In the Line of Business systems is where Flash and Silverlight will find a space to survive where the remote access and distribution facilities of the WEB are inherited. No matter if it is for business or personal use, nobody wants to install and maintain programs. It is the so called plug and play finally coming to live. Our personal computer is now a toaster, we buy it with pre-installed Operating System and software for protection, get connected and voila! The only thing we want to install these days is the browser of preference.

In the upcoming wave, our WEB solution will be open sourced, fully compliant with WEB standards, will use a whole bunch of pluggable pieces of free software, interchangeable, and it will be deployed in the cloud somewhere. Our job as WEB developers is to know how to put it all together rather than reinventing the wheel. The future has arrived!”

That’s been said, in terms of system integration, I would definitely go for the Service Oriented Architecture, the first available option comprising XML Web Services. I would choose an implementation that follows the WS-I specifications for Web Services Interoperability.

Software applications written in various programming languages and running on various platforms can use Web Services to exchange data over the Internet and HTTP, without requiring changes to the firewall filtering rules. This solution is platform neutral, scalable and provide enough security through WS-Security, an extension to SOAP to apply security to Web services. It allows the communication of various security token formats, such as SAML, Kerberos, and X.509 with the use of XML Signature and XML Encryption to provide end-to-end security.

Web services provide a very loose coupling between an application that uses the web service and the web service itself and therefore use “little glue” to connect the parts and allow great reusability of code.

Writing your own plug-in is pretty simple. We need to follow this  template:

1. //Needs an anonymous function to wrap around your function to avoid conflict
2. (function($){
3. //Attach this new method to jQuery
4. $.fn.extend({
5. //This is where you write your plugin’s name
6. pluginname: function() {
7. //Iterate over the current set of matched elements
8. return this.each(function() {
9. //code to be inserted here
10. });
11. }
12. });
13. //pass jQuery to the function,
14. })(jQuery);

I started by creating the a extension function in a separate file for the jQuery pkug-in. This is just a simple example that will receive background, color, height and width parameters to be set on the element.

The jQuery code consumes the plug-in function called setCSS:

That’s the result when we click the text on the web page:

Among the vast options of plug ins available for jQuery, I found jTemplate a very interesting one. As in the previous workshops when I talked about Ajax, if we want to populate a table with data from a web service, we can use jTemplate to bind the fields to the HTML elements. Data can be passed as an object and you can reference the object’s properties with this $T data item.

<scrip src=”scripts/jQuery-jtemplates.min.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

…

1. $(document).ready(function() {
2.           $.ajax({
3.               type: “POST”,
4.               url: “MyService.asmx/GetInfo”,
5.               data: “{}”,
6.               contentType: “application/json; charset=utf-8″,
7.               dataType: “json”,
8.               success: function(msg) {
9.
10.                   ApplyTemplate(msg);
11.               }
12.           });
13.       });
14. function ApplyTemplate(msg) {
15.       $(‘#Container’).setTemplate($(“#TemplateResultsTable”).html());
16.       $(‘#Container’).processTemplate(msg);
17. }

…

1. <script type=”text/html” id=”TemplateResultsTable”>
2. {#template MAIN}
3. <table>
4.   <tr>
5.     <th>Field1</th>
6.     <th>Field2</th>
7.     <th>Field3</th>
8.     <th>Field4</th>
9.   </tr>
10.   {#foreach $T.d as MyTable}
11.     {#include ROW root=$T.MyTable}
12.   {#/for}
13. </table>
14. {#/template MAIN}
15. {#template ROW}
16. <tr>
17.   <td>{$T.Field1}</td>
18.   <td>{$T.Field2}</td>
19.   <td>{$T.Field3}</td>
20.   <td>{$T.Field4}</td>
21. </tr>
22. {#/template ROW}
23. </script>

A little bit of jQuery, was an valuable asset not only because its widely adoption but also for opening my mind to the excellent JavaScript frameworks and plug-ins on the market. Dojo, Prototype, MooTools, you name it! And they’re all under the free license agreement.

In ITC565 we had a chance to learn, research and practice all we need to get involved with a WEB project plan. Our job as Web developers is more and more knowing how to put the all of the pieces together and take advantage of the components and frameworks available. After all, the Internet that once was something for Geeks is now everywhere for everyone. We are getting closer to the day that “E”-business will become just Business”.

or go to the page.

“As the team started to investigate building the ability to perform selection and animation operations, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already.  The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it?  We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. I’m excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward.  We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch.  The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time.”

I have already set up intellisense in my first Workshop post. Let’s now move forward and explore another ways to integrate jQuery and .NET. As we know we can consume ASP .NET web services using jQuery, we can consume an ASP .NET page method using jQuery and, as already explored in the workshop 6, we can consume WCF Services using  jQuery. I could play around and show some of those variations but they would’t change much in the way we use jQuery to call those different flavours of Web Services.

Even if the official jQuery support, Microsoft still has it own framework for Ajax that also provides Ajax features and UI extensibility (Microsoft Ajax Toolkit). One thing that is worth pointing out is some of the problems developers face when trying to coexist ScripManager (the main engine of the Microsoft Ajax Framework) and jQuery. I found two different workarounds for this issue. The first is to subclass the ScriptManager class and override its functionality that enables the replacement of the MicrosoftAjax.js reference with a framework of your choice, in this case jQuery:

<%@ Register Namespace=”AltScriptManager” TagPrefix=”asp” %>
…
<asp:AltScriptManager runat=”server”
FrameworkPath=”~/script/jquery-1.2.6.js” />
…

This is available for download here. But if you really want to have both frameworks running in parallel in the same project you may have some problems with the partial postback provided by MS Ajax Framewok and jQuery. Microsoft provides partial refreshes of the page by the use of UpdatePanel. Basically everything enclosed in the UpdatePanel takes advantage of the Ajax. For example:

<form id=”form1″ runat=”server”>
<asp:ScriptManager ID=”SM1″ runat=”server” EnablePartialRendering=”true” />
<div>
<asp:UpdatePanel ID=”UpdatePanel1″ runat=”Server”>
<ContentTemplate>
<asp:GridView ID=”GridView1″ runat=”Server” AllowPaging=”true” OnPageIndexChanging=”ChangePage”></asp:GridView>
</ContentTemplate>
</asp:UpdatePanel>
</div>
</form>

if you want to use jQuery in the client side to manipulate the HTML Table elements generated by the server side DataGrid within the UpdatePanel like:

<script language=”javascript”>
$(document).ready(function()
{
//for table row
$(“tr:even”).css(“background-color”, “#F4F4F8″);
});
</script>

It works great when the page is loaded for the first time but for further interactions such as when you click for  paging in the Grid, the jQuery won’t work unless we change the jQuery code to:

<script language=”javascript”>
function pageLoad(sender, args)
{
$(“tr:even”).css(“background-color”, “#F4F4F8″);
}
</script>

The alternate rows background color on every page load will work for for first time the page is loaded and all subsequent loads,  full or partial postback,

In my opinion where jQuery really fits is in ASP.NET MVC framework. It is out of the scope of this workshop to go deep inside the MS implementation of MVC but it is a very powerful pattern whereby the Web pages requests are routed to the controller for processing and redirected to the View. The Views are ASP.NET web pages without code behind, just pure HTML and Javascript. And that is why jQuery is convenient because the Views keeps posting information back and forth to the controllers who act as the code behind for the pages. The Controller then passes the request for retrieving or inserting data to/from the Model. The jQuery .post function comes in handy as an Ajax engine to plug the View to the Controller in the MS ASP.NET MVC framework.

This is how the View looks like when we add jQuery to the ASP.NET MVC to post information:

And this is how the Controller receives the information from the posted form:

This way we can grab the information as Request.Form["MyField"] or, instead of serializing the form,  we could have passed the input text “MyField” value in jQuery post function and receive it as a parameter in the MyAction method of the Controller.

References:

jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel:

http://www.dotnetfunda.com/articles/article471-jquery-and-aspnet-ajax-updatepanel-.aspx



2)Describe the purpose of the Open Mobile Alliance Initiative.
According to the official site, the purpose of Open Mobile Alliance is to establish interoperable services across countries, operators and mobile terminals that will meet the needs of the user. The companies supporting the Open Mobile Alliance will work towards stimulating the fast and wide adoption of a variety of new, enhanced mobile information, communication and entertainment services.

3)What are the main components of a mobile Web services framework?

Subscriber: End user or entity who has a business relationship with a mobile network operator.

Mobile Network Services: Web services that provide access to functionality within a mobile network that may be either well-defined within the industry  or proprietary.

Third-Party Services: Web services that provide access to what may be a wide variety of functionality, some of which may be well-defined within the industry and some of which may be proprietary.

Authentication Service and the Payment Service: Web services operated by the mobile network operator that expose functionality to perform authentication and payment authorization, respectively.

Both Mobile Network Services and Third-Party Services require a Subscriber to authenticate and optionally provide authorization to make a payment. A Client Platform provides support for secure, chargeable transactions using Web services between an invoking Client Application and Third-Party Services or Mobile Network Services. The Client Platform controls all interactions with the Subscriber being authenticated within the framework during the authentication.

4)Visit an airline Web site and search for information on WAP or SMS or 3G mobile application access to booking airline services. The same services exist in banking. How do both industries compare?

Air Canada provides Mobile Web Browser based applications as well as specific native versions for download (iPhone and Blackberries). You can use a variety of services such as electronic  paperless check-in, check flight status, receive flight information and timetables, manage miles and other travel information. At the moment they don’t seem to provide a mobile end to end feature to book flights and purchase tickets from a mobile device. I noticed that Lufthansa and American Airlines do provide Mobile Services to book flights and other cool features such as Check-in via SMS.

Banks provide non-transaction based services such as balance checks and transaction based actions like account transactions, payments and funds transfer. Security is the main issue for  those services. SMS token request is an alternative used to enforce security which provides a secondary channel of authentication.

Banks services are intrinsically more transaction based than airline’s, however the latter also requires a security communication channel and encryption for booking and managing the flights and payments.

References:

Open Mobile Alliance
http://www.openmobilealliance.org/
Mobile Web services framework
http://www.swe.uni-linz.ac.at/teaching/lva/ws04-05/service_engineering/246553/%5CMobileWS/mws_tech_roadmap.asp.htm
Air Canada Mobile
http://www.aircanada.com/en/travelinfo/traveller/mobile/index.html

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"
   src="script/jQuery-1.3.2.min.js" "></script>

     <script type="text/javascript">

        var varType;
        var varUrl;
        var varData;
        var varContentType;
        var varDataType;
        var varProcessData;

        function CallService()
        {
                $.ajax({
                    type          : varType, //GET or POST or PUT or DELETE verb
                    url           : varUrl, // Location of the service
                    data          : varData, //Data sent to server
                    contentType   : varContentType, // content type sent to server
                    dataType      : varDataType, //Expected data format from server
                    processdata   : varProcessData, //True or False
                    success       : function(msg) {//On Successfull service call
                    ServiceSucceeded(msg);
                    },
                    error: ServiceFailed// When Service call fails
                });
        }
    </script>

I created a basic WCF service to be consumed directly from the Web Page using the .ajax function above. This WCF service will return data in Jason format.

First we need to enable Ajax. We do that by setting the binding = “webHttpBinding” in the web.config file:

Secondly, configure the service to serialize Jason. We do that by decorating the method signature with the attribute ResponseFormat = jason in the service interface.

This is he WCF method (endpoint) implementation:

e

And finally, the jQuery Ajax call:

When the page loads, the alert shows the return data from the WCF service:

$.ajax(options)

This is jQuery’s low-level AJAX implementation.

Example 1: Load and execute a JavaScript file.

$.ajax({
type: “GET”,
url: “test.js”,
dataType: “script”
});

Example 2: Save some data to the server and notify the user once its complete.

$.ajax({
type: “POST”,
url: “some.php”,
data: “name=John&location=Boston”,
success: function(msg){
alert( “Data Saved: ” + msg );
}
});

Example 3: Retrieve the latest version of an HTML page.

$.ajax({
url: “test.html”,
cache: false,
success: function(html){
$(“#results”).append(html);
}
});

Example4: Loads data synchronously. Blocks the browser while the requests is active. It is better to block user interaction bother means when synchronization is necessary.

var html = $.ajax({
url: “some.php”,
async: false
}).responseText;

Example 5: Sends an xml document as data to the server. By setting the processData option to false, the automatic conversion of data to strings is prevented.

var xmlDocument = [create xml document];
$.ajax({
url: “page.php”,
processData: false,
data: xmlDocument,
success: handleResponse
});

$.get(url, data, callback)

This is an easy way to send a simple GET request to a server without having to use the more complex $.ajax function. It allows a single callback function to be specified that will be executed when the request is complete (and only if the response has a successful response code). If you need to have both error and success callbacks, you may want to use $.ajax.

Example:

$.get(“test.php”, function(data){
alert(“Data Loaded: ” + data);
});

$.post(url, data, callback, type)

This is an easy way to send a simple POST request to a server without having to use the more complex $.ajax function. It allows a single callback function to be specified that will be executed when the request is complete (and only if the response has a successful response code). The returned data format can be specified by the fourth paramater. If you need to have both error and success callbacks, you may want to use $.ajax. $.post is a (simplified) wrapper function for $.ajax.

Example:

$.post(“test.php”, function(data){
alert(“Data Loaded: ” + data);
});

load(url, data, callback)

A GET request will be performed by default – but if you pass in any extra parameters then a POST will occur. This is the highest level Ajax jQuery function.

Reference: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/5-ways-to-make-ajax-calls-with-jquery/

As soon as I checked my email this morning I noticed a great number of non-deliverable messages in my Inbox and surprisingly a huge list of emails in my Sent Items to every single entry of my contact list including the CSU Forums (which apparently refused them, fortunately).

Yes, now all my friends, ex-bosses, current boss and all the people I have business relationship with, know I am a Viagra seller

Norton suite 2010 is up and running and confirms that my computer IS NOT INFECTED whatsoever. If you do a Web search you will find out lots of people with similar or same problem.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=66f2b6d2cf7d41fe&hl=en
http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Message-Delivery-en/browse_thread/thread/8bfd0e496671c97b?fwc=2&pli=1

You can see in the picture that Gmail shows From (Poland) and When (7:23am , Toronto)  the hacker activity took place as well as the IP Addess used (which of course should not be real) .

The fact is: Who are we going to sue in these cases? The hacker? The provider that offers a free insecure service? In the past it was not conceivable to me to have my professional emails hosted in a free service. I would prefer to pay for the provider, download my emails with the hassle of managing backups, transferring accounts etc.. until I accepted the Google’s invitation and ended up having my whole professional communication in the hands of a free and unreliable service.

Canceling the email account is an easy and quick step…but I need first to bring and save the whole history of emails of about 4 years!

And finally a tip: Don’t enable the POP3 of your Gmail account. I think that was the hole and the source of my problem.

Welcome to the Cloud Computing!

According to the definition, a Web crawler or Spider is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks  in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies. In other words it is a piece of software that unattendedly browses a list of web sites to process or gather some information.

2)Differentiate the various types of software agents.
They are classified as static or mobile agents and either deliberative or reactive.

Some examples:
Spider: Used by the search engines to index the web pages. (static and deliberative)
Commercial: For example a news service or one that aggregates products from a variety of auction web sites. (static and reactive)

Malicious: Virus, spywares or any kind of software that is installed to collect information without consent such as email addresses and user preferences for spam purposes. (mobile and deliberative)

3)Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.
Some examples:
Price comparison sites: Search all the vendors to show the available options.
News service: Collects news from a variety of sources and push it to the subscriber.
Service to check popularity of a product, personality or event by counting the number of searches or web sites hits.

4)Computing ethics and bot programming case study: rocky

Eliza, one of the original chat bots created in the 60′s, is an interesting example of early artificial intelligence programs but It is very limited comaparing to the current technology
such as http://www.personalityforge.com/botlist.php

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot

“A shoppingCart object is associated with only one creditCard and customer and to items in itemToBuy object. Persistent customer information such as name, billing address, delivery address, email address and credit rating is stored in the customer object. The credit card object is associated with a frequentShopper discount object, if the credit rating for the customer is good. The customer can make or cancel orders as well as add and delete items to the shopping cart product. The credit card object contains the secure method for checking that the charge is authentic.”

Shopping Cart Class Diagram