ssklogs

Now a days all network based appliances support cryptography for security. There are lot of software based libs and algorithms available to perform the same.

We also added a prototype module to our backup appliance which will secure the backup data using crypto. At that time we were thinking about performance and i got exposed to hardware based crypto processors.

These processors offloads the CPU intensive crypto computing from the CPU, thus increasing the performance.

Here are some info on this topic

ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs-11v2-20.pdf

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/security/library/s-pkcs/?open&t=grl,l=921,p=openCrypt

http://www-3.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/

Want to tweak Firefox. Type about:config as the URL and you will get a list.

We have Ultra SCSI, iSCSI, SAN , NAS for Storage and Fast Ethernet, GigE for LAN and several IPC models for Clustering. Infiniband unifies these communication models into one High speed interconnect.

This way it provides ease of management and less wiring!! I remember the lab we had with all those SCSI, FC, GigE cables lying around and twisted with each other. This is with just dozens of machines. Just imagine the mess with a huge high end cluster with 1000s of nodes.

Linux has support for Infiniband.

http://infiniband.sourceforge.net/

http://www.openib.org/

JNDI (Java Naming and Directory Service) is an important concept in J2EE world. I have used it in many J2EE projects to expose custom resources to external apps. A better way to learn JNDI is to implement a simple Service Provider using the SPI interface. This will provide an in-depth understanding of how JNDI works, instead of just learning the Client interface.

For reference the following SP can be used. It provides an in-memory JNDI SP.

http://tyrex.sourceforge.net/naming.html

Workflow Engine provides task based activities to complete a work. This way the tasks can be easily pluggable and provides lot of modularity. We have been using home grown Workflow Engine for our system. This has a GUI to design the workflows and the core engine which instantiates workflows and executes them.

The challenges we faced were related to workflow rollbacks, when a task in a workflow fails. We solved this by having error handler tasks for each of the task, which knows how to handle a particular error.

Here are some of the open source workflow engines

http://www.opensymphony.com/osworkflow/

http://opensource.atlassian.com/confluence/spring/display/WEBFLOW/Home

WWW archived!

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

I used XML in a project where the client tier consisted of everything from Desktops to PDAs to Mobile phones to PSTN phones.

XSL was obviously the choice to render the HTMLs, WMLs and vXMLs out of the XML.

wiser is java framework which takes this concept to next level where XML can be used to define the GUI. This way it can be rendered as Standalone Swing GUI(thin or fat client) or Web based GUI.

https://wiser.dev.java.net/

I have mostly used JSP and very little ASP in my whole software career. Came to know about this tool which converts ASP pages to PHP.

When i was working on the Linux based Network Device, we went with custom dynamic pages based on just C and sprintfs!!! Since we had very little dynamic pages and need to use low level calls , We went with that approach. Otherwise I would have opted for PHP.

http://asp2php.naken.cc/howto.php