JavaFX being released on the December 4th 2008. it allows users to create Internet Rich applications.  It includes all the basic information about JavaFX. plus the latest news archives about JavaFX are also there. The link to the blog is

http://blogs.sun.com/javafx/entry/javafx_1_0_is_live

This is the best initiative by launching a blog that will allow users to discuss, and they will be notified about the latest news thats around about JavaFX…

Happy coding

“Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.”

Jesse J. Garrett

JavaFX has been released on 4th of December 2008, a new technology by Sun Microsystems. JavaFX is a collection of software’s that allow us to create rich Internet applications (i.e. web applications). These applications will have functionality as well as features similar to the functionality and features of a traditional desktop application. The best thing that potentially sounds very nice is the capability of making multimedia applications. The applications can be for desktop, mobile, TV and other platforms.  There are 2 components of JavaFX, the two being JavaFX script and JavaFX Mobile.

The JavaFX script is a declarative language intended to make the swings (import java.swing.*; // for those who know java) easier to use for the interface programming. I liked the fact that it is not an expansion of the awt library class. As I think the look and feel of swing is far better than the awt library class.

JavaFX Mobile, this features a Java standard Edition and Java micro edition implementation running on top of a Linux kernel.

As a simple person, it’s quite hard to admit how it is all done. Websites now are almost being used for every purpose. Let it be anything for fun, for portfolios, company websites, shopping, banking, etc. So how is it all done? Can I do it? How much does it Cost? Do I need to be an expert to make a website?

Well it is not as hard as it looks but when you keep on enhancing your website, it gets complicated. The more drastic effects you involve the complex the code gets. So what is behind the entire web? HTML, XHTML, etc allow users to design web pages. There are add-ons such as Java script, ASP, dynamic effects etc.

Well let’s see what an html page looks like

This is a very simple code; you can try evaluating it by copying it and pasting it in notepad and saving the file as *.html where * is the name. You can run the file in any explorer such as Firefox, opera, Internet explorer, Google chrome, etc. The words in bold are referred to as tags a tag is normally enclosed within < —- >. This can be considered as a simple web page which will allow user to create a web page with a black background and white text.

What about a little advance? Well it’s not that complicated. For example the code shown on the right. What will it do? It will do the same thing; the only difference is I added a simple java script which is an alert (error message) will pop up waiting for the user to click ok. The pop up will say “hello world”. The code for this is the code in bold. You can run this code the same way as above. (i.e. save as *.html where *is the file name)

What about graphics in web pages? By referring to thing I am talking about designing a web page? How all the beautiful web layouts are made? This is a question that many people ask to one self. I learnt a little html, but what to do to make beautiful graphics like those. Well the answer is using add-ons such as CSS, etc. and you can create the graphics in Adobe Photoshop. Other graphics software can also be used. Then the graphic is exported to html/htm format. And used for further designing and the development of the web page. The content is added. And finally uploaded to the server and that’s it your website is up and running and accessible to the world. There are some companies that let you design a web page for free of cost using there built in templates. If you want to see the source code of a webpage, right click and click view source in internet explorer, and right click and click view page source in firefox, Google chrome.

So how does it all turn out to be? Well being able to design professional web pages requires a lot of knowledge about web. Since the more things you put in a website the better it gets. The basic of all is HTML, so start off with HTML. And start coding. Happy coding

What is web?

Web is a collection of LAN (Local Area Networks), WAN (Wide Area Network) and MAN (Metropolitan Area Network). This means there is a lot of stuff being shared on the internet. So is the stuff being shared useful or useless? It depends on how you use the stuff. Some times the stuff is very good, websites like Wikipedia, Britannica, etc are very good sites for information on any thing. They are like electronic encyclopedia. You can search for any thing you want. A myth about the internet is “Web ruins the kids”. No, I strongly disagree. It solely depends on how internet is used.

So what else is there? You can use search engines to find any thing on the internet. I personally think you can get possibly any thing you want from the internet. A very good example that I would like to say about the internet is like looking for a drop of water in an ocean. Though it sounds very weird, how can one look for water in an ocean where an ocean is full with water. I have no idea about how man y web pages exist on the web. But just as an instance, 10 million web pages are there. And each web page has 100 words per average. This means there are 1 billion words, which is just a talk. Reading 1 billion words is not a joke.

Even if 100 pages meet your criteria of search, there will be 10 thousand words, this is still a lot. So potentially I would say being able to read and understand the information on the internet is rather a complicated task. Internet is a collection of useful as well as some useless information. How to look for the right information? Read more on searching, tips for searching, and how to search.

One single encyclopedia contains a lot of information. So if the web contains all the encyclopedias, how much information there will be? Let’s see a little numerical data to prove it.

1 encyclopedia = 3 DVD’s =4.7*3=14.1 GB=144384.4 MB

If there are 500 encyclopedias Total size = 14.1*500=7050 GB= 7219200MB of information

And for example at average 1 MB= 10 words; 7219200/10=721920 words.

And normally an alphabet is not even 1 KB. So there can be far more words than a billion words. This is just rough calculations if I be a little more precise. And say one alphabet=4bytes=3.814*10^-06MB

This will mean there are 1.2*10^12 alphabets. So can you possibly regret the fact there is not much information. I guess no, because the fact that web is full of information so relax, and start reading. And Web is no doubt a huge network.

Ever thought of social networking, there are many websites currently helping people to build a social network , such as facebook, orkut, hi5, etc. But a group of Pakistanis have come up with the idea of social networking for Pakistanis, stop.pk. Not only is it a social networking website, but it also pays you as you gain points, By saying pay, i mean there are awards such as easy load, domain hosting,etc. It also has an online forum for discussion. Other features include blogging, uploading images to galleries, uploading videos, games, stops, events, classifieds, schools, polls, etc.

Stop.pk, their moto “Extremely Addictive Internet Lifestyle for Pakistanis”, you will definitely find this site a little addicting and a little different then normal social networking sites. How does the points thing work ? For posting any thing you get points, for example a topic in the forums gives you 2 points, posting a reply gives you 1 point. The points vary for different things. You will have to earn certain amount of points to be able to get the rewards. After getting sufficient points, to get a reward, there is a seperate section for the rewards.

Stop.pk also gives you a customiable profile which you can design you self, though the intial profile looks good, but people will definitely want to customize it, so the option for the customization is fairly good. There also is a rating option on the profile, people view and rate your profile after you have edited it. Stop.pk also offers n online chat room, which is flash based, which is quite simple. It also has an instant messenger.

There are currently eight unique users, each with their own respect, and responsibilites. They include Hawalati (a person in jail), panggeybaaz(a person who likes messing about), aam log(Ordinary people), Khas Log(Special people), Counselor, Nazim, Chairman and Administrator (the last 4 are administrating people). The difference between aam log and khas log is the space provided, for aam log it is 10 MB and khas log it is 100 MB, No accounts are for any charge , and you can upgrade from aam log to khas log for free of cost. It depends on you which mode will you go to, If you spam a lot, you might end up being made Hawalati.

The sign up process is very simple, and easy to follow, the after usage is not that complicated as well. The website is very simple, and light not a very heavy one, though ads are there. So the website in it’s content is very good. So the question comes up. Does it meet international standards? Well, to be frank not yet atleast, there are a few flaws, but the flaws are being fixed. It has improved a lot after I joined. So we can expect that it will improve more, and keep on expanding.

So in plain words, stop.pk is a very good effort from the Pakistanis, and hopefully it will expand.

Note: To join it as my referral, click the following link

http://stop.pk/signup/friend_mutedart/

Who says you don’t need to check the site of company which has made you motherboard. some times you have to check for latest hardwares, whats the new stuff in the market or to check the specifications of any hardware, or even get the latest driver for your hardware. So does the website of Intel come to the standard and style to meet user?

When you log on to www.intel.com , you will notice a beautiful web page loading. the color scheme is just beautiful, definitely a very professional site. you will have the option to select the location where are you using from. Then, below the location selector you have the user type selection, are you a business user, home user, or about Intel. The background is the map of the world. I selected my country (Pakistan) and it loaded some thing, since the language Intel Pakistan is in English, not much changed. But if you select a country which is not in English you will be redirected to a page which will be in the respected language for that country.

So, I kept surfing the site,I went to the personal section, that is meant for home users. As soon as the page loaded, i was amazed, the page was very neatly arranged, very well oriented. though a little heavy as compared to normal web pages. A flash object has been put below the Intel logo which says “Find the Processor for you”, If you click on this, a list with a little description comes up , you can click on the name of the processor to learn more about it.

If we look a little more down in the main page, we see there are 3 columns made for ease of usage. They are Products, Technology, and what’s new. You can navigate where ever you want to depending what do you want to do? I felt the site being user friendly, though a little heavier than normal sites. But Intel’s website is a very simple and elegant site and simplicity being defined in its own words.

Here is the final score for intel’s website

Organization: 9/10

Navigation: 9/10

Interface Design: 9.5/10

Speed: 8/10

Content Presentation 8.5/10

Total Score 9/10

This is an important issue that we all face. We often have to search for many things. But many times we don’t get what we are looking for.  So here a few important tips for how to search.

1. Choose the terms wisely:

By saying this, I mean if you want to search for vacation locations in some place. Irrelevant terms can be vacation spots in the world, places for vacations in the world. This is rather a very wide area of search. I would say going with a term like tourism, etc will be better this way our search is also not made close.  But a better thing is for example if you are planning to go to Mauritius for vacations search for tourism in Mauritius will be better than searching for tourism or searching for vacation spots worldwide.

1. Search terms are normally not case sensitive:

Case sensitivity is a very important aspect that we often have to see. What does it mean? You might have noticed, that you can type alphabets in capitals or no capitals.  When we write in capitals it’s in UPPER CASE, and when we write not in capital, that is LOWERCASE. There is no difference between HELLO WORLD EXAMPLES, and hello world examples. You will get the same results.

1. Searching for a specific phrase:

I want to search for something like HELLO WORLD, how can I look for the exact phrase, it is quite simple, enclose the phrase within inverted commas (i.e. “Phrase that has to be searched”) if we were searching for HELLO WORLD we will write “HELLO WORLD”.

1. Operator usage in searching

We often use the and operator, this is denoted by &. We might want to search for something, for example Hello world and good afternoon. We will type “HELLO WORLD” & “GOOD AFTERNOON”.

1. Definition search:

Type in define: type here the word of which you are seeking definition, this is often very useful when looking for the definition. It works perfectly fine with Google. Don’t know about other search engines.

PS note: If you want me to add any other search tip, please leave a comment about the tip. And the tip will be added.

As I closed my early discussion by saying go ahead and use e-mail, which server is the best. The major servers are as follows:

1. Hotmail/ Live mail
2. Yahoo mail
3. Gmail
4. Maktoob
5. Aim mail
6. Gawab
7. Zapak mail
8. Mail.com
9. Lycos mail
10. Rediff mail

There are definitely many others, since I don’t use all of them I have no idea about how is the service. But these are the ones that I have heard a about.  Closing the discussion, each server has its own benefits. Though for a normal user I would recommend going with any of the major mail servers that are high lightened in bold.

Note: If you know any other server, please let me know so that I can add it to the list.

See others on the net post them here. Try posting some details of the servers as well…