Posts Tagged ‘wireless’
Friday, January 9th, 2009
In a project I’m currently working on, I need to make some parameters configurable, and they need to be outside the .war file that I’m deploying. For example, let’s say I’m creating a service which reads data from some other RESTful service. And let’s say that the other RESTful service has two URLs, one for test and one for production. I’d like to be able to deploy my .war, and then edit a file outside of that .war file to configure which URL my service should be using.
My first inclination was to try to do this with a JNDI Environment Entry, so I began researching that approach. However, while the EJB spec states in 20.2.4 that the container must “provide a deployment tool that allows the Deployer to set and modify the values of the enterprise bean’s environment entries” (thanks for finding that one, ipage), JBoss does not seem to have such a facility.
Soon I started to wonder if JNDI wasn’t a bit overkill for what I needed to do, anyway. I didn’t want to specify my parameters on the command-line; I wanted to simplify deployment and wanted to be able to change these values at runtime without restarting the server. But perhaps a System Property was all I needed.
As it turns out, JBoss has the System Properties Management Service for such things. Here’s what you need to do:
- Make sure properties-plugin.jar is in your ${JBOSS_HOME}/server/<server>/lib directory.
- Make sure the properties-service.xml is in your deploy directory (you can find a copy in the “default” server directory)
- You now have two options, either edit the URLList to have a comma-separated list of locations of properties files, or you can specify your properties directly in properties-service.xml in the <attribute name=”Properties”> element.
Now, to access your property, all you need to do is call the venerable System.getProperty() method.
Photo Credit: Shelley Gibb
Tags: java, jee, wireless
Posted in blog | 4 Comments »
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
So I guess it’s official: Verizon Wireless is acquiring rival Alltel Wireless for $28 billion. I had another topic in mind for my next post, but I decided to write about this market consolidation instead.
In a former life, I designed and did programming for billing systems for “tier three” (i.e., small, regional) wireless carriers. In many ways, it’s saddening to see what the mobile carrier landscape has become in the United States. One of the things that made it fun to work in the industry was the funky, inspired little companies that were created by scrappy hometown entrepreneurs. It took a certain amount of chutzpah and ingenuity to take on the behemoth teleco’s, even if it was a small rural corner of East Podunk, U.S.A.
Lots of people worked for the “Cellular Ones” of the world. I met some folks who got pretty wealthy by building medium-sized businesses by taking on the incumbent wireline carrier in their neck of the woods. These people hailed from small towns like Beckley, West Virginia, or Fort Morgan, Colorado, or Traverse City, Michigan. A lot of the employees were self-trained and didn’t have years of experience as Billing Directors or Network Engineers; sometimes it was so-and-so’s brother-in-law who was appointed to be the “Switch Tech” because he was good with electronic stuff.
I believe that these homegrown businesses are good for America. The people who operate them care about their communities because they see their neighbors every day. They hire local people to staff their call centers instead of outsourcing to distant continents. Their leaders do business with their local friends. These businesses help give their part of the world its own personality.
At one time, I thought that MVNO’s might fill this void – I had hoped that they could supplement the market with their own quirky personalities. But so far, MVNO’s have failed to gain much traction in the U.S.
I realize that some good things will come from consolidation. Bigger companies can often roll out better technology more quickly. It’s harder for, e.g., a small time operation in Decatur, Illinois to roll out 3G data services, than it is for a Goliath like AT&T or Verizon Wireless. But I still mourn the loss of the tier-3’s; for me, they exemplified the American entrepreneurial spirit.
Photo Credit: KB35
Tags: wireless
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
A recent blog post by Russell Beattie somberly announced the end of his company, Mowser. According to Mowser’s about page, Mowser “mobilizes the web by taking HTML pages normally viewed on a PC and adapts them so they work on a mobile phone.” In his post, Beattie says that “I don’t actually believe in the “Mobile Web” anymore,” and from that, some people have extrapolated that Beattie is proclaiming that the Mobile Web is Dead.
But Read What He’s Actually Saying
If you read further, and ignore the provocative headlines, and understand what Beattie is actually saying, he’s not claiming the Mobile Web is dead at all:
“I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time [...]“
This is hardly the death of the mobile web (shame on you, ReadWriteWeb!). All that this means is that the rules of the game have changed.
What “The Mobile Web” Used to Be
What do people mean when they talk about the Mobile Web? I think the usual context of the question is “how can we get people to look at our content from their mobile device?” In the past, simply presenting one’s content on the mobile web was a challenge. Browser technology was abysmal. CSS and JavaScript were out of the question. “Adapted” sites were developed in the crippled WML markup, or other proprietary formats, which made the browsing experience more reminiscent of using Gopher than a real web browser. Services like Mowser and Skweezer were created to adapt the existing, vibrant content into low-fi versions for phones.
What “The Mobile Web” Is Today
What I took away from Russell Beattie’s post was that the need for tools like Mowser and Skweezer have been obviated by advances in mobile browser technology. Does this mean that the mobile web is dead? Of course not! And, as far as I can tell, Beattie wasn’t even claiming that to be the case. Instead, I think the definition of the mobile web is changing.
The internet is comprised of three types of pages (behold my amazing OmniGraffle skills):
There are sites that are intended for viewing on a stationary computer, and sites that are intended for viewing on a mobile device. There is also a huge overlap of pages that work well for both contexts. This is because the barrier of how to present data on a mobile device, which was initially a barrier, has been mostly overcome.
Examples of using sites in the “purple zone” on a mobile device might be
- Wikipedia – looking up a bit of trivia when among friends at a coffee shop (got this one from Tichy on News.YC… thanks, Tichy!)
- IMDB – looking up who the did the voice in the Pixar film that you just saw with your kids.
- Google Maps – Wandering around in Chicago, and you want to know, what the heck is that building?
It’s perhaps the most difficult to define sites in the “red” PC-Only area. I can think of a few:
- Items requiring intensive keyboard work, like word processing or blogging.
- Anything involving heavy graphics, such as online games (and pornographic sites? Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned)
- Number-crunching or mathematical modelling and simulations.
Where Does This Leave the Mobile Web?
So, what is left in the light blue section? It has to do with context. What does someone with a mobile device look at, that a person browsing from a PC or laptop does not? What makes a mobile device unique? Well, duh, it’s mobility!
For years people have been prophecizing the coming of Location Based Services. I think that this area has lots of potential. Companies like Loopt have married social services with location awareness to create a compelling product that started out on Boost and Sprint, and it is supposedly coming to other carriers soon. Similarly, Meetro combines location and Instant Messaging. There are companies who produce audio tours which are location-aware. Fleet management services are exploring the mobile web for business opportunities. It’s not hard to imagine that the next killer app is waiting to be discovered in this space, making our iPhones indispensible. Mobile devices have now advanced to the point where it’s Location-Based Services turn to shine.
The New Mobile Web
The key is context. What do people need from the web when they’re using a mobile device? What do you think?
Graveyard Photo Credit: Qole Pejorian
Tags: wireless
Posted in blog | 3 Comments »
