Projects Galore At Osmania University

The month of May was a very critical month, filled with exams and lab assignments. The second year students (presently third year) were encouraged to submit a miniature project displaying their skill in Java, as a part of the curriculum.

Initially, the idea of motivating students to build their miniature projects was crafted by Mr. Hameed, a faculty member of my college.

The students worked on their projects under the guidance of the faculty, with support from the college management and S.O.U.R.C.E. All the labs were equipped with NetBeans to make project development easy.

There were 11 groups, each consisting of 5 members, and thereby 11 different projects. The projects included different applications like -

1. Media Player
2. Movie Ticketing Application
3. Download Manager
4. Beat Box

And many more.

After completion of the projects, each team gave a presentation about their project showcasing their theme and the methodology of implementation.

Overall, the entire concept was a huge success and the students gained a lot of exposure to the Java programming language.

Industry Association Program

To provide students with an exposure to industry practices and work environment, Osmania University started the Industry Association Program (A.K.A Industry Attachment Program, Summer Internship Program), as a part of the curriculum.

Under the IAP, the third year students are encouraged to work in a professional organization or a R&D organization to help students get acquainted with industry practices and the work environment.

Several government and private organization have been assisting the IAP for the past eight years and students of Osmania University have benefited immensely from the program.

This year, Sun Microsystems Inc. has extended its cooperation in the program and helped a lot of students get introduced to the work culture of corporate organizations.

There were 18 students working on 6 different projects, each executed by 3 students. Several technologies of Sun like OpenSolaris, MySQL, NetBeans, etc. were utilized in the development of these projects.

We are extremely grateful and express our profound gratitude and indebtedness to the entire Sun team for their constant support and inspiring guidance, throughout the IAP.

MySQL Clustering - Technology Summary

The demo framework not only showcases the MySQL capability but also demonstrates a variety of Sun Technologies and Industry Standard Interfaces.

The implementation has been modular so that the demo can be downsized but still the features can be demonstrated.

The various components that have been utilized are listed below -

• Hardware: Intel Quad Core Desktop with 4GB RAM
• Virtualization: Sun VirtualBox
• Operating Systems: Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Fedora Linux, OpenSolaris
• Database: MySQL
• Web Servers: GlassFish and Internet Information Services
• IDEs: NetBeans and Microsoft Visual Studio
• Web Service Layer: Java API for XML Web Services
• Front End GUI: Java Swing, HTML, JavaScript, Visual Web Java Server Faces, Java Micro Edition, C# and ASP.NET

Download the entire project here.

MySQL Clustering - Project Approach

As per the advice of Sun Team, the project has been implemented in a staggered model as outlined below with a use case that covered a Telephone Enterprise Customer Database wherein each Customer is uniquely identified by phone number (country code + phone number) -

Database Administration

This Phase covered the Hardware Setup, Operating System Setup, and Installation of MySQL. The major focus during this phase was to setup Replication features of MySQL using two different approaches - Asynchronous and Synchronous.

Both the replication approaches were implemented against two MySQL engines - InnoDB and MyISAM.

Implementation and comprehensive testing was performed at this stage which also covered failures of databases and scalability under the available hardware configuration.

Business Logic Development

This Phase covered the business logic requirement where the stress and focus was on standard database interfaces. The demo implemented Hibernate, an ORM model and JDBC to connect to MySQL database.

The connection to the database using these technologies is achieved through a Web Services layer. CRUD functionality has been implemented using Web Services.

Graphical User Interface Development

The focus of this phase is to demonstrate how an end-user application would interact with MySQL database using the Web Service Layer. The demo implemented various client-side GUIs in the form of front-end technologies like Java Swing, Visual Web Java Server Faces (JSF), Java Micro Edition and ASP.NET.

Exhaustive test cases have been written to demonstrate the functionality covering both success and failure situations.

MySQL Clustering - Project Design

Project Goals

The goal of the project is to provide a snapshot capability for three types of audience -

• Database Administrators - Installation, Replication and Clustering of MySQL databases both in standalone and virtualized Operating System Environments covering Windows, Linux and Solaris
• Business Logic Developers - CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) operations using Web Services to interact with the MySQL database adopting JDBC and Hibernate interfaces
• Client Side GUI Developers - Provide sample codes to access and implement data management through above Web Services. The Client interfaces are diversified covering J2ME, JSF, Java Swing, and ASP.net to demonstrate the versatility of the seamless interface to MySQL database

Project Architecture

The project as depicted below implements the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, with the database layer representing the model, the business logic layer representing the controller and the font-end GUI representing the view.

MySQL Clustering - Project Backdrop

Industry Association Program

To provide students with an exposure to industry practices and work environment, Osmania University started the Industry Association Program (IAP), as a part of the curriculum, wherein the third year students are encouraged to work in a professional organization.

As a part of IAP, we (J. Kamala Ramya, K. Laxman Bharadwaj and me) had been assigned to Sun Microsystems Inc.

Organization Profile

Sun Microsystems Inc. is a multi-national vendor of several software and hardware products. The Headquarters of Sun Microsystems is at Santa Clara, California, United States. It has branches in several countries covering APAC, America and Europe.

Its contribution to the field of hardware has been marvelous, especially with the SPARC architecture.

Sun has several software products to its credit, which include Solaris, Star Office, VirtualBox, MySQL, etc. The most significant contribution of Sun Microsystems to the field of computers and electronics has been the "Java programming language", which is widely used in several devices, which include computers and mobile phones.

Sun is a big supporter of Open Systems and is one of the major contributors of Open Source Software.

Project Identification

Our initial interactions with Sun Team was to identity a task which would benefit Sun as an organization and for us to improve capability and be industry ready after our BE course.

After evaluating various product lines and discussions with Sun Team, a decision was made in concurrence with Sun Team to focus on a Demo Framework which would showcase MySQL capabilities and how it would interface with various layers in a typical application environment.

After the $1 billion acquisition of MySQL, Sun has been actively propagating the product to its clients. It was felt that a demo framework encompassing standard frontend interfaces, standard database interfaces and standard database functionality would help the clients to make a knowledgeable assessment of the product.

The demo suite proposed was expected to cover the replication features of MySQL to demonstrate how MySQL can fit in a complete commercial application involving various layers like - Databases, Business Logic and GUI.

Globalized Solutions - Summary

For every new program that is being developed fresh, it is recommended that it should follow the MVC pattern and that it satisfies the criteria for an internationalized program. Going forward, internationalization is an unspoken requirement that every application in global markets should satisfy.

Using translation and transliteration features to the maximum reduces the requirement of a language expert and there-by obtain project profitability.

Whichever project is being worked upon, development, migration, enhancement or QA, thinking of ways to apply the concept of Globalization will improve the robustness of the application.

Database Internationalization

Besides GUI, an application has two other parts - Business Logic and Persistence. Typically the Business Logic is isolated and no language changes would be required. For globalized applications, the Persistence is typically a database like Oracle, MySQL, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server etc.

The advancements in Databases Technologies have simplified the support for multi-languages. Most of the databases today support internationalization using Unicode characters. Restrictions on the languages that can be a part of the database can also be imposed. However the availability of this restriction is dependent on the DBMS being used.

Each database management system provides its own procedure to implement this multi-lingual data processing on their database but many times a language parameter setup during installation would suffice.

Translation And Transliteration

Though not directly a part of internationalization, translation and transliteration provide the basis for I18n.

Translation

Translation is the process of converting a fragment of text from one language to another language. Translation is done by either by human translators, or by translators which involve artificial intelligence. In applications where perfect translation is required, human translators are employed.

However in applications where perfection of translation is not the at-most priority, AI translators are used. Examples of such translators include, Yahoo Babel Fish and Google Translate.

Transliteration

Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system. In the case of I18n, this provides a method of converting the keyboard language to a desired language.

Popular sites like Orkut make use of this service to create messages in languages like Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, etc. Several services related to translations and transliterations are available on the internet. In fact, Google provides APIs to directly implement these features in our applications.

Usage

If there is an existing product where a locale change is required and it does not follow the MVC structure, the developer can use the concepts of translation and transliteration and there-by migrate the application to the required locale. The language part is then reviewed by a language expert.

Even during internationalization, the resources bundles can be created for various languages using these concepts and they can then be offered to review by a language expert. These concepts are also useful when developers are interacting with users who do not know English through mails or documents to get an initial feel of the requirements.

Support for a product can also be made cost effective where the user logs issues in native language and the person supporting can understand the issue at high level using translation concepts. Reducing the time requirement of language expert is a significant cost saving in projects as these experts charge very high.

Internationalizing Mobiles Using J2ME

Unlike desktop applications and web application, mobile applications cannot utilize resource bundles. Internationalizing mobile applications follows a slightly different approach.

In such devices, internationalization is achieved using a user-defined resource class. This class holds all the strings required by the application in various languages. Depending on the locale, the required set of strings is returned to the main application, and that application in-turn displays the locale-specific content.

Generally the resource class obtains the locale of the mobile device and returns the locale-specific set of strings to the main application. However the languages supported by the mobile-device are entirely device-dependent. So there is a huge possibility that the internationalization efforts may not be completely perceptible in all the targeted mobile devices.