Java 7, brings a simple yet a long awaited feature...

Would you be surprised to know that the API of java.io.File only supported getting the last modified time, and NOT the file's creation time, until Java 7...? Well, not many people seem to be aware of this and surprisingly even the Internet was very quiet on this topic all the while.

So if you are using anything below Java 7 and are desperate to fetch a file's creation time then, one solution would be to write some native code to call system routines and then call the native code using JNI. Most of this work seems to be already done for you in a library called JNA, though. Nevertheless, you will still need to do a little OS specific coding in Java for this, though, as you'll probably not find the same system calls available in Windows and Unix/Linux/BSD/OS X.

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Shard – A Database Design

Scaling Database is one of the most common and important issue that every business confronts in order to accommodate the growing business and thus caused exponential data storage and availability demand. There two principle approaches to accomplish database scaling; v.i.z. vertical and horizontal. Regardless of which ever scaling strategy one decides to follow, we usual land-up buying ever bigger, faster, and more expensive machines; to either move the database on them for vertical scale-up or cluster them together to scale horizontally. While this arrangement is great if one has ample financial support, it doesn't work so well for the bank accounts of some of our heroic system builders who need to scale well past what they can afford. In this write-up, I intend to explain a revolutionary and fairly new database architecture; termed as Sharding, that some websites like Friendster and Flickr have been using since quite sometime now. The concept defines an affordable approach t...

FAINT - Search for faces

Lately, I've been playing around a bit with facial pattern recognition algorithms and their open source implementations. I came across many reference implementation but a very few were implemented in Java, and the Eigenfaces algorithm by far happens to be the best amongst them all. During my research around the said topic i happened to stumble-upon an implementation called FAINT (The Face Annotation Interface - http://faint.sourceforge.net). Faint by far the best facial pattern recognition API and as you must have already guessed, it implements the Eigenfaces algorithm. Now enough of theory talks, how about implementing an example with faint...? Here is one for all you face-recognition enthusiasts. The following example simply searches for faces in a given photograph and thumbnails them. Now, I know thats not face recognition; but be a little creative here. Once you have the facial thumbnails extracted, its never a big deal to look further in the Faint API and find methods which ca...

Schematron - validating web-forms and java objects

Whilst developing web applications, more than often we are confronted with the need to validate user inputs. On the client-side (browsers) we generally do that with scripting languages; and for those users who have perhaps deliberately disabled their browser script support; we perform the same set validation on the server side, and this time we write some lines-of-code to extract the user input from the HTTP request and validate the same. Well, although ironic; yet it seems to be a de-facto that - we have to specify the validation rules separately on the client and server side, for eventually validating something that is semantically same. A technical analysis into the core reason reveals that – although the semantics of the herein discussed "thing" (i.e. the user input) are the same, yet the representations of the semantic on the client and server side are different; which enforces us to implement the extraction and validation logic differently. So going by that theory - if ...

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