PHP OOP Book Updated

New chapter on PHP Functional Programming and few concepts left in the original edition (like Object Cloning) are covered in this update. Get the new edition here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CM4ZECG. Readers who have already bought the book will receive a mail from Amazon detailing how to download this free update.

Applying Lean Principles in Publishing

Launch the minimum-viable product. Then keep improving.

Can this be achieved in publishing industry? This is going to be my experiment. Technical books are best suited for this type experiments, considering the rapid innovation in the software field.

PHP OOP: Quick & Dirty for Advanced Learners

Our first book is published:

The book is available for free under a promotion that ends midnight May 4 midnight PST.

Focusing on the Essentials: A way of Learning

There are many things that we do in our life that don't add any value to our life. One such thing is learning the complete detail of a technology. Ever since I started learning programming, I have taken one approach to learn: learn the essentials. Then jump into implementation. The details of the language / software / environment are just a search-term away.

When buying a technical book too, I try to avoid reference books. Most of the information available in the reference books can be fetched quicker by a web-search. What I want a book to be is like a tutor: explain the fundamentals and give enough information to inspire me to explore more.

The same approach will be followed by books published by WizTools.org. The first in the series of books that will be published is under preparation and will be available shortly. The book covers PHP Object Oriented and Modular Programming.

Android---here we come!

I am happy to announce the start of WizTools.org Android Mini-Projects. We have also made available the first project in Google Play: Date Arithmetic.

I assure you that this foray into this wonderful platform is the beginning of a rich product line from WizTools.org.

RESTClient 3.1 Released

Check out:

• Download
• Release Notes

A teaser screenshot:

RESTClient 3.0 version available for download

One of the biggest milestone in the development of RESTClient is reached today: with the release of 3.0 version of RESTClient. The release is a major release which breaks backward compatibility with the earlier file format of RESTClient, but with that loss comes loads of new features including binary request and response body. Also not visible to the end users is the major design-level code refactoring and re-writing which has gone into this release: this ensures continued ease of development of the tool in near future.
As usual, the release includes:

• Download
• Release notes
• All wiki pages updated

Have fun developing/testing HTTP applications using RESTClient :-)

SimpleDateFormat Tester 1.0.3 Released

The Go button is now made the default button. Download.

RESTClient 3.0 Preview Available for Download

Get the latest and greatest work-in-progress version of RESTClient: 3.0 preview release. This revision is a major revision with lots of internal design changes and rewrites. Functions present and functioning in 2.x series could also be broken. Request everyone's help in testing this revision.

RESTClient: 3.0 Development, move to GIT and code re-organization

The word 3.0 in relation to RESTClient brings horror to my memories. I started working on 3.0 couple of years back, implemented major changes, made the build unstable, and was not able to fix the working functionality of the previous versions. Then I had to do the inevitable: shelve the 3.0 release plan and start fixing the 2.x branch. And the development has continued in similar vein till now---that is until recently.

Now, I once again took the plunge: started working on the 3.0 release. The 3.0 release is major because:

• Change the internal data-structure for holding request and response (to support binary formats)---this will break backward compatibility with the 2.x file formats.
• The UI will have major code re-writes as it will need to support binary formats.
• The public API will change.

Today I am happy to say that, I have successfully completed many of these changes as of now, and 3.0 preview release should be up for downloads within a week or two.

One of the best decisions I made recently for this 3.0 development is choosing Google Guice. Using the normal capability of Object Orientation provided by Java, it was increasingly difficult to wire UI components and develop maintainable code. Guice was some kind of nirvana in this sense: wiring components with participating APIs was made so much simpler. The choice of Guice and the API re-write made it easier for me to break monolithic classes into maintainable modules. This effort of mine will have long-term implications will provide quicker capability to change / add features.

One of the other changes is move to GIT from Subversion. Subversion was proving to be too restricting as a SCM tool. I was also acting as God---providing prospective committers commit rights. It was proving to be a hindrance---people cannot fork quickly and start developing. They had to wait for my permission before they can be productive. So, I believe, this move to GIT would prove to be extremely healthy for improving external participation.

So guys, as you are awaiting the next big version of RESTClient, I request all of you to actively participate in testing the preview release once it is made available!

RESTClient source moved to GIT

Today I moved RESTClient source code from SVN to GIT. This happened after a frustrating issue with SVN last night. Similar issue is discussed in this stackoverflow thread. The problem with centralised SCM software is this: when you are focusing deep in your code, a merge or update has the possibility of hijacking your focus from code to not so glamorous problems.

All WizTools.org Builds are Mountain Lion Compatible

To all the Mac enthusiasts: all WizTools.org products are compatible with Mountain Lion. Have a good time :-)

Pomodoro Timer 1.1 Released

WizTools.org mini-projects released Pomodoro Timer 1.1. This version has usability enhancements like stopping a running Pomodoro by pressing Esc key, starting timer by pressing Enter, and finally a Mac build.

RESTClient 2.5 Released

Hello Everyone!

Happy to announce the immediate availability of RESTClient 2.5:

http://code.google.com/p/rest-client/downloads/list

The most prominent enhancements in this release are: SSL two-way authentication contributed by Matt Wilson [http://mattwilson.org/] and support for SSL self-signed certificates. For a complete list of enhancements, read the Release Notes:

http://code.google.com/p/rest-client/wiki/ReleaseNotes

XSLT Transform Cli Tool Updated: Version 0.2.0

This command-line tool from WizTools.org mini-projects now supports URLs as command-line parameters:

Cache-lib available in Maven Central

Cache-lib dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.wiztools</groupId>
    <artifactId>cache-lib</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.0</version>
</dependency>

Pagination Lib available in Maven Central

Maven users, link to the library:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.wiztools</groupId>
    <artifactId>pagination-lib</artifactId>
    <version>0.2.0</version>
</dependency>

Article: Debug classpath issues with style

Go to the article: Debug classpath issues with style.

Tool to assist in debugging classpath issues in Java Web Applications

Classloader Servlet project consists of two servlets: one to search for from which location is a particular class loaded; and the other to list the complete classpath (in the order of loading) available to the web application. Deployment is just copying the Jar file into your web application's /WEB-INF/lib directory.

WizTools.org Checksum Compute version 0.4.0 Released

WizTools.org Checksum Compute version 0.4.0 released. This release supports native drag and drop support for files. Download from: http://code.google.com/p/wiztools/downloads/list.

New cli tool: Tree

One of the tool I missed most when I switched to Mac from Linux was the tree command. I wrote a new tool Tree (available from WizTools.org mini-projects) in Java which has similar functionality as Unix tree. This tool is an executable Jar:

$ java -jar tree-0.1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar

The output is similar (not same) to Unix tree command. The tool also supports command-line options:

Download.

Markdown2Html: Java command line tool v0.1.0 released

I am happy to announce the immediate availability of Markdown2Html tool (as part of the WizTools.org mini-projects). Guess what, this is a command line tool written in Java used to convert Markdown text to HTML. The tool operates on STDIN and STDOUT. Sample usage:

$ java -jar markdown2html-0.1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar < sample.md > out.html

Download the executable Jar: http://wiztools.googlecode.com/files/markdown2html-0.1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar.

RESTClient Featured in Mac Softpedia

Check it out here: http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Development/Java/RESTClient.shtml

Checksum Compute 0.3.0 Released

Checksum Compute is a MD5 and SHA computation tool written in Java Swing. Version 0.3.0 is released and is available for download. The new version has better support for Mac.

WizTools.org RESTClient 2.4 Released

Grab the shiny new version! Release Notes lists the changes in the new version.

Timezone Converter 0.4.0 Released

The new release of Timezone Converter is also optimized for Mac:

Download from usual location.

LDAP Password Change Validation

Our QA team was in dilemma today: there was a HTML form which collected change password request, and updated the user password in LDAP on success scenario. There was no login form corresponding to this to validate if the password has been successfully updated in LDAP. To help the team, I developed a quick tool to test the LDAP by binding the user to it. The tool source is available here: http://code.google.com/p/wiztools/source/browse/#svn%2Fldap-auth-validator%2Ftrunk

Usage:

$ java -jar ldap-auth-validator-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar \
                                    -u <ldap://host:port/base.dn> [user-cn]

On executing the command, the tool will ask the user to input password. If the password allows the user to bind to the ldap, SUCCESS output will be printed.

WizTools.org Commons Lib: 0.3.0 Release

Commons Lib has undergone a revision, and is now enhanced with additional utility classes. The new version is available in public Maven repository:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.wiztools.commons</groupId>
  <artifactId>wiztools-commons-lib</artifactId>
  <version>0.3.0</version>
</dependency>

Release notes available here: http://code.google.com/p/wiztools-commons-lib/wiki/ReleaseNotes.

WizTools.org projects dependent on Commons Lib will be updated in a phased manner.

How-we-use-the-tool tutorial on Servlet Path Info

How-we-use-the-tool tutorial on Servlet Path Info: http://fileit.in/p/395: This note explains how I was able to test Apache mod_rewrite quickly using Servlet Path Info.

Web Tester (online tool hosted in Google App Engine)

Web Tester is a online tool to host your HTML page temporarily in a web-url. The tool is configured to expire content after 24 hours of publishing.

This tool was developed for a specific use in a project I was involved with. In this project we used Schema.org defined rich snippets for SEO purposes. For testing this we required Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool. Unfortunately, Google's tool was available for use only for pages available in the internet. I had to enable my team to test content during development itself. So, I developed this tool wherein the development version of the pages can be web-enabled for immediate testing using Google's tool.

I am sure this is just one use of this tool. I am sure users could find many other interesting uses of it.

The source code of the tool is available here: http://code.google.com/p/gae-web-tester/.