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Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Saturday, July 5, 2014
DirectX SDK
Now I'm reading a book Beginning .NET Game Programming in C# [11]. It talks about using the technologies of GDI+ and DirectX. GDI+ is used for 2D, and DirectX for 3D. The book was published in 2004, so it uses VS.NET 2003 and DirectX SDK 9. The book is easy to read, so I was able to quickly skim through in 3 hours. It seems to be clearly written, with 7 chapters and several example games. At the end there is a bonus chapter on porting a game, .Nettrix, to Picket PC. Appendix A gives a list of recommended game programming books for interested readers. Appendices B, C and D are experiences and suggestions on how to make good, successful games by veteran developers.
For a brief idea on the comparison of GDI and DirectX, see [2][3].
DirectX is Microsoft's technology on high performance graphics application development.
The most recent version is DirectX SDK v9.29.1962 released on 06/07/2010, and can be downloaded here [9]. It works on windows XP and above. If you just want the DirectX End-User Runtime, you can download here [10].
Since Windows 8, the DirectX SDK is combined into Windows SDK [1]. If you have VS.NET 2012 installed, it should include it.
== DirectX development in VirtualBox XP ==
Microsoft's Tutorial on DirectX programming is at [4][5] (note tutorial in [4] is on C#, but the SDK downloaded form [9] contains only C++ examples). I got error "D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE" when running example programs (from the book [11]) on XP in mac VirtualBox. Don't know this is a limitation of the mac hardware or of the VirtualBox environment. After following the diagnosing procedure in [6] (basically using the dxdiag console command), it seems XP in VirtualBox does not support Display support of Direct3D, DirectDraw might be supported by software. I found [7], and followed it to install Guest Extension in safe mode, and installed Direct3D support (note after this, running video such as in youtube could have mosaic effect initially, use dxdiag to disable/enable DirectX support, and reboot, the problem then is gone). After this, when running dxdiag again I got this error in [8], test passes for DirectX 8 and 9, but not 7, which seems to be expected behavior. The tutorial program can run properly. For the gaming book examples, some still reports openGL warnings as in the screenshot below (Figure 1). However, the games can run! And some of these are cool games with realistic 3D video and wave sound, such as Space donuts (Figure 2) and Spacewar 3D (Figure 3).
Conclusion is I should be able to do Direct X development in VirutalBox XP :)
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Figure 1. OpenGL warnings
|
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Figure 2. Game: Space Donuts
|
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Figure 3. Game: Spacewar 3D
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References:
JavaEE and SSH (Struts/Spring/Hibernate)
Java Structs/Spring/Hibernate are used widely to created JEE applications.
Some resources are here:
- A self-contained Java Struts Spring Hibernate Tutorial [1] in pdf to download. About 80 pages.
- mkyong.com [2] has many tutorials. E.g., Struts 2 + Spring + Hibernate Integration Example
- AppFuse [3] is a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM. It can generate SSH website template in SSH. This is a demo site of it.
The JEE ecology system is large, complex and distributed. It contains a lot of technology and can build highly professional enterprise web applications. However the distributed nature decides that it is poor to manage. For example, for each new functionality, one needs to go to a website, download another Jar and include it into the lib. This is comparable to adding references in VS.NET. In VS.NET all references come in package out of the box, and is much easier to handle mentally and practically. Another example is the directory structure. JEE directory structure is much more convoluted than ASP.NET, which artificially adds difficulty to the understandability.
== Servlet and JSP ==
Basically, servlet is more primitive, can use different protocols, embed html in java code. JSP is layered above servlet. JSP uses HTTP protocol, embed java code in html. JSP is compiled into Servlet class automatically by container server (e.g. Tomcat). JSP is more modern, like ASP and PHP, has better separation of java logic from UI presentation.
See more at [4][5].
== Tomcat ==
Tomcat is an application server for Java servlet.
It is possible to use Tomcat independent from Apache. But Tomcat works only for Java Servlet, and does not have as many other functions as Apache.
This is what happens when Tomcat works together with Apache. When Apache receives a browser request as a long stream of bytes, it passes it to Tomcat, which creates a request object to parse the stream into request parameters, and passes the request object to a (servlet) java class. After the (servlet) java class finishes the processing, and returns a response object, it then interprets this into a http response stream and passes the stream to Apache to be sent back.
To configure Tomcat to work with Apache, a Tomcat-Apache connector module is needed. This is often the mod_jk module using Apache JServ Protocol (AJP). By default Apache uses port 80, Tomcat uses 8080, the mod_jk module uses port 8009.
See more at [6][7][8].
== Development with Eclipse ==
Tomcat uses port 8080. If development and production are on the same machine, as in the case of personal project, Eclipse can do development in a separate Tomcat instance, the port number can be configured in server.xml, e.g., to 8081. At deployment time, it can use the export function (similar to Android project being exported to a apk file) to package the project into a *.war file. The *.war file, when deployed to the Tomcat server in production, is unpacked (you can do this manually with: jar -xvf *.war) and being served. This way, development and production use different Tomcat instances and different ports on the same machine.
To know if a port is being used by any process, say port 8080, type this:
sudo lsof -i :8080
To kill such process and release the port graciously [9], do:
sudo kill -15 <pid>
Here the tomcat pid can be obtained by:
ps -ax | grep tomcat
When running Tomcat with Eclipse, the server path used by Eclipse (similar to wwwroot for IIS, or /var/www/html for Apache, or /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ for Tomcat7) is: workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.wst.server.core/tmp0/wtpwebapps
1) after first creating a project, it may complain the j2se1.4.0 JRE not match installation jdk. So you have to go to Library, and reselect the jdk to use.
2) another example, Tomcat7 installation has one directory at /var/lib/tomcat7/, and another at /usr/share/tomcat7. The latter needs references to many files/folders in the former location, so you need to manually create soft links in the latter place.
3) add a server to the current project may not work, and complains port 8080 already in use, for this you need to change the port number used in server.xml. Solutions to these problems are found online, e.g., in [9][10][11][12].
4) as one more prominent example, I finished the tutorial project in [1], in the process I need to download lib jar files from 15 different websites to set it up.
5) use the log4j project as an example, in version 1.2, one file log4j-1.2.17.jar can do it. But in version 2.0-rc2, you got a large number of jar files to choose from, for different platforms at least, have to include the api and core jar files, then some others. It's getting way bloated up.
== Struts ==
A MVC web framework for JEE development. For more details see [13][14].
== Spring ==
A programming and configuration framework for JEE development. Its principles include IOC (Dependency Injection), AOP, MVC, Convention over configuration etc. It's ambitious. But criticisms say it's just a loose bundle of best-practices.
For more details see [15][16].
== Hibernate ==
An ORM module for JEE development. ORM stands for Object-Relational Mapping. It basically handles all the work connecting to database and hides the details, through the use of configuration files. For more details see [17][18].
Java SSH can be used together. One major reason of their appearing was to address the unnecessary complexity of EJB.
I feel it's too much building up of concepts, which are often old wine packaged in new bottles. Servlet and JSP are the most primitive building blocks of the entire stack. While these technologies aim to provide a framework that's supposed to make enterprise application development easy, they are actually creating layers over layers, and become very much counter-intuitive to pick up. Tools are just tools, but now just to learn how to use the tools can become a full time job. In this aspect, LAMP and .NET are much more intuitive.
References:
[1] Java Struts Spring Hibernate Tutorial
[2] mkyong.com - Java related tutorials
[3] AppFuse - a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM
[4] Difference of JSP and Servlet
[5] Coding Servlet and JSP from ground up
[6] Can Tomcat run WITHOUT Apache
[7] Tomcat.apache.org: omcat-Apache Howto
[8] Apache 2 with Tomcat 6: How to configure Tomcat to work with Apache
[9] Tomcat startup 8080 port already in use
[10] Eclipse cannot load the tomcat server configuration at serverstomcat-v7-0-server-at-localhost-config
[12] Cannot add a new Tomcat server
[13] struts.apache.org
[14] Wiki: Apache Struts
[15] spring.io
[16] Wiki: Spring Framework
[17] hibernate.org
[18] Wiki: Hibernate (Java)
Some resources are here:
- A self-contained Java Struts Spring Hibernate Tutorial [1] in pdf to download. About 80 pages.
- mkyong.com [2] has many tutorials. E.g., Struts 2 + Spring + Hibernate Integration Example
- AppFuse [3] is a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM. It can generate SSH website template in SSH. This is a demo site of it.
The JEE ecology system is large, complex and distributed. It contains a lot of technology and can build highly professional enterprise web applications. However the distributed nature decides that it is poor to manage. For example, for each new functionality, one needs to go to a website, download another Jar and include it into the lib. This is comparable to adding references in VS.NET. In VS.NET all references come in package out of the box, and is much easier to handle mentally and practically. Another example is the directory structure. JEE directory structure is much more convoluted than ASP.NET, which artificially adds difficulty to the understandability.
== Servlet and JSP ==
Basically, servlet is more primitive, can use different protocols, embed html in java code. JSP is layered above servlet. JSP uses HTTP protocol, embed java code in html. JSP is compiled into Servlet class automatically by container server (e.g. Tomcat). JSP is more modern, like ASP and PHP, has better separation of java logic from UI presentation.
See more at [4][5].
== Tomcat ==
Tomcat is an application server for Java servlet.
It is possible to use Tomcat independent from Apache. But Tomcat works only for Java Servlet, and does not have as many other functions as Apache.
This is what happens when Tomcat works together with Apache. When Apache receives a browser request as a long stream of bytes, it passes it to Tomcat, which creates a request object to parse the stream into request parameters, and passes the request object to a (servlet) java class. After the (servlet) java class finishes the processing, and returns a response object, it then interprets this into a http response stream and passes the stream to Apache to be sent back.
To configure Tomcat to work with Apache, a Tomcat-Apache connector module is needed. This is often the mod_jk module using Apache JServ Protocol (AJP). By default Apache uses port 80, Tomcat uses 8080, the mod_jk module uses port 8009.
See more at [6][7][8].
== Development with Eclipse ==
Tomcat uses port 8080. If development and production are on the same machine, as in the case of personal project, Eclipse can do development in a separate Tomcat instance, the port number can be configured in server.xml, e.g., to 8081. At deployment time, it can use the export function (similar to Android project being exported to a apk file) to package the project into a *.war file. The *.war file, when deployed to the Tomcat server in production, is unpacked (you can do this manually with: jar -xvf *.war) and being served. This way, development and production use different Tomcat instances and different ports on the same machine.
To know if a port is being used by any process, say port 8080, type this:
sudo lsof -i :8080
To kill such process and release the port graciously [9], do:
sudo kill -15 <pid>
Here the tomcat pid can be obtained by:
ps -ax | grep tomcat
When running Tomcat with Eclipse, the server path used by Eclipse (similar to wwwroot for IIS, or /var/www/html for Apache, or /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ for Tomcat7) is: workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.wst.server.core/tmp0/wtpwebapps
== Issues running Eclipse with Tomcat ==
My feeing with Eclipse JEE development is, many configurations can go wrong. There is no central support, so you just get on google and search for other people's discussions and solutions. The quality of environment integration is less mature as the .NET world. For example:
1) after first creating a project, it may complain the j2se1.4.0 JRE not match installation jdk. So you have to go to Library, and reselect the jdk to use.
2) another example, Tomcat7 installation has one directory at /var/lib/tomcat7/, and another at /usr/share/tomcat7. The latter needs references to many files/folders in the former location, so you need to manually create soft links in the latter place.
3) add a server to the current project may not work, and complains port 8080 already in use, for this you need to change the port number used in server.xml. Solutions to these problems are found online, e.g., in [9][10][11][12].
4) as one more prominent example, I finished the tutorial project in [1], in the process I need to download lib jar files from 15 different websites to set it up.
5) use the log4j project as an example, in version 1.2, one file log4j-1.2.17.jar can do it. But in version 2.0-rc2, you got a large number of jar files to choose from, for different platforms at least, have to include the api and core jar files, then some others. It's getting way bloated up.
Compared to the IIS world, there are much to worry here, and many need manual setup. The .metadata folder under the current workspace contains many files and is complicated. If you kill the Eclipse process before it's properly shutdown, Eclipse may not be able to start, and fix is to remove something corrupted here in .metadata.
== Struts ==
A MVC web framework for JEE development. For more details see [13][14].
== Spring ==
A programming and configuration framework for JEE development. Its principles include IOC (Dependency Injection), AOP, MVC, Convention over configuration etc. It's ambitious. But criticisms say it's just a loose bundle of best-practices.
For more details see [15][16].
== Hibernate ==
An ORM module for JEE development. ORM stands for Object-Relational Mapping. It basically handles all the work connecting to database and hides the details, through the use of configuration files. For more details see [17][18].
Java SSH can be used together. One major reason of their appearing was to address the unnecessary complexity of EJB.
I feel it's too much building up of concepts, which are often old wine packaged in new bottles. Servlet and JSP are the most primitive building blocks of the entire stack. While these technologies aim to provide a framework that's supposed to make enterprise application development easy, they are actually creating layers over layers, and become very much counter-intuitive to pick up. Tools are just tools, but now just to learn how to use the tools can become a full time job. In this aspect, LAMP and .NET are much more intuitive.
References:
[1] Java Struts Spring Hibernate Tutorial
[2] mkyong.com - Java related tutorials
[3] AppFuse - a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM
[4] Difference of JSP and Servlet
[5] Coding Servlet and JSP from ground up
[6] Can Tomcat run WITHOUT Apache
[7] Tomcat.apache.org: omcat-Apache Howto
[8] Apache 2 with Tomcat 6: How to configure Tomcat to work with Apache
[9] Tomcat startup 8080 port already in use
[10] Eclipse cannot load the tomcat server configuration at serverstomcat-v7-0-server-at-localhost-config
[12] Cannot add a new Tomcat server
[13] struts.apache.org
[14] Wiki: Apache Struts
[15] spring.io
[16] Wiki: Spring Framework
[17] hibernate.org
[18] Wiki: Hibernate (Java)
Apache projects
A full list of Apache projects is here: http://www.apache.org/dist/
For example:
- For httpd web server, it's here: http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/. This repository contains the source code.
- Here is the Apache Commons project, which aims to provide reusable Java components. Among these is the Java Commons Daemon component for both windows and unix.
For example:
- For httpd web server, it's here: http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/. This repository contains the source code.
- Here is the Apache Commons project, which aims to provide reusable Java components. Among these is the Java Commons Daemon component for both windows and unix.
Friday, July 4, 2014
Hiren's Boot CD
Hiren's Boot CD is a bundle of system utilities in a bootable CD. Here is a list of included software tools.
It is highly useful.
For example, my Windows installation on VirtualBox used 2 partitions C: and D:. Unfortunately C: drive is only 6GB. I found the space not enough when I tried to install VS.NET Express 2008 and relevant server development softwares. Then I used a tool (Partition Wizard Home Edition 7.0 in the Partition Tools section, see here for a short introduction with screenshot) from this CD to shrink D: drive and expand C: drive. Now I have 14GB on C: drive, enough to fit in the softwares I wanted. It only took 5-10 minutes and 2 automatic reboot, partly because the disks are still quite empty.
Just download the ISO (at the end of this page, or direct link here) and burn it to a CD, or just mount it virtually. The download is about 592.5MB in size.
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Notes on Git and Github
##############################################
# Create a new repository on the command line
touch README.md
git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"
git remote add origin https://github.com/[username]/[project name]
git push -u origin master
##############################################
# Push an existing repository from the command line
git remote add origin https://github.com/[username]/[project name]
git push -u origin master
##############################################
# Create new local clone from a remote project:
git clone https://github.com/[username]/[project name]
##############################################
# Push to remote repository after update local files (in "git add .", dot "." means all changed files)
git add .
git commit -m "..."
git push -u origin master
##############################################
# Other commands
# Show status of local repos
git status
# Update local files from remote repos
git pull
# More commands by usage frequency
git diff
git log
git mv
git rm
git tag
git branch
git merge
git checkout
git fetch
git grep
git reset
git rebase
# In general, get help information.
git help
usage: git [--version] [--exec-path[=]] [--html-path] [--man-path] [--info-path]
[-p|--paginate|--no-pager] [--no-replace-objects]
[--bare] [--git-dir=] [--work-tree=]
[-c name=value] [--help]
<command> [<args>]
The most commonly used git commands are:
add Add file contents to the index
bisect Find by binary search the change that introduced a bug
branch List, create, or delete branches
checkout Checkout a branch or paths to the working tree
clone Clone a repository into a new directory
commit Record changes to the repository
diff Show changes between commits, commit and working tree, etc
fetch Download objects and refs from another repository
grep Print lines matching a pattern
init Create an empty git repository or reinitialize an existing one
log Show commit logs
merge Join two or more development histories together
mv Move or rename a file, a directory, or a symlink
pull Fetch from and merge with another repository or a local branch
push Update remote refs along with associated objects
rebase Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head
reset Reset current HEAD to the specified state
rm Remove files from the working tree and from the index
show Show various types of objects
status Show the working tree status
tag Create, list, delete or verify a tag object signed with GPG
See 'git help <command>' for more information on a specific command.
##############################################
# Difference of git add -A, ., -u [6].
##############################################
# github usage:
[1] https://help.github.com/articles/creating-releases
[2] Git Tutorial
[3] A successful Git Branching Model
[4] Github md file formatting
[5] Undoing git changes
[6] Difference of git add -A, ., -u
# Create a new repository on the command line
touch README.md
git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"
git remote add origin https://github.com/[username]/[project name]
git push -u origin master
##############################################
# Push an existing repository from the command line
git remote add origin https://github.com/[username]/[project name]
git push -u origin master
##############################################
# Create new local clone from a remote project:
git clone https://github.com/[username]/[project name]
##############################################
# Push to remote repository after update local files (in "git add .", dot "." means all changed files)
git add .
git commit -m "..."
git push -u origin master
##############################################
# Revert to a previous version [5]
# Shows all previous versions with hash value
git log --oneline
# Checkout given version given hash value. Change will be saved to repository
git checkout
# Checkout individual file. Will be saved to repository as change
git checkout <hash> <filename>
# Checkout most recent version
git checkout master
##############################################
# Other commands
# Show status of local repos
git status
# Update local files from remote repos
git pull
# More commands by usage frequency
git diff
git log
git mv
git rm
git tag
git branch
git merge
git checkout
git fetch
git grep
git reset
git rebase
# In general, get help information.
git help
usage: git [--version] [--exec-path[=
[-p|--paginate|--no-pager] [--no-replace-objects]
[--bare] [--git-dir=
[-c name=value] [--help]
<command> [<args>]
The most commonly used git commands are:
add Add file contents to the index
bisect Find by binary search the change that introduced a bug
branch List, create, or delete branches
checkout Checkout a branch or paths to the working tree
clone Clone a repository into a new directory
commit Record changes to the repository
diff Show changes between commits, commit and working tree, etc
fetch Download objects and refs from another repository
grep Print lines matching a pattern
init Create an empty git repository or reinitialize an existing one
log Show commit logs
merge Join two or more development histories together
mv Move or rename a file, a directory, or a symlink
pull Fetch from and merge with another repository or a local branch
push Update remote refs along with associated objects
rebase Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head
reset Reset current HEAD to the specified state
rm Remove files from the working tree and from the index
show Show various types of objects
status Show the working tree status
tag Create, list, delete or verify a tag object signed with GPG
See 'git help <command>' for more information on a specific command.
##############################################
# Difference of git add -A, ., -u [6].
##############################################
# github usage:
[1] https://help.github.com/articles/creating-releases
[2] Git Tutorial
[3] A successful Git Branching Model
[4] Github md file formatting
[5] Undoing git changes
[6] Difference of git add -A, ., -u
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Birthday Calculator update
Today updated the Birthday Calculator Android App according to the feedback of the friend. Added these functions:
1) Instead of using keyUP() which does not work for real Android phone touch screen event, now it is using OnChange event, actually, TextWatcher is the name here.
2) Tax is added. Check the checkbox in front of Tax, then Tax is included in tip calculation.
3) The settings page is setup now. The tax rate is included in setting.
The new interface is like this:
1) Instead of using keyUP() which does not work for real Android phone touch screen event, now it is using OnChange event, actually, TextWatcher is the name here.
2) Tax is added. Check the checkbox in front of Tax, then Tax is included in tip calculation.
3) The settings page is setup now. The tax rate is included in setting.
The new interface is like this:
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