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:

• Will your applications crash by huge demand on the launch date?
• Web 2.0: YUI -- Work Less, Make More
• Eclipse 3.4 released
• Upcoming courses for software developers

Will your applications crash by huge demand on the launch date?

If you're developing a web application that is supposed to be used by the public. Are you sure that it can handle the demand when it is launched into production? If it crashes or grinds to a halt, it will be a disaster to the image of your organization. Fortunately, there is something that you can do to prevent this nightmare from happening.

The solution is to test its performance under heavy loading during development. For example, with the Eclipse TPTP project, we can capture our interaction with the web application in the browser, loop it, say,  thundred times concurrently to simulate a hundred users accessing your application concurrently. Then it will show you the overall performance of the application and more importantly, which part of the code is taking up most of the time or memory so that you can optimize it.

Web 2.0: YUI -- Work Less, Make More

In the browser, everything on the right side of this diagram requires some hard work. YUI, like other JavaScript / CSS libraries, aims to make that work less hard.

YUI, the Yahoo! UI Library is one of favorite Web 2.0-style JavaScript libraries. The best way to think about YUI and what it does for you is to consider the difference between the user interface language of the browser as compared with the desktop. 

In the browser, the "default" language (such as HTML, Javascript, VBscript etc.) is relatively limited. You have some elements such as buttons, select menus, text inputs and hyperlinks. But on the desktop, you have much more such as Tabs, sliders, cascading menus, dialogs, tooltips, data grids, rich text editing, drag and drop, animation, autocompletion, and so on. After the developer uses YUI in web project, some desktop elements can be easily shown in the browser. Therefore a liitle coding effort is all it takes.

The best way to know YUI is to take a quick tour of the YUI website at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/. Or you can join our Web 2.0 course. Enroll now!

Eclipse 3.4 released

Eclipse 3.4, also called Eclipse Ganymede, has just been released. I think the most important enhancement is that the Java compiler take advantage of multi-core CPUs, improving performance by up to 30%. The other enhancements are listed here. You can download it here.

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