CAPTCHA – Java based solutions.

You may aware that Captcha is common and much needed solution to prevent Denial of Service attack from public network. Being a Java lead, it is very difficult to find out the correct Captcha solution for the given requirement. If so, don’t worry. I have articulated the available Captcha solutions for Java Technology with Pros & Corns. Hope this article brings much detail to choose relevant Captcha solution to your project.

Are you looking for any specific details on the above?  Leave me a comment. I will get back to you.,

Thanks,
Nanjundan Chinnasamy

New ways of doing the Banking..

Use Customer Mobile & banking app to complete Customer Identification Verification at other channels:

Use customer Mobile/banking app as one of the authentication mechanism to use banking services in any channel. Once Customer successfully login with banking app, they can use their device to pair to your banking channel and by-pass any channel specific Customer Identification and Verification process. Think of like generating ready-to-use QR code while paring mobile device Whatsapp app and web client version browser to make the communication.

This mobile phone authentication concept can be applied to multiple channels like ATM, branch, Online etc. Few of the examples I am thinking at this moment and documented below. This may be eliminating/minimizing the use of plastic card going forward. I am thinking that world is moving towards cardless in banking area. This concept can be analyzed further to make it reality in any industry including banking.

ATM channel usage:

Customer can withdraw money from our own bank ATM using mobile authentication without a plastic card. At present, to get any emergency cash, we really no need to call telephone banking and get the one time access code to get the emergency cash from ATM.

Firstly, Get Emergency cash onetime secret code can be generated from App.

If we pair customer mobile and ATM using mutual authentication as mentioned above, we won’t need to generate the one-time access code.

Branch channel usage:

Widely used Customer Identification and Verification mechanism at the branch is using a plastic card (Chip&PIN OR Signature across UK banks). Some/Most of the banking services can be made available at the branch just with the phone along with some bio-metric security integration like fingerprint scanning to complete CIV to use the services offered by the bank.

Again, the overall idea is that customers have phone with them, so - they can be identified & verified using Mobile app secret code. And hence, No additional identification mechanism will be needed to use the services offered by the customer - once customer’s mobile device has been paired with our banking network.

Additionally, we can offer this feature by minimizing the mobile banking app using Web client like Whatsapp web client to experience the app feature within desktop/laptop. Customers like me may be excited to use the app specific feature via desktop/laptop browser.

Do you think you have some idea and it can change the way we are doing banking today? Please write to me. We can catch-up.

Happy Learning,

Nanjundan Chinnasamy

Ideation Blog - Exposing few banks APIs (RESTFul) to the Public

I am planning to share my Ideas on the way we are banking today. Also, how the technology can be used to help our Customers on day to day basics. Again, Banks are not there to Server Customer alone. To Make Profit as well J. Next 4-5 blogs will be more specific to how banks can make money using the new technology and trends.

Banks can follow Project-centric approach to Product-Centric approach. What do i mean by this? Banks should not limit to implement the project. Rather banks should proactively think to convert Projects to Product to make more money out of it. Few points are,

ü  As a bank, we can think of exposing our APIs like Telecoms to generate income by following Product centric approach.

ü  Open/Closed API model to increase the traffic.

ü  APIs are a channel to new customers and markets.

ü  APIs promote innovation & revolution is Banking. Like Savings account deal comparator, all banks branch/ATM locator etc..

ü  APIs are a better way to organize IT.

ü  APIs create a path to apps.

Business Benefits:

ü  API’s will generate indirect income to the bank.

ü  A free API is free advertising.

ü  Free APIs encourage 3rd party developer usage.

Eg: Expedia’s 70% revenue comes from API

Above points are explicit. So i am not going to explain in detail. If you are seeking for more specific details on any of the points above, i am happy to clarify you.

Happy learning!

Nanjundan Chinnasamy

WebSphere Application Server Performance Tuning Toolkit

Do you want to analyze the performance bottlenecks for the applications running under Websphere Application Server? IBM - WebSphere Application Server Performance Tuning Toolkit will help us to spot the issues during development time itself. Its an Eclipse based tool used to identify the performance issue at a code block/layer level.

Here, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel again. IBM developer work article explains with basic step by stem details.

WebSphere Application Server Performance Tuning Toolkit – Developer works article: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/downloads/performtuning.html

If you see any difficulties in using this tool, kindly post yiour qns to me. I am happy to help you.

Happy Learning,

Nanjundan Chinnasamy

SchemaSpy to visualise the DB schema design

Are you looking for very simple and lightweight tool that generates ER diagram from commonly used DBs. SchemaSpy tool will help you to understand all the relationships in DB schema. This week blog is about SchemaSpy tool.

About SchemaSpy:

SchemaSpy is a Java-based tool (requires Java 5 or higher) that analyzes the metadata of a schema in a database and generates a visual representation of it in a browser-displayable format. It lets you click through the hierarchy of database tables via child and parent table relationships as represented by both HTML links and entity-relationship diagrams. It's also designed to help resolve the obtuse errors that a database sometimes gives related to failures due to constraints. It’s free.

SchemaSpy uses JDBC's database metadata extraction services to gather the majority of its information, but has to make vendor-specific SQL queries to gather some information such as the SQL associated with a view and the details of check constraints. The differences between vendors have been isolated to configuration files and are extremely limited. Almost all of the vendor-specific SQL is optional.

Browse some sample pages generated by SchemaSpy. Note that this was run against an extremely limited schema so it doesn't show the full power of the tool.

SchemaSpy is a command line tool. If you are interested to work with GUI based tools. Try Its GUI tools using http://www.joachim-uhl.de/projekte/schemaspygui/

Running SchemaSpy

You run SchemaSpy from the command line:

java -jar schemaSpy.jar -t dbType -db dbName [-s schema] -u user [-p password] -o outputDir

More details to explore SchemaSpy can be found below:

http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/

Happy Learning,

Nanjundan Chinnasamy

Apache PDFBox - A Java PDF Library

I wanted to share my recent learning on PDF creation using PDFBox Java API. More technical details about this documented below.

The Apache PDFBox library is an open source Java tool for working with PDF documents. This project allows creation of new PDF documents, manipulation of existing documents and the ability to extract content from documents.

Features:

Create PDFs:

 Create a PDF from scratch, with embedded fonts and images.

Signing Digitally:

 Sign PDF files.

Print:

 Print a PDF file using the standard Java printing API.

Preflight:

 Validate PDF files against the PDF/A-1b standard.

Fill Forms:

 Extract data from PDF forms or fill a PDF form.

Split & Merge:

 Split a single PDF into many files or merge multiple PDF files.

Extract Text:

 Extract Unicode text from PDF files. Save as Image Save PDFs as image files, such as PNG or JPEG.

Other alternative frameworks/tools to generate PDF in java:

• iText: nowadays iText is a commercial library, the latest version is not for free anymore.

• FOP: I worked a lot with FOP. It's fairly resource intensive (Java > XML > XSLT > PDF) and complex PDFs become a nightmare ( may result in XSLTs with 20k+ LoC).

• PDFBox: it seems to be the best alternative although I did not work with it in large project.

More details about this can be found from my previous blog at http://nanjundanonlinedictionary.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/wanted-to-generate-pdf-and-ms-excel.html

FOP is much performance optimized solution to create a PDF. It also comes with few limitations like digital signing, split&merge etc. iText and PDFBox offers almost same features from its library. Please be aware that iText is much performance optimized solution compare to PDFBox as the parsing techniques used.

Happy Learning,

Nanjundan Chinnasamy

Is the Competency differentiates Hard&Smart Workers?

Simple answer is YES as you all know. But here i want to explain with an example.

I have read through this stories long time back. I think this holds good even today. I though i can share with my readers so that so can understand Indian Managers expectations and work accordingly. In general, to win in a competitive would, only knowledge makes the difference to identify the experienced ones.

Story:

A giant ship engine failed. The ship's owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. 

Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom. 

Two of the ship's owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed! 
A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars. 
"What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!" 
So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill." 

The man sent a bill that read: 

Tapping with a hammer...... $2.00
Knowing where to tap.......... $9,998.00

Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference!

I have posted few people management related blogs recently as it is much required to understand and work as a team to win people heart. I am planning to concentrate few core technical blogs in coming days as many personally requested me!

Happy reading.

Nanjundan Chinnasamy