Android User Interface Development: Validating and Handling Input Data

Android provides an excellent toolset to capture many different types of data from the user, while also providing loose coupling between your application components in the form of Intent structures. By using several smaller Activity classes to capture data, while at the same time abstracting the functionality to capture different types of input, you'll be able to more easily reuse the input capturing Activity classes, not just within the application, but in other applications as well. Further, by registering the Activity correctly, you'll allow other applications to override, or make use of your Activity implementation, allowing the users to select their preferred capturing mechanism.

This article by Jason Morris, author of Android User Interface Development: Beginner's Guide, provides tips regarding taking input from a user, and how to keep this experience as painless as possible. This article investigates the different input widgets Android provides and how to configure them best, depending on the situation. Also, when everything else fails, how best to inform your users that what they are doing is wrong.

Animating capabilities of Cinema 4D

Cinema 4D is a powerful 3D application created by Maxon computing. It is relatively easy to learn and use. Despite this, it also has a host of powerful features that can be used to create dynamic and eye catching 3D images and animations, quickly and efficiently. In this article by Aaron Kaminar from the book Instant Cinema 4D Starter, we will walk through some of the animating capabilities of this powerful application.

Animating in Panda3D

Animation is a crucial component of most 3D applications. Our game is a bit of a special case because our characters are vehicles rather than people, and they don't need walking or running animations. For many video games, that won't be the case. In order to be better prepared for those situations, we're going to use a simple proxy program to discuss some of the aspects of animation and how it's used in Panda3D. Once we've covered that material, we'll employ some aspects of the animation system in our game as well. Our hover cycles may not need a walking animation, but there are pieces of the animation system we can make use of.

The topics we're going to cover in this article by David Brian Mathews, author of Panda3D 1.6 Game Engine Beginner's Guide, will be:

• Loading Actors and Animations
• Controlling Animation
• Blending Animations
• Creating and using Actor subparts
• Exposing joints

Animation in Silverlight 4

Packt are due to launch a new Enterprise brand, into which future Silverlight titles will be published. For more information on that launch, look here.

In this article by Frank LaVigne, author of Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development, we shall create an interactive logo using Silverlight and incorporate it into the website.

Apache Cassandra: Libraries and Applications

Apache Cassandra is a fault-tolerant, distributed data store which offers linear scalability allowing it to be a storage platform for large high volume websites.

In this article by Edward Capriolo, author of Cassandra High Performance Cookbook, you will learn:

• Building the contrib stress tool for benchmarking
• Inserting and reading data with the stress tool
• Running the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark
• Hector, a high-level client for Cassandra
• Doing batch mutations with Hector
• Cassandra with Java Persistence Architecture (JPA)
• Setting up Solandra for full text indexing with a Cassandra backend
• Setting up Zookeeper to support Cages for transactional locking
• Using Cages to implement an atomic read and set
• Using Groovandra as a CLI alternative
• Searchable log storage with Logsandra

Apache Continuum: Ensuring the Health of your Source Code (Part 1)

In the article Continuum: Ensuring the Health of your Source Code by Maria Odea Ching and Brett Porter, we will learn about the importance of a continuous integration, or CI, server in a project (especially gigantic ones!).

We will be using Continuum to show you first-hand the formidable role of a CI server in the development life cycle. We will learn the essentials of how to set up Continuum, plus the basics of how to configure it so you will know when your project's build breaks.

The first part of the article deals with setting up a source repository, installing any required applications or tools, and setting up Continuum. The remaining sections cover the systematic process of adding and building projects in Continuum.

Apache Felix Gogo

Felix Gogo, a sub-project of Apache Felix, is an implementation of this early draft specification. The Gogo shell is included with the Felix Framework Distribution since version 3.0.

It is worth noting that this specification is not yet part of the official OSGi specifications, and therefore, may change in the future.

In this article, by Walid Gédéon, author of OSGi and Apache Felix 3.0, we will:

• Learn about the Tiny Shell Language and its syntax
• Cover some of the commands provided by Gogo

So let's start with a quick overview of the language.

Apache MyFaces Extensions Validator

In this article by Bart Kummel, author of Apache MyFaces 1.2 Web Application Development, you will be able to:  

• Set up a project to use ExtVal
• Use ExtVal to generate validation based on JPA annotations
• Use ExtVal’s added annotations for additional validation
• Implement cross validation using ExtVal’s annotations
• Use ExtVal with custom JSF validators
• Create custom error messages for ExtVal validations
• Override and extend ExtVal’s default behavior

Apache MyFaces Trinidad 1.2 Web Application Groundwork: Part 2

Read Part One of Apache MyFaces Trinidad 1.2 Web Application Groundwork here.