Dear Software Developers,

This CPTTM Software Developer newsletter is to bring useful news to you, software developers in Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or recommend your friends to subscribe, just email me at kent@cpttm.org.mo. Old issues are available here.

Topics in this issue:

• Printer-Friendly Web Pages Made Easy
• Spring 2.5
• Visual Studio 2008 released
• Five ways for tracing Java execution
• Upcoming courses for software developers

Printer-Friendly Web Pages Made Easy

Some web pages can be difficult to read online. It's because that the ads and flashing blinking images. Do you think that generate a printer friendly version from your web pages? Web2printer could fit your need. 

web2printer is PHP script, that gives your visitors the ability to view your web pages in a "printer-friendly" manner. web2printer removes images or replace them with the alt text. If you want, web2printer creates an hyperlink cross reference at the page bottom of the page. Also it is free for non commercial users.

For more detail, please see http://www.printer-friendly.com/

Spring 2.5

Spring 2.5 extends the framework's core themes of flexibility and power by providing an extensive set of configuration approaches, with an emphasis on comprehensive support for conifgureation annotations.

Following are key features and enhancements of Spring 2.5,

• Comprehensive support for Java 6 and Java EE 5 APIs
• Enhanced support for web controllers
• Improved testing capabilities
• Autodetection of components in the class path
• Extended AspectJ integration
• Enhanced messaging support

It is currently available. For more information and to download the software, please visit http://www.springframework.org/download

Visual Studio 2008 released

Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 were released to manufacturing (RTM). This release will enable developers and development organizations to be more productive, take advantage of all the latest platform advances on Windows, Office and the Web, and collaborate more effectively throughout the software life cycle.

For more information and download trial editions, please visit http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx

Five ways for tracing Java execution

Most of time, programmers need a lot of time to trace the code and debugging. There are some tips here.

• The Basic: Breakpoints and Step-by-step Execution. Start with the simplest way: set up breakpoints and start tracing your execution.
• The Primal: Debug messages. The simplest way is to use System.out.println statements to print out messages to the console. The next step would be to use a logging mechanism: the basic JDK logging, Apache Commons Logging or Log4j.
• The Hot Shot: Dynamic Proxy. Once you intercept the calls, you may print out appropriate debug messages with all the information you require.
• The Brute Force: Run-time Profiler. Profilers are powerful tools that trace all the calls in the system through special JVM hooks. 
• The New Age: Aspects. it's a quick and easy way of intercepting the execution of your code. You can selectively set hooks around methods, constructors, field access, etc., without modifying the original code.

Upcoming courses for software developers

Feedbacks

Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 28781313 or kent@cpttm.org.mo. We also have two other newsletters: CIO newsletter and Network administrator newsletter, your friends may like to subscribe.

Until next time, 

Kent Tong