@Override
    protected void onResume() {
        super.onResume();
        someAsyncStuff.start();
        expensiveResource.allocate();
    }
 
    @Override
    protected void onPause() {
        super.onPause();
        someAsyncStuff.stop();
        expensiveResource.free();
    }

Let’s image we had an interface ActivityLifeCycleListener and one could add those to an Activity:

    Activity.addLifeCycleListener(ActivityLifeCycleListener listener)

The interface would be straight forward:

interface ActivityLifeCycleListener {
    void onActivityResume(Activity activity);
    void onActivityPause(Activity activity);
    // on...  and so on...
}

Like this, each object could attach itself to the life cycle, for examle in the constructor.

Example:

public ExpensiveResource(Activity activity) {
    activity.addLifeCycleListener(this);
    // other stuff
}
 
public void onActivityResume(Activity activity) {
    allocate();
}
 
public void onActivityPause(Activity activity) {
    free();
}

This would be particularly great for library classes used in more than one Activity/project. The advantages:

• Individual Activities don’t have to delegate their life cycle
• Less code (just once, not in all activities)
• Less error prone (e.g. one cannot forget overriding a lifecycle method one of the activity)
• Simpler to use (for example new ExpensiveResource(this) is sufficient)

What do you think?

Here’s the main video presenting the specs:

The Android 2.2 tablet comes with the official Android Market. Almost all Android apps should be available for the Galaxy Tab. A nice thing about the pre-installed apps is that they make use of the bigger screen efficiently. For example, the email app uses two columns: the message list on the left and a the details of the selected message on the right. This is one of my favorite features. Samsung’s tablet also comes with a newspaper and bookstore. In Germany, users can choose from 48 newspapers.

The perceived performance was very good. Like the Galaxy S it seems to have a decent 3D performance as well, making it suitable for advanced games. The Linpack performance app showed around 14 MFLOPS, which lets one speculate whether the JIT Compiler of Android 2.2 is not enabled yet. It was a pre-series device, and there may be some improvements to the final version. The Quadrant performance app showed the Galaxy Tab on the third place after the Nexus One 2.2 and Moto Droid X, but before the Galaxy S.

I gave my labyrinth-style game K’UMPA a quick try: There were some UI glitches at the start and menu screens, but the game itself was smoothly playable in full screen. Some apps and games will need adjustments adapting the new screen resolution and ratio.

We were not told the pricing details yet. I am at the press conference starting at 11:00 am Berlin time, and will update specs in the article.

Oh, and one more thing: you can use the tablet as a phone.

On its first day, QuickSearch also got its first update: V1.1 utilizes the voice recognition feature of the latest Android update (RC33). Instead of typing in your query you can just speak it. I really like how applications can connect to each other on Android!

And thanks to a very nice guy from the Netherlands, who was of great help, I added a Dutch search profile. I hope to add more search profiles soon – any suggestions for this?

And least, but not last: The initial idea for this little utility came from Vivien Dollinger, who also supported the development in various ways.

Compared to Netbeans, Eclipse with WTP seems to offer only 2nd class support for Glassfish. Unfortunately, this did not change with Eclipse 3.4 and WTP 3.0. For example, directory deployment is not supported. Publishing a EAR project to Glassfish always implies creating a new EAR File. I played around with it a bit and decided to switch back to ant. It requires just a simple ant script to copy the files into a directory structure and to call asadmin deploydir. This reduced deployment time by 20% for my EAR project. Another advantage of exploded directory deployment is that changes in JSPs (including JSF) do not require redeployment. Changes are immediately visible after copying the JSP files.

The next observation was that antivirus software had a major impact on deployment performance. I do not recommend to switch it off completely, but I was curious to get a number, which turned out to be surprisingly high: Without virus protection, deployment got over 60% faster! Maybe I should consider replacing Kaspersky with a faster virus scanner… At least, Kaspersky allows to exclude file checking for programs, which are considered trustworthy. By excluding only the java.exe used by Glassfish, deployment got around 15% faster after all. In my opinion, this is a OK compromise of performance and protection. But, as said before, I do not want to recommend how you use your virus protection: it is totally up to you.

Let’s have closer look at the graphs and the set-up. I tested it with a small EAR project consisting of two EJB jars and one web application WAR. A few entity beans are used with drop-and-create-tables, so deployment includes some database operations. The first graph shows redeployment time in seconds, which were measured three times. The initial deployment was not measured to get consistent and repeatable values. Anyway, the values are just a snapshot for a random project and are most probably not representative. I think performance will depend highly on your project and virus scanner, but the presented figures should give you at least a clue.

The second graph visualizes the same values, but shows the performance gain in percent. The combination of directory deployment and excluding java.exe from virus file scanning resulted in a 40% improvement.

Of course, deployment time is just one factor and in an efficient development process, frequent deployment is often avoided. Usually, this is done using a unit test based development approach. Another very interesting alternative is JavaRebel, which I will try to cover in another article soon.

Basic Installation and setup
Before pointing you to a guide for the basic steps, I suggest to check out what’s the newest release of Glassfish at its download site. To download Glassfish 2 Update Release 2 (April 2008, English only, 54MB):

wget http://java.net/download/javaee5/v2ur2/promoted/Linux/glassfish-installer-v2ur2-b04-linux.jar

Although the official site for V2 UR2 has some basic installation instructions, I recommend Jasper Kalkers blog article Installing Glassfish 2 on ubuntu 7.10. Besides installing Java and Glassfish, Jasper also explains how to set up a service script to automatically start Glassfish with user privileges. Of course, Debian users must adjust the scripts a bit because sudo is a Ubuntu-only command.

Virtuozzo vServer Memory Issues
If you try setup Glassfish in a shared server using Virtuozzo vServer, you may experience some weird memory issues when trying to run the ant setup script. Follow this blog article if you get errors like this:

BUILD FAILED
/home/gtest/glassfish/setup.xml:156: The following error occurred while executing this line:
/home/gtest/glassfish/setup.xml:137: Execute failed: java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: Cannot allocate memory

Change default passwords
Especially if your server is exposed to the Internet, you should secure Glassfish a little more. E.g. after the standard installation the admin console (port 4848) can be accessed by everyone who knows the default login admin/adminadmin. This can be changed in the admin console or using the change-admin-password command inside the asadmin console/command when the server is running.

asadmin change-admin-password

You should also change the master password (default is “changeit”). This time the server (the domain)
should not be running:

asadmin change-master-password

Port 80
By default, Glassfish listens to port 8080 for HTTP requests. The most popular ways to wire it to standard HTTP port 80 probably are:

• Apache using mod_jk
• authbind lets Glassfish to bind to port 80
• iptables redirection (Wikipedia has just the right example)
• Some proxy running on port 80 (like Squid)
• Some port forwarder utility

If Apache is running on your machine anyway, you could forward some URLs pattern to Glassfish using mod_jk (details). But you can easily run Glassfish stand alone if you do not need Apache. Thus, I deactivated the Apache service in favor of Glassfish because Apache would be just another system to be maintained.

Iptables and authbind both seem to be simple and robust solutions. I chose authbind because it is the only solution that allows Glassfish to actually listen to port 80 running as a non-root user. Note, that Linux normally requires processes listening to ports below 1024 running with superuser privileges, which is not recommended for security reasons. If you opt for authbind, you can configure Glassfish to use port 80 in the admin console. Look for http-listener-1 in the configuration section for HTTP. Here’s how to set up authbind for user glassfish (check the chown command if you want to use a different user).

apt-get install authbind
touch /etc/authbind/byport/80
chmod 500 /etc/authbind/byport/80
chown glassfish /etc/authbind/byport/80
(Ubuntu users, don’t forget to prepend “sudo”)

One drawback to this approach is that starting Glassfish now requires calling authbind:

authbind –deep asadmin start-domain domain1

Some more links and tips
By now, your Glassfish server should be up and running. The following selection of resources may also be useful for your next steps:

• Sun’s documentation for Glassfish 2 UR2
• Automatic domain restart
• Glassfish IDE Plugins, e.g. for Eclipse 3.3
• If you get a NullPointerException when deploying from Eclipse with WTP 2.0.2, you need to install additional patches for WTP (bug report)
• If you have installed Sun’s JDK 6 (apt-get install sun-java6-jdk), Java will be installed in /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.X.XX and will be linked from /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
• Troubleshooting memory issues
• The official Ability to run on port 80/443 as non-root user enhancement request
• If you are crazy enough, you can try to run PHP inside inside Glassfish using Quercus

Here, you can download an Ubuntu 8.04 (Desktop) VMware Image. This virtual Linux system with all its applications is usable out-of-the-box (e.g. with the free VMware Player). Thus, it is perfect to test drive Ubuntu or as a secondary operating system running within Windows. The image already comes with the current VMware Tools, Java 6, and Eclipse 3.3 Europa.

User name: jars
Password: jars
Root password: there is none in Ubuntu! Please Use sudo instead.

VM settings:
RAM: 512 MB RAM
Screen size: 1024×768
Language and keyboard: English
Partition size: 20 GB (dynamic)

Deutsche Version

Download Ubuntu 8.04 VMware Torrent (recommended)
Other downloads have been removed as they are not supported any longer. Sorry!

FAQs

Is there a “root” account? For security reasons, the root account is disabled in Ubuntu, and you do not need it. Instead use the command sudo.

The downloaded RAR archive seems corrupt (CRC error) – must it be download again? No, the RAR archive has a recovery record and can often be repaired. In WinRAR, choose “Tools -> Repair Archive” from its menu or press Alt+R. After repairing, the checksums should match the values listed before.

If you have trouble downloading, you may try the backup server.

Also from the MWC: Video interview with Rich Miner on Google Android

Q: What was TAT’s role in giving Android a new UI?
A: We are part of the open handset alliance working with specifying the platform UI.

Q: What were your primary goals in terms of style and functionality and how would you describe the outcome?
A: We are still working on is as you know, there will be a release in a couple of days. As all UI:s the goal is to make the style fit the target group, and make the right features as accessible as possible. A good UI is seldom noticed, only bad ones. So our goal is to make the platform and the devices built on it as user friendly as possible.

Q: Which particular challenges did you face in doing this particular work and how did you solve them?
A: One big challenge with a platform which should cater multiple form factors is always that the UI should “scale” well and be plastic, as the same time as it should make optimal use of the physical UI and keys, to not become to “generic” and clumsy. It is a tricky one!

Q: If you could pick one or two specific things that worked out especially well, which ones would you pick?
A: Can’t tell you… You’ll see in time

Q: What do you think is the future of mobile UIs? Will GUIs get less important?
A: No way! I think it will get more important. Time of pure enabling technology innovation is of no more – it needs to be useful to be commercial! More and more services are developed, and the phone is not getting bigger due to the size of the pocket, so UI:s will increase in importance.

Q: What do you think of non-graphical UIs like, for example, speech and gestures?
A: I think ui in general and gui in particular will be important. There are many social (as well as technical, but in time those are easy to fix) obstacles of gestures and voice recognition – accuracy, fidelity and privacy are issues.

Thank you very much.

Processor : ARM926EJ-S rev 5 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 280.98

However, this BogoMIPS value is highly fluctuating. Different runs of the emulator result in different values, so it is important to start the emulator several times. Although the typical value for my ~2 GHz system is around 300 BogoMIPS, one run resulted in 38 BogoMIPS. Nevertheless, if we assume the BogosMIPS value is not flawed, we need to find reference values for mobile CPUs. The Wikipedia article on ARM architecture has some:
220 MIPS / 200 MHz for the ARM926EJ-S and 600 BogosMIPS / 600 MHz for an XScale CPU.

So, one could assume my emulated 300 BogosMIPS compare to a moderate 300MHz mobile CPU, which happens to be a quite sensible reference value. The speed in the emulator running on a 2 GHz would be around the same speed of an low cost mobile CPU. The iPhone with its ARM11 CPU at 620 MHz would be more than twice as fast.

To take this assumption further, one could create the rule of thumb to multiply the speed of your desktop CPU by 0.15 to get a speed of a corresponding mobile CPU. Like this, the emulation running on a CPU with 2, 3, or 4 GHz would be as fast as on a 300, 450, or 600 MHz mobile CPU.

Keep in mind that all this is based on assumptions and simplifications.

So, I was eased to hear that Android gets a new UI soon. It seems Google does not repeat Suns mistake ruining Java UIs by giving Swing those “Look and Feels” that only half-blind engineers could stand. At least if TAT is doing Android’s new UI. I like TAT’s style, which is ranging from reduced to playful, but always classy. But have a look yourself and click for a demo movie (Quicktime):

More screens from TAT:

Do you like it? Keep in mind that these screens do not relate to Android’s new UI. These works may give you an idea what it could look like and what influences there might have been. Let’s wait a few more days to see the real thing…

I just released a new version of the compact RSS feed reader. The Eclipse plugin can be installed using the update site http://www.junginger.biz/eclipse. Please check the full announcement for details.

Today’s Android Workshop was fun – especially meeting lots of interesting people. The audience of around 100 people had the pleasure to meet Dan Morrill and Jason Chen from Google, Mountain View. After an introductory presentation, Dan and Jason had a really though time answering thousands of questions. The audience was quite diverse – I meet people from all over Germany, Austria and even a very devoted team from Canada.

I was especially curious about the next SDK of Android and hoped to learn some new details about it. Well, I guess we still have to be patient for a couple of weeks to find out what will be fixed and which APIs will be added… It’s going to be released “soon”. From what I heard, one could conclude it might be released in mid-February. My personal guess is February, 20th. There’s one concrete thing Dan said about the new SDK: it will come with a completely new UI. That was great new for me, because I was not particular happy with Android’s current look and feel. So, I am really looking forward to it!

Dan Morrill	Dalvik	New SDK	The “Hackathon”	Jason Chen

Q: What are the minimum requirements for an Android device in terms of performance, memory, storage, and screen size?

Q: Will Android support Serialization completely? If so, will it be fully compatible with standard JVMs?

Q: Will Android support Annotations completely?
(Issue 29)

Q: How does the performance of the Android emulator compare to real Android devices?
A: A 2 GHz desktop CPU should compare quite well to a lower end mobile CPU. See

Q: When will the Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text APIs be ready?

Q: Which standard applications will be available from Google? And when?
(The m3-rc37a comes with just a web browser, a contact list, Google Maps, and a recent call list.)

Q: Will there be a standard PIM API and applications (calendar, tasks, email) from Google?

Q: Will there be a standard PIM synchronization API and applications from Google?

Q: Will the Android browser support Flash?
A: Probably not.

Q: Will Android support multi-touch in a future version?

Q: Will it be possible to create Android UIs completely without XML files?
(OK, the XML files are good for future tool support, but there are none available yet and I am not a big fan of XML declarations. Currently you can get far without XML, but I did not figure out how to apply themes, and create Activities without having to touch XML).

Q: How to compress .apk files?
(When I deploy from Eclipse, the apk File is a basically an uncompressed ZIP file. Zipping the apk reduced the size of my application (only Java classes, no media resources yet) to a third. That’s OK for developing, but compressing makes sense for distribution, of course).

Q: There are still some undocumented APIs (navigation, Google Data APIs including calendar etc.) in the android.jar – when do they get official?

Q: Does Android come with a soft keyboard (on-screen keyboard)? How will it be integrated into applications?

Q: Developer Challenge: Are submitted applications required to run with all four screen resolutions?
HVGA is most importatn. Details: http://groups.google.com/group/android-challenge/browse_thread/thread/826a04c8a2541b7e?tvc=2

Q: What’s the role of the java.sql package and JDBC?
(Despite the presence of JDBC, SQLite has its own API iterface)

Q: It seems that data encryption is not supported yet, e.g. if you loose a device, the information inside a SQLite database could be accessed. Are there any plans for encryption? E.g. an encrypted file system?

Q: Is the application always running in a single process?
(What about services and startService? Clarify how the activity and service life cycle relates to processes…)
(Assumption: single process whose priority depends on (visible) activity and started services)
(But: Why do we need remoting then?)

Q: How does remoting with Parcels relate to Serialization?

Donwload patched XStream 1.2.2 for Android (Java Source)

An Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) VMware Image is available here for download. This virtual Linux system with all its applications is usable out-of-the-box (e.g. with the free VMware Player). Thus, it is perfect to test drive Ubuntu or as a secondary operating system running within Windows. The image already comes with the current VMware Tools, Java 6, and Eclipse 3.3 Europa.

User name: jars
Password: jars
Root password: there is none in Ubuntu! Please Use sudo instead.

VM settings:
RAM: 512 MB RAM
Screen size: 1024×768
Language and keyboard: English
Partition size: 12 GB (dynamic)

Deutsche Version

Download Ubuntu 7.10 VMware Torrent (recommended)
Download Ubuntu 7.10 VMware (no resumes, no download managers)
Download Ubuntu 7.10 VMware (no resumes, no download managers)
(657 MB, uncompressed 2.6 GB)

Please check the checksums after downloading. If they do not match, it is likely that the downloaded archive can be repaired (see FAQ).

MD5: DDBB82A2F07278CE5379B62E405C486B
SHA1: 00386744EDE928CEBABB003F12A6A5BCB0C56858
CRC32: CA08ACF3

The RAR archive can be unpacked with WinRAR for example. For running the VM a VMware product is required, e.g. the free VMware Player.

The image is provided “as is” without any kind of warranty.

FAQs

Is there a “root” account? For security reasons, the root account is disabled in Ubuntu, and you do not need it. Instead use the command sudo.

The downloaded RAR archive seems corrupt (CRC error) – must it be download again? No, the RAR archive has a recovery record and can often be repaired. In WinRAR, choose “Tools -> Repair Archive” from its menu or press Alt+R. After repairing, the checksums should match the values listed before.

If you have trouble downloading, you may try the backup server.

The only thing to consider is that the links refer to a specific version, so make sure it is the current one. After you downloaded a plugin, simply place in the plugins directory of your Eclipse installation and (re)start Eclipse.

To dive into this subject a little deeper, let me explain the meaing of update site, feature and plugin in the context of Eclipse. An update site is the web site where the plugins are stored along with some meta information. The later can be found in the file “site.xml” on the update site, e.g. http://www.junginger.biz/eclipse/site.xml. This XML file describes which features and versions are available. If you open my site.xml, it will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<site>
   <feature url="features/biz.junginger.FreeMemFeature_1.3.0.jar"
         id="biz.junginger.FreeMemFeature" version="1.3.0">
      <category name="FreeMem"/>
   </feature>
   <feature url="features/biz.junginger.RssViewFeature_1.2.5.jar" 
         id="biz.junginger.RssViewFeature" version="1.2.5">
      <category name="RSS_View"/>
   </feature>
   <feature url="features/biz.junginger.RssViewFeature_1.3.2.jar" 
         id="biz.junginger.RssViewFeature" version="1.3.2">
      <category name="RSS_View"/>
   </feature>
   <feature url="features/biz.junginger.ExploreFS_Feature_1.0.0.jar" 
         id="biz.junginger.ExploreFS_Feature" version="1.0.0">
      <category name="ExploreFS"/>
   </feature>
   <category-def name="FreeMem" label="FreeMem (Eclipse 2.x and 3.x)"/>
   <category-def name="RSS_View" label="RSS View (Eclipse 3.x)"/>
   <category-def name="ExploreFS" label="ExploreFS"/>
</site>

To go on, it is important to understand what a feature is. When speaking of an Eclipse plugin one often refers to a feature, which may actually be a set of plugins. A feature provides certain functionality to end users and may technically consist of one or more plugins. Coming back to the site.xml, the interesting information is the url attribute of the feature tag. It points us to the feature jar in relation to the update site. This jar contains a feature.xml file carrying information about the feature, e.g. which plugins it consists of and where to find them. Example of the plugin section:

   <plugin
         id="biz.junginger.rss.eclipse.RssPlugin"
         download-size="96"
         install-size="96"
         version="1.3.2"/>

Finally, we have all parts necessary to construct the URL:

• update site URL
• “plugins/” subdirectory
• plugin id
• underscore
• plugin version
• “.jar”

Thus, the URL of the ongoing example would be:

http://www.junginger.biz/eclipse/plugins/biz.junginger.rss.eclipse.RssPlugin_1.3.2.jar

Eclipse plugin developers do not directly handle these files, however. Instead, Eclipse generates them according to one’s configuration. It is necessary to setup an update site Eclipse project, which contains feature projects that in turn reference plugin project.