Posted on

Experience Space using Microsoft WorldWide Telescope

We already have been visualizing the earth on our desktops for quite a long time now. Thanks Google Earth and Bind maps.

Ever wondered if we could visualize space this way as well? Imagine taking a close look at a stars or galaxies like Milky way right from your desktop? Or even taking a view of Moon or Mars? Well Microsoft Research has come up with a solution to this.

Microsoft Research WorldWide Telescope
Yes that’s true we have a software from Microsoft which will soon be integrated into Bing maps and it enables us to view space with the help of images captured by telescopes all around the world.

What is WWT
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. Feel free at any time to pause the tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off. Join Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman on a journey showing how dust in the Milky Way Galaxy condenses into stars and planets. Take a tour with University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders two billion years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past.

Some of the Tours available at the website are as follows:
Search for Extra Solar Planets
Apollo Missions 15 to 17
Pluto
Aug 1, 2008 Eclipse
Orion Nebula – Hubble’s
The Ring Nebula
Beautiful Nebulas
Center of the Milky Way
Universal Beauty
Impact with M31
and many more….

So what are you waiting for? just visit the website and enjoy looking at stars even during day time 🙂

kick it on DotNetKicks.com

Shout it

pimp it

Posted on

Introduction of Castor in Java

Castor is an open source data binding framework for moving data from XML to Java programming language objects and from Java to databases. It’s the shortest path between Java objects, XML documents and relational tables. Castor provides Java-to-XML binding, Java-to-SQL persistence, and more.

Castor is made up of (independent) modules as follows:– Castor XML
– Castor XML – Code generator
– Castor JDO – Persistence framework
– Castor JDO – DDL generator
– Additional tools
– Integration with other frameworks
Castor XML
XML data binding framework to bind XML artefacts to Java objects and vice versa.
Castor XML code generator
Code generator that generates Java source code from XML Schema information.
Castor JDO
Java persistence framework to bind Java objects to RDBMS tables. Castor JDO (Java Data Objects) is an open source, 100 percent Java data binding framework. Initially released in December 1999, Castor JDO was one of the first open source data binding frameworks available. Since that time, the technology has come a long way.

Castor JDO DDL generator
Generates DDL statements from JDO mapping files.
Castor is currently integrated with the following frameworks or has support for being integrated:
Spring ORM support for Castor
– Spring OXM for Castor
– Spring XML artifacts
– Web Service toolkits
– Apache Cocoon (Castor transformer)
– extendedXML module for Mule, offering enhanced XML-transformation support for Mule, using Castor

You can find Castor Api doc on – http://www.jdocs.com/castor/1.0.1/overview-summary.html
More information you can find on – http://www.castor.org/

pimp it

Posted on

Reflection Api in java

The Reflection API allows Java code to examine classes and objects at run time. The new reflection classes allow you to call another class’s methods dynamically at run time. With the reflection classes, you can also examine an instance’s fields and change the fields’ contents.
Reflection is commonly used by programs which require the ability to examine or modify the runtime behavior of applications running in the Java virtual machine. This is a relatively advanced feature and should be used only by developers who have a strong grasp of the fundamentals of the language. With that caveat in mind, reflection is a powerful technique and can enable applications to perform operations which would otherwise be impossible.

Uses of Reflection

Extensibility Features
An application may make use of external, user-defined classes by creating instances of extensibility objects using their fully-qualified names.

Class Browsers and Visual Development Environments
A class browser needs to be able to enumerate the members of classes. Visual development environments can benefit from making use of type information available in reflection to aid the developer in writing correct code.

Debuggers and Test Tools
Debuggers need to be able to examine private members on classes. Test harnesses can make use of reflection to systematically call a discoverable set APIs defined on a class, to insure a high level of code coverage in a test suite.

Drawbacks of Reflection
Reflection is powerful, but should not be used indiscriminately. If it is possible to perform an operation without using reflection, then it is preferable to avoid using it. The following concerns should be kept in mind when accessing code via reflection.

Performance Overhead
Because reflection involves types that are dynamically resolved, certain Java virtual machine optimizations can not be performed. Consequently, reflective operations have slower performance than their non-reflective counterparts, and should be avoided in sections of code which are called frequently in performance-sensitive applications.

Security Restrictions
Reflection requires a runtime permission which may not be present when running under a security manager. This is in an important consideration for code which has to run in a restricted security context, such as in an Applet.

Exposure of Internals
Since reflection allows code to perform operations that would be illegal in non-reflective code, such as accessing private fields and methods, the use of reflection can result in unexpected side-effects, which may render code dysfunctional and may destroy portability. Reflective code breaks abstractions and therefore may change behavior with upgrades of the platform.

References
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/reflect/
http://www.javacommerce.com/displaypage.jsp?name=index.sql&id=18272

pimp it