Prepare and Build

In this article by Alex Nuijten, Iloon Ellen-Wolff, and Learco Brizzi, authors of Oracle APEX Best Practices, we will discuss different aspects of setting up an Application Express (APEX) environment. Among others, we'll take a look at installing APEX, performing preparational tasks before actually building applications, and transforming the data model into initial screens.

Windows Azure Service Bus: Key Features

Windows Azure Service Bus offers features that are not offered by any other cloud platform on the market. One important feature is the Service Bus that enables you to connect your on-premise services to Windows Azure services and beyond. The Access Control Service enables you to easily authenticate users without having to write complex authentication code ourselves. By using Windows Identity Framework (WIF) and supporting identity providers such as Live ID, Yahoo, and Facebook, it will be easy to use these identity providers as the main authentication mechanism in our own services.

In this article by Riccardo Becker, author of Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups, we will provide a systematic guide on how to integrate with Facebook. AppFabric also contains AppFabric applications, an easy way to develop and deploy composite applications. Another interesting feature is the caching feature that AppFabric offers.

Managing Files

Talend Open Studio for Data Integration (TOS) is an open source graphical development environment for creating custom integrations between systems.

This article by Jonathan Bowen, author of Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration, shows how to manage Files during integration jobs. We'll look at renaming, moving, copying, and deleting Files; how to timestamp a File; connecting to remote servers to FTP files; and zipping and unzipping Files.

BatteryMonitor Application

The BatteryMonitor application allows you to monitor the state and battery levels of your iOS device using the APIs that come with the iOS SDK. Each iOS device represents a unique set of properties that include the device's current physical orientation, its model name, and its battery state. It also provides access to the onboard hardware.

This article by Steven F Daniel, author of iPad Enterprise Application Development BluePrints, we will be taking a closer look at how we can use the Core Graphics framework to create and draw a gauge that will be use to present and visualize the total amount of battery life remaining on the iOS device, and then start to design the user interface for our app.

Basic Coding with HornetQ: Creating and Consuming Messages

Exchanging information in the form of short messages is becoming more and more important, so frameworks for doing this will be a key factor in software development. Messages and information can be exchanged at exponential speed with JBoss HornetQ asynchronous messaging middleware.

In this article by Piero Giacomelli, author of HornetQ Messaging Developer’s Guide, we will cover the following topics::

• Installing Eclipse and NetBeans for developing with HornetQ on both Windows and Ubuntu
• Setting up a development environment for working with HornetQ core API in Eclipse and NetBeans
• Creating an example for producing and consuming messages in HornetQ in both a synchronous and an asynchronous way
• Implementing some classes using the performance practice for managing core API connections, sessions, and clients

Nmap Fundamentals

Nmap is a well known security tool used by penetration testers and system administrators. The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) has added the possibility to perform additional tasks using the collected host information. Tasks like advanced fingerprinting and service discovery, information gathering, and detection of security vulnerabilities.

In this article by Paulino Calderon Pale, author of Nmap 6: Network exploration and security auditing Cookbook, we will cover:

• Downloading Nmap from the official source code repository
• Compiling Nmap from source code
• Listing open ports on a remote host
• Fingerprinting services of a remote host
• Finding live hosts in your network
• Scanning using specific port ranges