JSR-286 Compliant RSS And Atom Feed Reader

I have just uploaded a portlet which mimics the behavior of a news feed reader, although in a portlet. The portlet uses some of the new features from the portlet 2.0 specification viz Resource Serving. The source of the portlet is available in the project's SVN repository on the Project Bevy Site.

For a little more detail on what the portlet is capable of doing, visit my blog entry on sun about the portlet.

The portlet is AJAX enabled and for achieving this I have used the Adobe Spry Framework. I must say I am quite impressed with the Spry framework and found it extremely easy to use. Do give it a try!

To use this portlet you will require a JSR-286 compliant portlet container. Read the blog entry mentioned above for more details on where to get such a container.

If you do give this portlet a try, please post your opinions on this blog or my official blog

Flex Based Portlet - Rich Internet Application

Sometime ago I had posted an entry on my blog at blog.sun.com [ my official blog :-) ] about how to leverage a rich client application development environment like Flex to build a rich user interface in a portlet. You can read more about that on my blog here. There is a screencast on that blog entry that shows the portlet in action. The screencast shows a portlet I had developed that will present a user with some kind of a legel document (NDA, EULA) etc. and present the user with a canvas area which the user can use to E-Sign it using his mouse.

I recently posted the portlet and its associated Web Service on Project Bevy

Feel free to download the archive from the Bevy Download Page. The download consists of a Zip file which contains a readme.html file. Please go through the README and follow instructions to deploy and use it on your portlet container.

Windows Sharepoint Services Portlet

I have uploaded the portlet for accessing a Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) 2.0 site and retrieve data from there and displaying in a portlet on Project Bevy.

There are a set of portlets included in this project viz. List Portlet, Meeting Portlet, Document Library Portlet, Alerts Portlet etc. Each of these portlets will allow you to access the similar artifact on the WSS site. That is, the List Portlet will allow you to see data from any selected list on the WSS site.

Each of these portlet follows the same UI principle:

• Deploy the portlet to your portal ( Refer documentation of you portal or portlet container to deploy the portlet )
• In the Edit Mode of the portlet, you will see two links, one to edit the site information and the other to select the artifact you want to view.
• Select the "Edit Site" link, and add the WSS site information you want to access. Including site URL, username and password (Only Basic Auth supported. No NTLM ).
• After the site info is entered, click the "Edit List/Document Libraries/Meeting" link. This will bring you a list of all Lists/Meetings/Document Libraries available on the selected site. Select any one you wish to see in your portlet. Click Ok.
  
• And now in the view mode of your portlet you can see the data from the selected artifact in the WSS site in your portlet.

You can download the portlet from the main download page on Project Bevy.
Enjoy!

Charting Portlet Added to Project Bevy

I talked about the Project Bevy being opened up on Google Projects in my last post. I did an article a while back on Sun Developer Network on how you could incorporate dynamically generated charts in your portlets and had included sample code in that article.

Recently I rewrote the charting portlet from scratch and added a lot more features to it. Now the portlet takes configurable parameters for getting its charting data. It takes in a user specified ( configured ) database connection, SQL queries and then based on the chart type the user selected displays the chart dynamically.

I have added this charting portlet as my first entry into the project Bevy. Check out more details of it here and download and use it if you find it useful.

Project Bevy!

Check out the Project Bevy I started a few days ago on the Google Open Source Prjects. Like the word "Bevy" suggests, the project will consist of a group of useful utilities/projects written in different and varying languages. The projects will range from JavaEE, JavaSE, Windows Applications written in C/C++, .NET technologies etc. In addition to it I will be adding several useful scripts that I have done over the past years in different languages- Perl, PHP, WSH,BAT etc. The project is open, if you share interests and have something that you feel you can add to the project, check it out and sign up!

Number Game!

Consider that you have a 32 bit machine and you have a number such as say Hex CF39. How would you go about counting the number of 1's in the binary representation of this number? In other words, the binary representation of CF39 is 1100111100111001. What is needed is a way to count the number of 1's in this number i.e the answer should be 10.[ Your 32 bit machine doesn't have an instruction that can do this :-) ]

Blog At Sun

My name is Sandeep Soni and currently I work for Sun Microsystems, in Bangalore, India. My "official" blog is here.

I blog there on several technical topics, but once in a while also post some recreational stuff or interesting things I come across. Do visit there!

The "Pi" Room

Came across this question from a mailing list of pals :

The mighty adventurer came upon the House of "Pi". The house consisted of 9
rooms without windows, all in a row, with a digit of the numerical constant
pi written on the wall of each room:

entrance [3][1][4][1][5][9][2][6][5] exit


There was an entrance door to the first room (the "3" room) and an exit door
at the last room (the second "5" room). There were also doors between each
of the neighboring rooms. Near the entrance there was a sign:

Behold the House of "Pi"

1. You may only pass though the entrance door once.
2. Start with a score of zero.
3. When you enter a room, add the room number to your score.
4. You can only pass though the exit door if your current score is exactly 96.
5. You can't pass though more than 20 doors, including the entrance and exit doors.

By what moves (F and B = Forward and Back, where forward is towards the exit) can the mighty adventurer pass though the House of "Pi"?