Green Earth? Where are we heading?

Its time we ruminated further over our chances of creating a greener & healthier planet. With the economic rise globally, its tough to minify on the emission & pollution control front. The emerging world economies, while gaining pace towards development have forgotten what menace we are upto, if we are not able to control our environment.

Developing countries, particularly India & China have been polluting the environment in the race for supremacy as global economy drivers. The harm that we are doing to the climate via the industrial emission, vehicle pollution, waste production, etc is not being conceived at a granular level. Will we have a planet to live in 100 years is a question unanswerable by even the most experienced scientists & individuals. The smoke, pollutants, gas, etc is producing enough trauma for our environment. 80% of this destruction is being caused by the the top 17 developed/developing nations.


In the most recent climate control seminar where all the major economic leaders participated, it was decided not to let go off of this severe menace silently biting our planet. Has this been taken seriously by all is still a question. The consequences at the granular level in these nations will clearly answer for itself.

Folks, its time we agree on it & take a step forward to save future lives. How can we? The initiative has to come from within us & further more from our government.

An Amazing Vacation !

This winter we planned for a trip to a hill station! Well, you would say what a bizarre idea but fortunately it turned out to be an amazing experience (even though it was dead cold on the hills ;-) ). Our trip lasted 10 days from Kolkata to Delhi through Shimla/Manali & back to Kolkata. Even though it was quite a hectic tour, yet we enjoyed every moment of it. Each destination we visited was unique in its own way & had its own enamor & enchantment. Right from the moment we had a sight of the all so special Taj mahal at Agra to the bright & fresh snow covers of the peaks of Manali, it was a treat for the eyes.

It was my third visit to the Taj but the Taj Mahal in all its grandeur mesmerized me yet again with its architectural & romantic beauty. The dainty looks & the grandness of the monuments becharms every tourist.

Manali on the other hand fascinated us with it vividly brilliant snow covers. The beauty of the mountains intrigues me due to its physical & natural attributes. The change of climate & weather refreshed my mind & body away from the hustle & bustle of the polluted cities.

Given a chance & a welcome break, I'll surely shoot for another trip of a hill station - perhaps not during winter ;-) !

Here are some wonderful captures of the trip.

Introduction to Spring

I believe that Spring is unique, for several reasons:

* It addresses important areas that many other popular frameworks don't. Spring focuses around providing a way to manage your business objects.

* Spring is both comprehensive and modular. Spring has a layered architecture, meaning that you can choose to use just about any part of it in isolation, yet its architecture is internally consistent. So you get maximum value from your learning curve. You might choose to use Spring only to simplify use of JDBC, for example, or you might choose to use Spring to manage all your business objects. And it's easy to introduce Spring incrementally into existing projects.

* Spring is designed from the ground up to help you write code that's easy to test. Spring is an ideal framework for test driven projects.

* Spring is an increasingly important integration technology, its role recognized by several large vendors.

The Spring framework is a layered architecture consisting of seven well-defined modules. The Spring modules are built on top of the core container, which defines how beans are created, configured, and managed, as shown in Figure below:


Each of the modules (or components) that comprise the Spring framework can stand on its own or be implemented jointly with one or more of the others. The functionality of each component is as follows:

* The core container: The core container provides the essential functionality of the Spring framework. A primary component of the core container is the BeanFactory, an implementation of the Factory pattern. The BeanFactory applies the Inversion of Control (IOC) pattern to separate an application's configuration and dependency specification from the actual application code.

* Spring context: The Spring context is a configuration file that provides context information to the Spring framework. The Spring context includes enterprise services such as JNDI, EJB, e-mail, internalization, validation, and scheduling functionality.

* Spring AOP: The Spring AOP module integrates aspect-oriented programming functionality directly into the Spring framework, through its configuration management feature. As a result you can easily AOP-enable any object managed by the Spring framework. The Spring AOP module provides transaction management services for objects in any Spring-based application. With Spring AOP you can incorporate declarative transaction management into your applications without relying on EJB components.

* Spring DAO: The Spring JDBC DAO abstraction layer offers a meaningful exception hierarchy for managing the exception handling and error messages thrown by different database vendors. The exception hierarchy simplifies error handling and greatly reduces the amount of exception code you need to write, such as opening and closing connections. Spring DAO's JDBC-oriented exceptions comply to its generic DAO exception hierarchy.

* Spring ORM: The Spring framework plugs into several ORM frameworks to provide its Object Relational tool, including JDO, Hibernate, and iBatis SQL Maps. All of these comply to Spring's generic transaction and DAO exception hierarchies.

* Spring Web module: The Web context module builds on top of the application context module, providing contexts for Web-based applications. As a result, the Spring framework supports integration with Jakarta Struts. The Web module also eases the tasks of handling multi-part requests and binding request parameters to domain objects.

* Spring MVC framework: The Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework is a full-featured MVC implementation for building Web applications. The MVC framework is highly configurable via strategy interfaces and accommodates numerous view technologies including JSP, Velocity, Tiles, iText, and POI.