Making the World Wide Web an Easier Place to Talk About

If you were tasked with finding the letter that when spoken out loud repeatedly was more awkward than any other, you would come up with the W. Every other letter in the English alphabet is pronounced with a single syllable, yet the W is unique in requiring an impressive three syllables to utter.

This campaign is to encourage people to forget that WWW ever existed. Don’t type it, don’t speak it, and complain to every website that still requires it.

Downloading evolved with Metalink

Anyone who has tried downloading a popular software or Linux distribution on or just after release day, knows of the pain of the phrase "connection timed out". Getting the software can be quite a struggle, despite all the mirrors and BitTorrent Samaritans. Anthony Bryan's Metalink is an open standard that makes downloading easier, faster, and more reliable by helping users extract the last drop of juice out of their connection.

I emailed a set of questions to Bryan to understand what separates Metalink from other run-of-the-mill download accelerators and listen in awe as he explains how Metalink combines traditional HTTP and FTP methods of downloading files along with BitTorrent.

Read more about this in Mayank's interview with Anthony Bryan.

Service Oriented Java Business Integration - What's & Why's

Many of you as (Java) programmers generate business purpose code, like "confirming an order" or "find available products". At times, you may also want to connect to external systems and services, since your application in isolation alone will not provide you the required functionality. When the number of such connections increases, you would be generating more and more of "integration code", mixed along with your business code.

In this short article, Binildas A. Christudas introduces the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification and discusses how it is covered in his new book, Service Oriented Java Business Integration

Creating a Web Page for Displaying Data from SQL Server 2008

This article by Jayaram Krishnaswamy describes how you may connect to SQL Server 2008 and display the retrieved data in a GridView Control on a web page. Trying to establish a connection to the SQL Server 2008 is not possible in Visual Studio 2008 as you will see soon in the tutorial. One way to get around this, as shown in this tutorial, is to create an ODBC connection to the SQL Server and then using the ODBC connection to retrieve the data.

Visual Studio 2008 Version: 9.0.21022.8 RTM, Microsoft Windows XP Professional Media Center Edition, and SQL Server 'Katmai' were used for this tutorial.

Network Configuration—Tunneling with Free BSD

When talking about tunneling, different definitions come to people's minds. Basically, tunneling is transmitting data that is encapsulated into a pipe, over a public network (for example, the Internet). However, there are different methods to tunnel data over a public network for different approaches. For example, when security is a concern, tunnel protocols with cryptography are more favorable. But when performance has higher priority, protocols with lower packet overheads will be chosen. FreeBSD 7 has a built-in support for a number of important tunneling protocols, although there are also many third-party applications in FreeBSD packages that support more tunneling protocols.

This article by Babak Farrokhi, introduces the manipulation of tunnel interfaces in the FreeBSD 7 operating system. Let's have a look into the following:

• GRE
• IPSEC

Table and Database Operations in PHP

In this article by Marc Delisle, we will learn how to perform some operations that influence tables or databases as a whole. We will cover table attributes and how to modify them, and also discuss multi-table operations.

User Access Control in Drupal 6

In this article by David Mercer, we will look at an entirely different aspect of running a Drupal website. Once we have added the functionality to the site, we now have to give some thoughts about how this functionality is to be accessed, or by whom. As the site grows, you will most likely feel the need to delegate certain responsibilities to various people. Alternatively, you might organize a team of people to work on specific aspects of the site. Whatever is required, at some stage you will have to make decisions about who can do what, and Drupal makes sure that it is possible to do precisely this.

Having Drupal simplify the implementation of your access control policies does not mean that the task is a trivial one. There is still much thought that needs to go on behind the scenes in order to create a sophisticated, and above all, effective policy for controlling access to the site. Because of this, we will spend a bit of time exploring the ramifications of the various choices available, instead of simply listing them. Taking a holistic approach to implementing an access control policy will ensure you don't end up with any nasty surprises down the line.

Specifically, this article will look at Planning an access policy, Roles, Users, and Access rules.