Performance Tuning – Systems Running BPEL Processes

This article is written by Ravi Saraswathi and Jaswant Singh, the authors of Oracle SOA BPEL Process Manager 11gR1 – A Hands-on Tutorial. This article covers performance tuning of SOA composite applications for optimal performance and scalability. The industry leading practices for the Oracle SOA Suite platform components, WebLogic server platform, JVM, operating systems, and load balancers are also included.

Performance tuning is an important step for any IT system implementation to optimize the systems and software resources needed for serving business functions. In other words, performance tuning enables us to optimize the system cost and performance to stay competitive in the market place. The process of performance tuning is iterative and in this article we will look into various systems and software components tuning options to optimize BPEL processes response time, scalability and availability, and underlying systems utilization.

Introduction to Modern OpenGL

The OpenGL API has seen various changes since its creation in 1992. With every new version, new features were added and additional functionality was exposed on supporting hardware through extensions. Until OpenGL v2.0 (which was introduced in 2004), the functionality in the graphics pipeline was fixed, that is, there were fixed set of operations hardwired in the graphics hardware and it was impossible to modify the graphics pipeline. With OpenGL v2.0, the shader objects were introduced for the first time. That enabled programmers to modify the graphics pipeline through special programs called shaders, which were written in a special language called OpenGL shading language (GLSL).

After OpenGL v2.0, the next major version was v3.0. This version introduced two profiles for working with OpenGL; the core profile and the compatibility profile. The core profile basically contains all of the non-deprecated functionality whereas the compatibility profile retains deprecated functionality for backwards compatibility. As of 2012, the latest version of OpenGL available is OpenGL v4.3. Beyond OpenGL v3.0, the changes introduced in the application code are not as drastic as compared to those required for moving from OpenGL v2.0 to OpenGL v3.0 and above.

In this article, by Muhammad Mobeen Movania author of Kevin Cardwell, the author of OpenGL Development Cookbook we will introduce the three shader stages accessible in the OpenGL v3.3 core profile, that is, vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. Note that OpenGL v4.0 introduced two additional shader stages that is tessellation control and tessellation evaluation shaders between the vertex and geometry shader.

In this article we will cover:

• Setting up the OpenGL v3.3 core profile on Visual Studio 2010 using the GLEW and freeglut libraries
• Designing a GLSL shader class
• Rendering a simple colored triangle using shaders
• Doing a ripple mesh deformer using the vertex shader
• Dynamically subdividing a plane using the geometry shader
• Dynamically subdividing a plane using the geometry shader with instanced rendering
• Drawing a 2D image in a window using the fragment shader and SOIL image loading library

Breaching Wireless Security

This article is by Kevin Cardwell, the author of BackTrack – Testing Wireless Network Security.This article introduces the reader to the way in which hackers typically break into networks.

In this article, we will discuss how hackers attack and breach wireless security. We do this to understand the various methods of attacking so that we can defend against them. There are a number of wireless attacks to discuss on wireless. An important point to understand is that attackers will follow a process and methodology when they attempt an attack, and the way to defend against this is to stop information from getting to the potential attacker. This can be a challenge when it comes to wireless. We group the attacks into several different categories. They are listed in the following table:

Hubs

This article by Einar Ingebrigtsen, author of SignalR Real Time Application Development, will cover how you connect a client with a server in a very different way, making it seem like you can call code directly on the client from the server and vice versa.

Topics covered in this article are as follows:

• Setting up a Hub on the server

• Working of the Hubs

• Consuming a Hub from a .net client

• Consuming a Hub from a JavaScript client

At this stage, the developer should be able to use Hubs, and our sample app will now be able to chat properly.

Routing to an external ActiveMQ broker

Usually, for practical purposes, we connect to the embedded Active MQ broker coming with ServiceMix out of the box. In real-world, however, you would probably need to connect to the standalone JMS broker. This article by Henryk Konsek, author of Instant Apache ServiceMix How-to,will teach how you can in the real world connect to the standalone JMS broker.

Creating your first heat map in R

In this article by Sebastian Raschka, author of Instant Heat Maps in R How-to [Instant], we will learn how to construct our first heat map in R from the AirPassenger data set, which is a standard data set included in the data package that is available with R distributions. For this task, we will use the levelplot() function from the lattice package and explore the enhanced features of the gplots package, the heatmap.2() function.