2004/11/30

c3p0:JDBC DataSources/Resource Pools

c3p0 is an easy-to-use library for augmenting traditional (DriverManager-based) JDBC drivers with JNDI-bindable DataSources, including DataSources that implement Connection and Statement Pooling, as described by the jdbc3 spec and jdbc2 standard extensio

http://sourceforge.net/projects/c3p0

Introducing Spring Framework

Author: Rod Johnson

You may have heard the buzz this summer around the Spring Framework. In this article, I'll try to explain what Spring sets out to achieve, and how I believe it can help you to develop J2EE applications.

Introducing Spring Framework

2004/11/28

What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business

What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business

Whether you're new to the field or a seasoned executive, this book will give you a firm grasp on what it takes to make an organization perform. It presents the basic principles of management simply, but not simplistically. Why did an eBay succeed where a Webvan did not? Why do you need both a business model and a strategy? Why is it impossible to manage without the right performance measures, and do yours pass the test?

What Management Is is both a beginner's guide and a bible for one of the greatest social innovations of modern times: the discipline of management. Joan Magretta, a former top editor at the Harvard Business Review, distills the wisdom of a bewildering sea of books and articles into one simple, clear volume, explaining both the logic of successful organizations and how that logic is embodied in practice.

Magretta makes rich use of examples -- contemporary and historical -- to bring to life management's High Concepts: value creation, business models, competitive strategy, and organizational design. She devotes equal attention to the often unwritten rules of execution that characterize the best-performing organizations. Throughout she shows how the principles of management that work in for-profit businesses can -- and must -- be applied to nonprofits as well.

Most management books preach a single formula or a single fad. This one roams knowledgeably over the best that has been thought and written with a practical eye for what matters in real organizations. Not since Peter Drucker's great work of the 1950s and 1960s has there been a comparable effort to present the work of management as a coherent whole, to take stock of the current state of play, and to write about it thoughtfully for readers of all backgrounds. Newcomers will find the basics demystified. More experienced readers will recognize a store of useful wisdom and a framework for improving their own performance.

This is the big-picture management book for our times. It defines a common standard of managerial literacy that will help all of us lead more productive lives, whether we aspire to be managers or not.

Confronting Reality : Doing What Matters to Get Things Right

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
In their 2002 bestseller, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan identify why people don’t get results: they don’t execute. Bossidy and Charan are back with another stellar study on organizational behavior that shows how companies can succeed if they return to reality and examine every part of their business. Confronting Reality is based on a simple concept, but many companies approach strategy and execution in a surprisingly unreal manner and even the simplest of measurement methods, like the business model, are not applied correctly.
Cisco, 3M, KLM, Home Depot, and the Thomson Corporation are just a few of the companies that Bossidy and Charan examine. To demonstrate how to examine a business using the business model, Bossidy and Charan map out external variables, financial targets, internal activities, and an iteration stage (defined as a time to "make tradeoffs, apply and develop business savvy") to prove how a dynamically evolving business model will help improve performance.


"The version of the business model we have developed is a robust, reality-based process for thinking about the specifics of your business in a holistic way. It shows you how to tie together the financial targets you must meet, the external realities of your business and internal activities such as strategy development, operating tactics, and selection and development of people."
Larry Bossidy, retired chairman and CEO of Honeywell International and Ram Charan, author of What the CEO Wants You to Know and Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business, have once again shed industrial-strength light on how to run a successful business. --E. Brooke Gilbert


link

Struts vs. JavaServer Faces

Author: Craig McClanahan


Introduction

It should come as no surprise that the most frequent questions I get asked center around the issue of which of these two web tier technologies an organization or individual developer should consider using. It makes sense to ask me, because I was the original creator of the Struts Framework, and was the co-specification lead for JavaServer Faces 1.0 (JSF).

Usually, the question is framed as an or issue, based on an understanding that the two technologies are mutually exclusive. That turns out not to be the case, but it can still be difficult to determine what to do. This blog entry provides my current advice on the subject -- but, to understand it better, it's worth briefly reviewing the development and focus of the two technologies.

The story is a little long compared to typical blog entries; if you want to cut to the chase and see my advice, scroll down to the section entitled The Bottom Line, below.


http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/craigmcc/20040927

2004/11/24

display tag library

The display tag library is an open source suite of custom tags that provide high-level web presentation patterns which will work in an MVC model. The library provides a significant amount of functionality while still being easy to use.


http://displaytag.sourceforge.net/



You can directly study the displaytag.war, it must can shorten your learning curve.

Making Java Objects Comparable

by Budi Kurniawan
03/12/2003

In real life, objects are often comparable. For example, Dad's car is more expensive than Mom's, this dictionary is thicker than those books, Granny is older than Auntie Mollie (well, yeah, living objects, too, are comparable), and so forth. In writing object-oriented programs, there are often needs to compare instances of the same class. And once instances are comparable, they can be sorted. As an example, given two Employees, you may want to know which one has stayed in the organization longer. Or, in a search method for Person instances with a first name of Larry, you may want to display search results sorted by age. This article teaches you how to design your class to make its instances comparable by using the java.lang.Comparable and java.util.Comparator interfaces and presents three examples that illustrate both interfaces.

http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/3286

2004/11/11

Book Recommendation: Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business : 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning

Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business : 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning

Book Description
The coauthor of the international bestseller Execution has created the how-to guide for solving today’s toughest business challenge: creating profitable growth that is organic, differentiated, and sustainable.

For many, growth is about “home runs”—the big bold idea, the next new thing, the product that will revolutionize the marketplace. While obviously attractive and lucrative, home runs don’t happen every day and frequently come in cycles.

Products like Kevlar, Teflon, and the Dell business model for selling personal computers may be once-in-a-decade phenomena. A surer and more consistent path to pro?table revenue growth is through “singles and doubles”—small day-to-day wins and adaptation to changes in the marketplace that build the foundation for substantially increasing revenues. The impact of singles and doubles can be huge. They are not only the basis for sustained revenue growth but, in fact, the foundation for home runs. Singles and doubles provide the discipline of execution, an absolute necessity for successfully bringing a breakthrough technology to market or implementing a new business model.

Inherent in this way of thinking is the revolutionary idea that growth is everyone’s business—not solely the concern of the sales force or top management. Just as everyone participates in cost reduction, so must everyone be engaged in the growth agenda of the business. Every contact of each employee with a customer is an opportunity for revenue growth. That includes everyone from the people working in a company’s call center handling customer inquiries and complaints to the CEO.

In this trailblazing book, Ram Charan provides the building blocks and tools that can put a business on the path to sustained, pro?table growth. For more than twenty-?ve years, Ram Charan has been working day in and day out with companies around the world. The ideas he has developed for solving the profitable revenue growth dilemma facing many businesses are based on personally seeing what works in real time. These are ideas that have been tested across industries and that deliver results, and they can be put to use starting Monday morning.

Book Recommendation: The Wal-Mart Decade: How a New Generation of Leaders Turned Sam Walton's Legacy into the World's #1 Company

The Wal-Mart Decade: How a New Generation of Leaders Turned Sam Walton's Legacy into the World's #1 Company

Book Description

Inside one of America's most remarkable success stories, from the bestselling author of Jack Welch and the G.E. Way.

Two of the toughest challenges for any company are leadership transitions and rapid growth. How do you replace an enormously popular and beloved CEO-especially one who started from scratch to create a national icon? And how do you maintain a rapid growth rate without losing the culture and focus of a small company?

Over the past ten years, since the death of the legendary Sam Walton, Wal-Mart has passed both challenges with flying colors. In 1992, it had revenues of $43.9 billion; now it's number one on the Fortune 500 list of America's largest companies, with revenues of $218 billion. Sam Walton's successors have taken the company into far-flung new markets and new directions yet without losing the down-to-earth retailing culture that made Wal-Mart thrive in its early years, when its business model was truly revolutionary.

Robert Slater, a highly respected business journalist and author, was granted unprecedented access to the company while writing The Wal-Mart Decade. He takes readers deep into the inner circle, where the big decisions are made about strategy and operations. And he weaves a fascinating, accessible story about the many challenges of the past decade and how Wal-Mart built on its founder's legacy to overcome them.