I’d rather be a great historian than to be a quack engineer.

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=> On Software Architecture

=> On Knowledge

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Just about two weeks after District 9 debuted and defames Nigeria, Sony Coorporation has followed the same suit to reference Nigerians as major scammers on the Internet in its new PlayStation 3 (PS 3) Slim TV spot advert.

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Barely 6 months ago the minister of Information launched the Rebranding Nigeria campaign. As this campaign is going on, the block buster movie District 9, which debuted in cinemas on August 13 shatters it.

In the movie, a gang of Nigerians were depicted as black marketers having weaponry deals with aliens, which is led by Obesandjo. (Sounds familiar?)

The Nigerians were also depicted as illiterates, trading weapons they don’t have idea of how they are being operated.

While the Rebranding program suffers from recognition as it strives to achieve its goals, District 9 has gained world fame and earned $37 million at the box office over its opening weekend, $7 million more than its cost price.

Its popularity was also influenced by social networking sites which the Rebranding program failed to utilize. District 9 has been trending on Twitter long before its release.

“Nigeria’s Rebranding Program Suffers Again“

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Google is cool. It changed the way we do things. It makes our lives easier and more effective.
But wait, does everyone in the world know that? What about Nigeria?

The Google Technology User Group, Nigeria (the first GTUG in Africa) provides an avenue for Google geeks in the country to meet, share and learn. And of course they are going to spread these great opportunities to everyone out there.

Learn more here.

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Yesterday, Twitter launched a ‘Live-Updating Search Widget’ which lets you customize the widget with a certain search query to see real time results of tweets.

I customized the widget to return tweets with the keywords Nigeria, #nigeria or #lightupnigeria.

The #lightupnigeria hashtag is particularly interesting. It is a movement in regards the current situation of Power in the country and Nigerians are now expressing their desperate need of steady Electricity. There is a good post about it here.

The customized widget is now running on my home page. I also created a Google Gadget for the widget and I have it running on my iGoogle page. Click to add to your iGoogle page.

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I applied Adam Bien’s Generic CRUD service which he described in his book, Real World Java EE patterns – Rethinking Best Practices, and it greatly simplified the CRUD operations for the project I am working on. He also discussed about it on his blog.

However, I have queries which vary considerably depending on some options selected by a user, so I needed to create my queries on the fly instead of having named queries which keep growing. I therefore extended the Generic CRUD service to generate dynamic queries.

In the CRUDService interface I added findByDynamicQuery():

public interface CrudService {
     //...
     <T> List<T> findByDynamicQuery(Class<T> type,
                     List<ParameterDefinition> parameters);
}
 

Class<T> type represents the entity class for the query to be made and List<ParameterDefinition> parameters is used for specifying the query parameters (more on that).

The DynamicQueryParameter

I needed to specify parameters for OR conditions as well; Map<String, Object> could not satisfy the requirement since each key can map to at most one value and some queries may define one key (field) for many values. E.g. “SELECT c FROM Candidate WHERE c.program = :prog1 OR c.program = :prog2″ (program twice).

To solve the problem I used List<ParameterDefinition> to specify the parameters. ParameterDefinition is a simple class that defines the parameter type, name and value:

public class ParameterDefinition {
   private final String name;
   private final Object value;
   private final ParameterType paramType;

   public ParameterDefinition(ParameterType paramType, String name, Object value) {
      this.name = name;
      this.value = value;
      this.paramType = paramType;
   }

   public ParameterType getParameterType() {
      return paramType;
   }
   public String getName() {
      return name;
   }

   public Object getValue() {
      return value;
   }
}

ParameterType is defined using an Enum:

public enum ParameterType {
    WITH, AND, OR
}

The dynamic version of the QueryParameter is therefore as follows:

public class DynamicQueryParameter {
   private List<ParameterDefinition> parameters = null;

   private DynamicQueryParameter(String name, Object value) {
      this.parameters = new ArrayList<ParameterDefinition>();
      addParameter(ParameterType.WITH, name, value);
   }

   public static DynamicQueryParameter with(String name, final Object value) {
      return new DynamicQueryParameter(name, value);
   }

   public DynamicQueryParameter and(String name, final Object value) {
      addParameter(ParameterType.AND, name, value);

      return this;
   }

   public DynamicQueryParameter or(String name, final Object value) {
      addParameter(ParameterType.OR, name, value);

      return this;
   }

   public List<ParameterDefinition> parameters() {
     return this.parameters;
   }

   private void addParameter(ParameterType paramType,
      String name, final Object value)
   {
      parameters.add(new ParameterDefinition(paramType, name, value));
   }
}

And finally the CrudService implementation:

@Stateless
@Local(CrudService.class)
@TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.MANDATORY)
public class CrudServiceBean implements CrudService {
   @PersistenceContext
   private EntityManager em;

   //...

   public <T> List<T> findByDynamicQuery(Class<T> type,
       List<ParameterDefinition> parameters)
   {
      //generate query
      String queryString = generateQuery(type, parameters);

      Query query = this.em.createQuery(queryString);

      //set parameters
      int k = 1;	//parameter position
      for (ParameterDefinition param : parameters) {
           query.setParameter(k++, param.getValue());
      }

      return query.getResultList();
   }

   //helper method
   private <T> String generateQuery(Class<T> type,
      List<ParameterDefinition> parameters)
   {
      final String VAR = "obj";
      StringBuilder queryBuilder = new StringBuilder(
      String.format("SELECT %s FROM %s %s",
         VAR, type.getSimpleName(), VAR)
      );

      if (parameters.size() == 0) { //no conditions
           return queryBuilder.toString();
      }

      //WHERE clause
      Iterator<ParameterDefinition> itr = parameters.iterator();
      int k = 1;	//parameter position
      ParameterDefinition firstParam = itr.next();  //always type WITH
      queryBuilder.append(String.format(" WHERE %s.%s = ?%d",
           VAR, firstParam.getName(), k++));

      //append parameters
      for ( ; itr.hasNext(); ) {
           ParameterDefinition nextParam = itr.next();
           queryBuilder.append(String.format(
               " %s %s.%s = ?%s", nextParam.getParameterType(), VAR,
               nextParam.getName(), k++));
      }
      return queryBuilder.toString();
   }
}

The query can be constructed from a client as follows:

List<Candidate> candidate = crudServiceBean.findByDynamicQuery(Candidate.class,
      DynamicQueryParameter.
      with("id", "111").
      and("program", "SE").
      or("program", "IT").
      and("mode", "FT").
      parameters());

where Candidate is an entity bean and crudServiceBean is a reference to CrudServiceBean session bean.

In the beginning of the year we predicted that 0.5 million (or more) Nigerians  would be on Facebook by mid-year. Today there are 573,780 on the platform with more engagements being noticed. Google Trends show that more than 50,000 Nigerians return to Facebook daily.

The effect of the growth has started manifesting in the country: lot of groups are now formed with active participations and discussions.

A very interesting group recently is the “SUPPORT FOR SENATE BILL AGAINST CHILD DESTITUTION” formed to support Senator Tafidan Argungu and Forty others’ bill to stop child destitution in the country. There are more than 1,380 members on the group now. The group has certainly made an impact in this campaign which made Thisday publish an article about it.

In the last 2 months, Facebook attracted more than 100,000 Nigerians each month. With this rate, we should expect 1.2 million users by the end of the year and about 2.4 million by 2011. Indeed with this number, it is going to be an interesting platform for politics for the next general elections. There are numerous political groups already.

However the biggest question still remains: do we expect to see positive developments in the country through the power of information sharing and collaboration Facebook offers?

[Other posts on "Nigeria and Facebook"]

Nigeria and Facebook


Nigeria and Facebook – Update I

Nigeria and Facebook – Update II

Nigeria and Facebook – Update III

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1) Stick to Microsoft Live Search (or is it called Bing) and leave Google alone (with every search query being processed on Linux OS).

4) Microsoft Office is also SaaS. Google Docs looks too simple.

5) Did I hear you say your favorite plugin is available only on Firefox or that Google Chrome is faster?

7) You also love Microsoft Office – $149.95 is not much for it. The professional version is damn feature-rich and surely worth for $499.95. NEVER use pirated version.

10) Are you thinking of a DBMS choice? SQL Server provides all you need – Your Data, Any Place, Any Time. Prices and Licences aren’t that bad again. MySQL may not work for you the way it did for NASA, Facebook, …

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In last week’s JavaOne conference, great announcements, demos and technical sessions took place.

J2SE 7 (Dolphin – the next version of Java standard edition with improvements in performance, security and usability) is anticipated for early next year. Early access may be found here.

J2EE 6 with improvements in Servlets, web services and annotations to greatly simplify enterprise applications’ implementation would be finally released in September.

Lot of cool demos on JavaFx were made. With JavaFx you write one program and it runs on the desktop, browser and mobile. It also supports TV.

Here is a wrap up from the JavaOne’s website.

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