Page 317 - DCAP408_WEB_PROGRAMMING

Unit 14: Database Connectivity

Ellison has gone over to the dark side of the Silicon Valley infatuation with power and Notes
wealth, notes the concluding chapter, titled On the Edge. His world is solipsistic. But don’t
count him out too soon. “He has been a wildly entertaining performer,” finishes the
author, but sighs: “How much more he could have been.”
Let’s talk IT out
What’s common between politics and computers? Everybody talks about both and yet
unfortunately few understand. So, Mohammed Azam has taken ‘a dialogue oriented
approach’ to IT. His book Computer Literacy Kit, from Eswar Press (www.eswar.com) , is
aimed at “providing a wholesome learning experience for the entire family.” Being
conversational in style, there are many questions throughout the book, and these find
answers from the author’s many characters. For instance, “Who were the first buyers of
personal computers?” Hobbyists, who knew electronics and software, bought the first lot
of PCs. “Apple Computers realised that users did not like the idea of messing around with
a lot of wires specially with electricity running in them and unveiled a model that was
fully built. The users had to merely take it home and connect it to their TV and start work.”
Questions often come in torrents: Such as, what is a platter, what is a cylinder, why is the
hard disk sealed, how does the read/write assembly work, how is data recorded on
magnetic tape, how is the storage of a tape measured, and so forth. Also, there are short
poems. “The computer will tell you with a beep or chime/That you pressed the wrong key
this time.” Or, “The Operating System plays the host/Taking over after the POST.” Yet
another, “Command and syntax you need not cram/But to run Windows you need plenty
of RAM.” Try this one on virus: “A virus is actually an intelligent string of bytes/But it is
malignant and it sometimes bites/Some rename and some even corrupt a file/Some are a
nuisance, harmless and not vile.”
The book provides an elaborate glossary with entries such as “a.out: The default name of
the executable file produced by the Unix assembler, link editor, and C compiler” and
“Daisy chain: The linking of items one after another. In word processing, daisy chain
printing means to print documents one after another.” To keep the conversation alive,
there are illustrations throughout the book. Good read for starters.
Net coding
In the near future, we will be dealing with distributed applications, fragments of which
run on different systems, in heterogeneous networks, under different operating systems;
and the computer itself would lose its traditional look, and take any shape, from cubic
units built into the walls to small devices such as wristwatches. This is the scenario that
Sergei Dunaev paints in Advanced Internet Programming Technologies and Applications,
from Eswar PressThe book is a guide for developing Net applications and e-com solutions.
“Readers learn how to create and use objects such as applets, scriplets, servlets, XML-
constructions, JSP, ASP pages and so on,” states the back cover. “JavaBeans/CORBA and
ActiveX/DCOM are described in detail.”
What software developers encounter every day are “two basic technologies,” notes the
author in the first chapter. One of these is ActiveX/DCOM, used on Intel platforms using
Windows OS, while the parallel technology is called JavaBeans/CORBA, which does not
depend on either the platform or the OS. DCOM, which is no diploma in commerce, but
distributed component object model, also called COM `with a longer wire’ because it
allows `registration of remote objects’. ActiveX serves a unique purpose — that of providing
operations for program components inside composite program containers that include
Web browsers and other document viewers. JavaBeans components are “obliged to
advertise their characteristics”, and the “clearing of these characteristics by other
components is called introspection.”
Contd...

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