
Thanks to google and I could find links, pointing to exact root cause. Just installed the Script debugger from Microsoft’s site and restarted QTP. It worked like charm!!! 
Flash Builder profiler not working
Flash builder profiler not working has been like a thorn in the flesh for a long time. After trying out multiple options, right from installation and formatting and blah blah… nothing worked properly. Strangely it was working on few user machines and we had no clue as why flash builder is behaving in irratic way. The problem was mainly with Domain user accounts, as it was working properly for local accounts.
Finally I stumbled upon following link and got a clue… and it worked too !!!
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/657773
Check the posts about home drive settings.
QTP 11 – Flex 4 – Dropdown with scrollbar
Few days back, one of our automation tester came across a weird problem in Flex 4 application. We could able to set the selected item for the dropdowns which are not having scrollbars, but the ones having scrollbars were not able to set the appropriate item.