Mahboob's Journal

Rails the darling of startups could possibly give way to the new kid on the block, Meteor which is built on JavaScript. In Berlin at least, MEAN another set of JavaScript technologies has over taken Rails.[1] Meteor has structural blocks and semantics that would resonate with Rails developers. In this blog post, I cover five such idioms common to both technologies. They are: i) templates ii) helpers iii) partials iv) fixtures, and v) routing. And also give relevant extracts from the books on Rails [2] and Meteor [3] on these aspects.

What if you wanted to develop a SOAP web service without using JAXB? Now, as a Java programmer, why in the world would you not use JAXB? After all, it makes it so easy to map classes to XML representations.

About parsing XML, Horstmann & Cornell write: “To process an XML document, you need to parse it. A parser is a program that reads a file, confirms that the file has the correct format, breaks it up into the constituent elements, and lets a programmer access those elements. The Java library supplies two kind of XML parsers: Tree parsers, such as the Document Object Model (DOM) parser, that read an XML document into a tree structure. Streaming parsers, such as the Simple API for XML (SAX) parser, that generate events as they read an XML document. The DOM parser is easier to use for most purposes.”[1]

XSD is XML Schema Definition, one of those recursive acronyms that I like. In this post, I share my notes on generating an xsd file from a given XML file. But first a disclaimer: It’s been quite a while since I played with XML, so my methods maybe a bit outdated; if you know of better tools and automation approaches please let me know.