It's about computer literacy

David Brin wrote an article about how computer users (kids in particular) need an easy language like BASIC again, and it should come with the computer. Read it all here http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/index.html

I absolutely agree with Mr. Brin's stance. The trouble isn't that there aren't tons of programming languages to choose from, many of them free. The problem is that the computer doesn't come with an easy language. And if it did come out of the box (like DOS had QBasic), it really should be an icon on the desktop. Hiding it away would be a bad thing.

Also the programming culture worships complexity. What the professional programmer today considers easy sets a bar way too high for the child or casually interested adult. The result is that the fun is removed from the experience. No fun = no learning.

Schools today think that computer literacy is about using Photoshop, Microsoft Office and Frontpage. That's a low-minded place to be. Teach kids to program. Some of them will latch onto the experience.

Security?

Scriptman responded to my last post with the following questions:

O.K. point taken, but how do you overcome security issues such as passing "nasty" commands to the interpreter? (yes even Perl has them if scripts are not properly configured.)

This is a very good question. Our web BASIC uses a custom web server with the language engine built right into it. We are trying to be very security minded. We will sandbox each session to prevent improper access to files and to avoid server swamping, processes that fail to terminate, etc.

Another question I have is, will your Basic have a feature to "get" (sorry no pun intended) parameters such as the IP of the client ?Much like the Perl $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR}

We don't have this yet, but I see no reason why it cannot be made available.

Not about Perl. Not about cgi.

Scriptman replied to an earlier post about our web BASIC effort:

What's wrong with PHP and PERL? They are both free and easy to learn.

So I replied to him with the following:

Perl is a useful tool, but let me explain why this is different from what we're doing.

First of all this is about BASIC, not Perl. If you like Perl then that's great. Use it. Enjoy. ;-)

A lot of people know and like BASIC, which is a perfectly useful language. There's no reason why a nice BASIC for the web shouldn't exist.

With Perl you have to manage at least three components. Your web server, your cgi scripts (you write them using a text editor), and to use your programs you use a web browser.What we're doing will allow the BASIC programmer to do everything in the browser. There is no concept of a remote procedure. An application with sophisticated interactive features can exist in one file, written in a very standard desktop app coding style. In other words this is going to be easy. If you think cgi programming with Perl is easy, this is going to be even easier.

Read the original post and comments here:

http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com/2006/05/web-20-extremely-easy-web-programming.html#comments

[JBoss 4] How to change port 8080 in JBoss?

With default configurations, JBoss listens on port 8080 for web connections. But this can be changed easily as this port is defined in an configuration xml file.

This is how port 8080 is changed on JBoss 4.

1. Goto the deploy folder of the server instance you use.
2. Goto the jbossweb-tomcat55.sar inside that deploy folder.
3. Find the file named server.xml inside that folder. (tomcat service file).


Look for the HTTP Connector section inside the server.xml where 8080 configuration is available. Change the port value to what ever the required port number.

This change wiill be available when JBoss is restarted.

Related: Change port in Tomcat?

What is ACID?

In database world, ACID is an acronym. It stands for; Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability. Databases should have these four features for them to become a reliable databases. All of these four features relate with transactions.

  • Atomicity:
    A transaction has to be completely commited or roll-backed, a portion of the transaction should not be committed to the database due to any issue even on a hardware failure.
  • Consistancy:
    After any transaction the data in the database should be correct and vailid according to the requirements. Database should not be having any illegal data after a transaction.
  • Isolation:
    When two or more transactions exists, one's behaviour should not give invalid data for the other transaction. That is, when one transaction is in progress, the data alterations made by that transaction should not be visible to any other transactions.
  • Durability:
    After the commit operation is aknowledged by the database, the data inside that transaction should not be lost. The updating of those data into the database has to be guaranteed.

Related Posts:
What is CRUD?

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