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).
Is it wise to use unsafe – Hidden secret of Java
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.
QTP 11 – Windows 7 – Adobe Flex
When it comes to testing Adobe Flex applications using automated tools – QTP (HP Quick Test Professional) surely stands at no. 1 position. With its rich support of scripting and point-n-identify interface, it becomes very easy to write automation test scripts. While I was working on one of the Flex Application, I felt a need of installing QTP on my machine.
Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, I am using Windows 7 – 64bit operating system and I got QTP 11 installed on my machine. While I was in urgent need of doing some Automation related changes, I was stuck at the first place itself. While launching QTP, the Add-in manager was not able to detect the Flex Plug-in. I tried all the options suggested on various sites, downloading QTP plug-ins and blah blah, but none of them worked for me.
Gearing up…
I was gone for a while rather for a long time. I dont like to give excuses because reasons never give you results. It has been a long time and there was no article published on the site, something which has been bugging me as well. Rather than saying I have been quite busy with work (which anyhow I will be always), it was rather quite hectic and something which almost drained my energy and an unfortunate visit to ICU made it even worse.
CXF on IBM WebSphere 7 – Deployment Pitfalls
Just recently I deployed CXF enabled application on websphere 7 and came across many issues. The issues were not with respect to configuration problems but were mostly related to the classes used internally by CXF (version 2.1, I guess) framework. Surpizingly these issues dont pop-up on JBoss server (Its like saying, hey look my code works on my machine, I dont know what went wrong with yours, it simply doesn’t kick. Heard that a lot in college days 