Imaging Experts

The Tradeshow Season

As I'm sure you all are aware, September has been a hectic month. Besides being the end of the quarter, there were simultaneous trade shows for us in Germany (DMS) and in Los Angeles (Momentum by EMC). Additionally we continued to perform a lot of planning and development activity as our customers continued to challenge our development team with requests for new features and platforms.

In Europe, attendees of DMS 2006 in Cologne showed strong interest in our .NET and Java products, particularly for our Microsoft Office and Acrobat options as well as our FlexSnap document manipulation and viewing products.

At Momentum, the EMC user group event in Los Angeles, we met with well over 60 customers eager to discuss the latest enhancements to our FlexSnap application. There was strong interest in features like enhanced thumbnails, faster performance through page manipulation on the server, support for new PDF document types, and new configuration options.

We also had the distinct pleasure of participating in a joint presentation with Countrywide Financial. The focus was on their mortgage purchasing process into which our FlexSnap: SI document manipulation application was recently integrated. Through our cooperative efforts, they were able to increase mortgages processed per day and to approximately cut in half the time to fully process each application. Greater throughput translates directly to larger profit margins for them. Our unique server-based document rendering technology quickly streams individual pages of large documents to the client. We thereby were able to meet their extremely difficult requirement of providing a document's first page and thumbnails to Countrywide's users in less than 2 seconds, with subsequent pages served at sub-second speeds.

In just the first few months of "going live", Countrywide's throughput saw dramatic improvement, and gained wide acceptance with the business unit, a critical element in supporting their projected growth.

-Simon

Cloning Using Serialization

We recently encountered a bug in our software where we were copying annotations. Changes made to the copy of the annotations would also be made on the original documents. This is because we were simply moving around the references of the object rather than making actual copies. When I looked into the code, it looked like it would be somewhat tedious to clone the object at its full depth. I then wondered if I could use Serialization to perform a deep copy. After some searching I found the exact article I was looking for. You can indeed use Serialization for this purpose and it works beautifully.

- Alex

Proposed Changes in DST Cause Java Runtime Environment Security Concerns

On August 8, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act changed the time change dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday of March and end the first Sunday of November. The Secretary of Energy will report the impact of this change to Congress.Congress retains the right to revert the Daylight Saving Time back to the 2005 time schedule once the Department of Energy study is complete.

The effect of this on Java is significant. Time zone information is obtained from a set of files stored internally by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and applied to dates as required. Since this information is statically stored in the Java Runtime Environment, older versions of Java do not know about the changes and will display the wrong time for the USA throughout most of March 2007. Forward date information will already be wrong if it refers to dates in that period.

IMPACTED VERSIONS:

Java 5 update 5 and earlier

Java 1.4.2_10 and earlier

Java 1.3.x

NON IMPACTED VERSIONS:

Java 5 update 6 or later

Java 1.4.2_11 or later

Prior to Java Plug-in 5.0 Update 6 and later for Windows,an applet could specify the version of the JRE on which it would run. With 5.0 Update 6 and later installed on the Windows platform, all applets are executed with the latest version of the JRE. See Sun Alert ID: 102557. The 1.5_08 JRE will force applets to run using the new version regardless of previous specification.

The Sun Java 1.5_08 pilot package was released and made available September 2006. Pilot testing and code remediation will continue until January 2007 and product distribution to workstations will begin in February 2007.

- Ed

The Microsoft JVM

With good regularity, Sun introduces their latest technology in the form of their Java Virtual Machine or JVM (aka JRE, or JDK; at their core, the acronyms are essentially synonymous). Functionality provided over the past years includes the following: mouse wheel support, "always on top" windows, full screen mode, internationalization, logging, security, and enhanced data structures. The latest version is JDK 1.5.0.8.

This is all great unless you're stuck with the Microsoft JVM. Some machines from a few years back were shipped with the MS-JVM. The problem is that it is based on JDK 1.1, which is over 8 years old at this point. It's easy enough for an individual to go to Sun's website and upgrade. But it is not necessarily easy for IT Managers at large corporations.

So that means if you provide Java applets for one of these large corporations, you have to make sure your applet will run on the MS-JVM, aka JDK 1.1, aka 1998 technology. This means no Swing, no Collections, no java.util.Logging, etc.

To make matters worse, Microsoft stopped shipping Java at all with new PCs, and they don't make their old JVM available. Luckily, some old versions of the install program are still kicking around. If you search on the filename msjavx86.exe, you'll find some results. I found my copy at filemirrors.com.

Once you install the JVM, it is still a bit tricky to get it to work. You need to navigate to Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced and scroll down to the section on Java. Be sure to uncheck the option to use the Sun JVM and be sure to check the options for the console and logging for the MS JVM. Once you've restarted IE, your Java Console will now be available at View -> Java Console instead of Tools -> Sun Java Console. You'll  know you've successfully installed the JVM if  you console shows up and shows something like the following:

    Microsoft (R) VM for Java, 5.0 Release 5.0.0.3805

Welcome to 1998!

-Alex

Serialization: Avoiding a NotSerializableException with the Transient keyword

When you are writing client-server software with Java, it's often convenient to pass Java objects from the client to the server. Java Serialization allows classes to be converted to a string format, allowing for easy network transmission. In most cases, it is very easy to make a class Serializable. You simply have your class implement the java.io.Serializable interface. Unlike most interfaces, there are no methods for you to implement, it is simply a "marking interface".

public class Person
    implements Serializable
{

private Date mBirthday
private String mName

public Person (String pName, Date pBirthday)
{
    mBirthday = new Date (pBirthday);
    mName = pName;
}

/* add some setters / getters etc... */

}

Once you have a Serializable class, you can then create an ObjectOutputStream and use the writeObject method to send your object. If you try to write an object that is not Serializable, you will get a NotSerializableException.

There are some classes that just can not be serialized. Often these are AWT components, or Threads, or the like. But what if you have a class that you want to "make Serializable" but once of it's member variables is a Thread object. This is where the transient keyword comes in.  By marking a member variable transient. You tell the Serialization engine not to include that member in the serialization process. You are now able to send down that complex object without getting a NotSerializableException. For example:

...
private Date mBirthday
private String mName
private transient Thread personThread
...

When a Person object gets deserialized, the personThread Thread will be null, but most likely, you won't care, especially in the case, where you just want to store the birthday and the name of the person.

For further reading, check out the discussion on Serialziation at the Sun Developer Network

-Alex