Agents
Are intelligent software programs which acts on behalf of a user as per a defined assumption based on set preferences.
Some examples would be getting news, getting information from the stock market, de-fragment the hard disk at some specific times etc.

Bots(web Robots)  Runs automated tasks on the internet.
Are software application that does repetitive and automated tasks that would otherwise take human too long to to.
The most common one is the SPIDER, which are used for web servers to analyze gather data, they are also used on  online auctions and online games.
Bots can also be used to censor in chat room and forums.

Business Model
A model of doing business by which the company can support itself by generating revenue.

Content Convergence
This is about doing more with the content like, taking content from multiple sources and automatically reuse them,  and allowing usrs to choose content only they want. Eg is RSS which allows content to be integrated in other content without any manual intervention.

CORBA(Common Object Request Broker Architecture)
Is the middleware of choice for large and even not so large enterprise.
This is a vendor independent  open architecture and infrastructure that computer application used to work together.

Distributed objects
Software Modules that are designed to work together, but may reside on multiple computer, or in different processes on the same computer.

Distributed Systems
Consist of multiple software components that are on multiple computers, but run as a single system.
The computers that are in the distributed system may be close as well as geographically distant and connected by a wide area connection.

Denial of Service
An attempt to prevent access to information or services, by targetting the computer and the network.
The most common of DOS is when hackers flood the network with information.
When a url is typed, a request is sen to the server, but the number of request a server can handle at once. At this time no more request can be received by the server hence there is a denial of service.

Java servlets
Java servlets are java codes that run on the server to answer client requests.

M-commerce
Give the opportunity to offer services on a mobile phone like a list a site of interest point in the area, list of restaurant, banks etc

Malware
Malicious software designed to infiltrate a computer without the owner knowledge/ consent

Middleware
A software that connects or glue software components or applications together. A set of services that allows multiple processes running on one machine to interact.
Middleware sits between application software that may be running on different os.
Also known as plumbing because it connects two applications and passes data between them.
Message oriented Middleware
As in the Middleware, which is considered to be liked the plumbing, here in the MOM, the same rule apply except that the messaging system is asynchronous. It uses a queue system to hold the responses and will pass it to the client when there is a connection.

OMG(Object Management Group)
A consortium originally aimed at setting standards for distributed object oriented systems and now focus on modeling program systems processes as well as model based standards.

Portal
A place for making all sort of information accessible to a wide variety of audience, which can be spilt in two major classififications which are
1. Enterprise information portal
2. Content Management

Phishing
A criminal fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information (name and passwords) or credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity such as banks or .
These are mostly carried out by emails or instant messaging.

Pharming
A hacker attempt to redirect a web site traffic to another site.
This is done by changing the host file on the owner’s file
or by exploiting a vulnerability in the DNS server software

Port and Sockets
A port is a logical data connection that can be used by programs to exchange DATA DIRECTLY, instead of going through a file or a temporary storage location.
On of the most common one is the TCP port,  which is used to exchange data between computers on the network.
In other word is a gateway between a computer and something else to exchange data.
A port is analogous to a pigeon hole mail box. This allows the mail to be delivered to the desired number.
With ports, data of specific type of service is addressed to a specific port.
Eg
Telnet uses port 25
SMTP uses port 23

Sockets
Basically a socket is the combination of an IP address and a port number.

Synchronous and asynchronous message passing
In the SYNCHRONOUS message passing,  a client send a request to another entity (usually the server) and wait for the response to be able to continue. While the server processes the request, the client has to wait.
Asynchronous on the other hand is when a message is sent to another entity (may be from a client to the server), where the client need not wait for the response to continue.

RMI (remote method invocation)
Enables programmers to create distributed java based applications where the methods can be invoked from other java programs, or JVM.

Thread
A separate stream of execution that takes place simultaneously and independently of anything else that might be happening.
Its just a classic piece of program that starts at point A and executes until it reaches point b.
With thread if a piece of program is stuck in a loop, the other thread will keep on working.

TP Monitor
Transaction Processing Monitor is a program that monitors a transaction as it passes from one process to the other. Its purpose it make sure that a transaction is completed else it will take some actions.
It is especially important in a three-tier architecture that employs load balancing as the transaction may be forwarded to different servers to be processed.

Three Tier Architecture
In the beginning there were mainframes, where everything is stored on the server and connection is made using dump terminals.
Then came the network connected Pc in the 80′s which produce a two tier client-server architecture. In this architecture, there is an application running on the client computerand coominucate with the server to request data from dbms.
The client application (thick or fat) normally contains all the business logic.
In a three-tier or multi tier architecture, the applicaion on the client is a thin one that is it contains simple controls and user input validation.
The middle or the application server provides business logics as well as database access
The third one is the data server which provides the data.

Spoofing
Spoofing is the creation of a TCP/IP  packet using somebody’s else IP address. Routers uses the destination IP address to forward the Packet but ignore the source IP address which is only used by the destination computer for the response.

Stored Procedures
Is a subroutines that allows application to access relational database systems.
These subroutines are stored in the database data dictionary.
Typical applications are
1. data validations
2. access controls
3. May return a result set

Trojan Horse
A non-self-replicating  program that appears to perform a desirable process, but instead will facilitate unauthorised access to te computer.

ZigBee
A set of  specification for a suite of high level communication protocols using small low powered digital radio

Wi-Fi
A wireless network using radio waves like (mobile phones, radios, television)

Widgets
Is a standalone application that can be embedded in a third party site.

Worm
A self replicating (malware) computer program which replicate itself and send copies of itself to other nodes and may even do so without the intervention of any user.

Notes

A program

is the code you write.

A process

is what you get when you run it.

A message

is used to communicate between processes.

A packet

is a fragment of a message that might travel on a wire.

A protocol

is a formal description of message formats and the rules that two processes must follow in order to exchange those messages.

A network

is the infrastructure that links computers, workstations, terminals, servers, etc. It consists of routers which are connected by communication links.

A component

can be a process or any piece of hardware required to run a process, support communications between processes, store data, etc.

A distributed system

is an application that executes a collection of protocols to coordinate the actions of multiple processes on a network, such that all components cooperate together to perform a single or small set of related tasks.

Thank you for listening  to my second and final elevator pitch for this subject. After having completed all the workshops and the exercises, I do feel now that I have acquired a good knowledge  of  the E-System Infrastructure.
The way this subject has been presented, has given me the opportunity not only to look into the programming site of the E-system, but also to have a closer look to the other important aspects of the subjects. Throughout the exercises, I have been guided on specific topics of the E-System, such as,  Web application servers, Database servers, Shopping cart specification, M-commerce, Search mechanism,  TP monitor, transaction protocol, which are just a few of these interresting as well as important parts of this subject.
I now feel better equipped and more confident with all the knowledge acquired here, and I am in no doubt that this will be of great help in my career for the coming years.

2. List what you consider to be the three weaknesses of Ruby on Rails workshop series:
a. Need some more tutorials online, could not find why I was having some problems
b. Spent lots of time to make InstantRail works especially to get the Apache and MySQL server to run
c. Meed some more sample projects online

3. List what aspects of Ruby on Rails workshop series that you found to be most difficult.
As this has been a new venture for me, all the workshop had some difficult part. Firstly to understand the MVC concept, then came the views and the methods and finally it was quite hard to learn about all the aspects of RoR, as apart from being a dad of four children(the last one, three months old), having to face quite a big recession in the UK, and have to work extra hours to make money, I still have to find time for the researches ….hard

4. List what improvements could be made to the Ruby on Rails workshop series:

Free response and reflective questions:

5. Reflect on your experiences with the other Web framework used in this subject: Was it effective? How can it be improved? Should other Web frameworks be used as well or instead of Ruby on Rails?

6. Did the Developer’s or IT managers Team that you joined after workshop 4 have a preference towards using other tools to facilitate collaboration? Comment on the differences between these use of the sub-forum or Interact wiki tools from your experiences in this subject.

7. Further comments to add?

References

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/9/4/timing-weakness-in-ruby-on-rails

http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making-twitter-10000-percent-faster

To Do:

Developers conclude their work with the OTBS and look at the options for deployment of the site. Examine the various platforms/software tools used for deployment such as UNIX environment suggested in the Discussion Notes, Mongrel or Mongrel cluster, Nginx, Subversion or Capistrano (during development stage), JRuby in the Java environment.

Which way?

The choice is up to you as this workshop present just one option and you may like to use another, such as deploying the OTBS in a .NET or J2EE environment
While there are plenty of  hosting available to deploy my site, there a just a few who are dedicated Rails hosting companies.
Well which way to go, is not an easy choice, some site even suggest to use our own pc to deploy our site by just by installing the necessary tools like Ruby, Rails Gems and SQLite, but for obvoius reasons, and this is not a practical way.
For which platform are we going for?

Can you get the OTBS Running in production mode as a minimal production server?
Since Mongrel is a WEB Server for Ruby web applications, OTBS can easily run such server.
Apache can be used to as a load balancer as several Mongrel instances can be running concurrently using different port.
And if we want to avoid Apache server, this also is possible as Mongel cluster can be deployed using other web servers such as nginx or lighthtpd.

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongrel_%28web_server%29

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/643897/ruby-on-rails-deployment-requirements

2. What are the syntax differences in the way that Ruby and Javascript use the if statement?
The if statement for Ruby is as follows
if  variable == 100
print “variable=100″
elseif variable == 200
print “variable=200″
else
print “variable is neither 100 nor 200″
end

The if statement for Javascript is as follows
if  (variable=100)
{
document.write(“Variale = 100″)
}
else if  (variable=200)
{
document.write(“Variale = 200″)
}
else
{
document.write(“Variale is neither  100 nor 200″)
}

3. While Ruby and Python are quite similar, can you find some similarities between Ruby and Javascript?

References
http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_if_else.asp

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/programming/ruby/ruby-if-else-if-command-syntax/

1. Choose ONE of the four ways to manage and develop integrated systems as listed below;
2. Summarise your understanding and describe its relevance (250 words max) 3. Edit TWO similar versions (include bibliography) of that summary to CSU Interact:
a. post version A as a wiki page contribution;
b. add version B as a final entry to close your developer’s blog.

The way to manage and develop integrated system that I have chosen is the ERP or the Enterprise Resource Planning. It is a mixture of three most important components which are, Business Management Practices, Information Technology and Specific Business Objectives.
This is huge software architecture which can handle and integrate large businesses with branches  in different geographical locations.
At the heart of EPR is a well managed centralised data repository which will collect as well as supply information from and to different sources.
ERP will provide businesses with loads of functionalities with features like flexibility, modularity and openness, widespread, finest business processes and global focus.

Integration plays a key role in ERP systems  in order to achieve a great increase in productivity, speed as well as performance.  The integration will help in creating a single unified database repository which can communicate with different software and functionalities to provide different part of the organisation such as Human Resource, Supply Chain Management, Finance, Manufacturing as well as Supply Chain Management among others with various business statistics and information.
The ideal ERP systems will chains the following together.
Manufacturing, which will include engineering resource planning, workflow management
Financials, Accounts, fixed assets, general ledger, cash management
Human resource, Recruitments, training, payrolls, attendance sheets, labour rules
Supply Chain Management, supply chain planning, sales order administration, transportation and distribution
Projects, costing, billing, time and expense management
Customer Relationship Management, Customer contracts, after sales support, marketing
Data Warehouse, where all information are centrally kept and can be accessed by the organisation, suppliers, customers, as well as employees.

Here is where I conclude all my exercise for the subject ICT549. I knew it for some time now that in IT, we have to keep up with all the new technologies else we will not only be staying still but as a matter of fact we will be going backwards.
This subject has given me a change to refresh my knowledge in the ever changing field of IT. I have been able to catch up with some of the latest technologies and gained some experience while doing the workshops.
This is surely the beginning of a new era, where I hope that with all these exercises and workshops I have been working on in this subject, will give me a competitive advantage in the real world.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning

http://www.topbits.com/erp.html

4. Visit an airline Web site and search for information on WAP or SMS or 3G mobile application access to booking airline services. The same services exist in banking. How do both industries compare?
Having visited the British Airways site, and seach for SMS, I received 28 results starting from flight information such as arrivals and departure times. Text Afor arrival and D for departure followed by date and flight number, a text will be sent back with either the arrival or departure time. This will be charged a normal text rate plus a 25p when the text is received from BA.
Also if your phone is web based, flight status can be checked or even seats can be chosen for single, family or group travellers. Are you affected by the cabin crew strikes, well in case your flight is cancelled, the operator will send you a text  giving  of the flight.
For the banking site, I visited the HSBC site. There we can see, by just registering for your free mobile alerts services, as sms will be sent as an alert for due payments or term maturity dated or even a mini statement.
As we can see both industries are using the mobile technology to keep their customer up to date and provide an extra service that could give them a competitive advantage.

References
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1075386967&type=RESOURCES

http://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Mobile_Alliance

http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/triple-play/articles/45089-open-mobile-alliance-begins-work-standardization-initiative-proposed.htm

http://www.telecoms.com/8586/operators-vow-to-clean-up-web-services-framework/

http://www.it-innovations.ae/iit005/proceedings/articles/D_1_IIT05_Elmasri-1.pdf

http://www.telecoms.com/8586/operators-vow-to-clean-up-web-services-framework/

http://www.britishairways.com/travel/searchba/public/en_gb

http://www.hsbc.co.in/1/2/personal/internet-and-self-service-banking/mobile-alerts

Search engines used this technique to crawl  over the web pages. As soon as a link is found, the spider will go off and fetch the page.
There are basically three types of  search engines and they are powered by robots which are called crawlers, ants and sipders.
Crawler based search engines will read a web sites, will read the information on the site, will read the mata data of the site, and will follow the links on the site. The crawler will then create an index for the site as well as all the linked site.
Human power search engine, this method will rely on people submitting their site to the search engine.
The third type of search engines are a combination of both of the above.

2. Differentiate the various types of software agents.
In order to understand the software agent, we should look at the name itself, agent, to act on behalf. In the same way, software agent will act automatically with some degree of autonomy to perform some task on the behalf of its user.
Basically there are four essential type of  intelligent software agent.
1. Buyer agent or shopping bots
2. User or personal agents
3. Monitoring and surveillance agents
4. Datamining agent.
1. Buyer agent or shopping bots
Buyer agent or shopping bots will search all the internet and will gather information about goods and services. The  example used on wikipedia.org is Amazon.com. While buying books or CDs at this site, a list of related book or CDs will be offered that the buyer might consider to buy as well or ythe same can provide a list of books or CDs that other people bought when the bought the selected books or CDs.
2.User or personal agents
These agent will take actions on a user’s behalf. For example, the agent can check emails, sort the emails in order or preferences, or they can be opponent while playing a computer game, they can also get the news for the user, they could also search for information about a typical sybject. They can also fill form on the user’s behalf, they can also search for jobs online  as well.
3. Monitoring and sueveillance agent
This agent is used to monitor computer systems. They can be used to track inventory levels, keep a close look and report competotirs prices, as well as stock watching.
4. Data mining agent
In order to keep ahead of the competitors, information is vital. Data mining agent helps in this regards by searching relevent information in data warehouses so that decisions can be made.
Data mining uses the “classification”  method to find these information and to categorize them as well as it can detect major shift in trends or a key indicator and alert the user.

3. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.
Going back to amazon.com, when a client buy a book or a CD, immediately  list of similar item is being displayed as, user who buy this book or cd also buy one of these in the provided list.

4. Computing ethics and bot programming case study:
a. Get an account username and password from the lecturer to LC_MOO at http://ispg.csu.edu.au:7680 and login to the Welcome Lobby.
By using train1 as username and train1 for password, I immediatege got access to LC_MOO in a new window. The first command I used was news 1, and the following page is the result.

b. Hold a 5-minute discussion with Rocky on a special topic.
Commands and chat are entered in the command box (bottom-left of screen in Figure 11) : act rocky (start bot) hush rocky (stop bot)
The next command I used was “act rocky” and the answer was “train1 activates rocky”, “Gee thanks for waking me up! I must have dozed off..”
After spending sometine exploring the software,  finally chose the option SAY at the bottom right of thr screen and the coversation started.

c. Rocky is an ELIZA-like bot. Report your findings.
Please find below the convesation that I had.

editors             @lastlog            put                 @wrap
@eject              letters             @quit               write
You say, “hello”
Rocky says, “I think LC_MOO Welcome Lobby is an excellent name for this place, dont you?”
You say, “that’s true”
Rocky says, “What are you like at programming in Python?”
You say, “i don’t program in python, i used perl”
Rocky says, “Um, i get the feeling this conversation is not going anywhere..”
You say, “why, don’t you know perl?”
Rocky says, “I am sure you should be working on another assignment…”
You say, “oh, yes and its half past four oclock in the morning in the uk”
Rocky [to train1]: Yes? Hmm, that’s interesting…
You say, “who are you?”
Rocky says, “Hmm, not sure I know..”
You say, “I think you should know!”
Rocky says, “Why do you say you think me?”
You say, “I do not know who you are and I am trying to find out”
Rocky says, “Perhaps it is you who are and I am trying to find out!”
You say, “how many users are you serving rignt now”
Rocky says, “oh yeah?”
You say, “where are you?”
Rocky says, “I like the way you bring up such great topics to discuss..”
You say, “are you in europe”
Rocky says, “Where’d you think up a name like ‘train1′ anyway?”
You say, “may be USA”
Rocky says, “Um, i get the feeling this conversation is not going anywhere..”

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213035,00.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agents

http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2003/HowWebSearchEnginesWork.asp

http://www.chayden.net/eliza/instructions.txt

following is the diagram

References

http://www.gliffy.com/gliffy/#templateId=blank&signup=1

In this exercise, I will create a MongHQ account, install Mongomapper on my computer, create the Guestbook application which will consist of a post route as well as guestbook comment page. Atfer testing the application locally, I will then  deploye it  on Heroku.

To start with I created an account on MongoHQ. After connecting to MongoHQ.com, I chose sign up for MongoHQ, fig (2).

Fig 2
The second step is the pricing info, I choose the option to skip this and use a free datadase for now option.

The third page is the database options, which are Hosted Databases and Remote Databases. Here we are presented with the options to (1) Add a database or (2)add a remote connection.

Installng mongo on my local computer, I use the command “gem install mongo_mapper” and the following figure shows the result.

To create the guestbook application, I used the command “rails guestbook” and below is the result
rails guestbook
create
create  app/controllers
create  app/helpers
create  app/models
create  app/views/layouts
create  config/environments
create  config/initializers
create  config/locales
create  db
create  doc
create  lib
create  lib/tasks
create  log
create  public/images
create  public/javascripts
create  public/stylesheets
create  script/performance
create  test/fixtures
create  test/functional
create  test/integration
create  test/performance
create  test/unit
create  vendor
create  vendor/plugins
create  tmp/sessions
create  tmp/sockets
create  tmp/cache
create  tmp/pids
create  Rakefile
create  README
create  app/controllers/application_controller.rb
create  app/helpers/application_helper.rb
create  config/database.yml
create  config/routes.rb
create  config/locales/en.yml
create  db/seeds.rb
create  config/initializers/backtrace_silencers.rb
create  config/initializers/inflections.rb
create  config/initializers/mime_types.rb
create  config/initializers/new_rails_defaults.rb
create  config/initializers/session_store.rb
create  config/environment.rb
create  config/boot.rb
create  config/environments/production.rb
create  config/environments/development.rb
create  config/environments/test.rb
create  script/about
create  script/console
create  script/dbconsole
create  script/destroy
create  script/generate
create  script/runner
create  script/server
create  script/plugin
create  script/performance/benchmarker
create  script/performance/profiler
create  test/test_helper.rb
create  test/performance/browsing_test.rb
create  public/404.html
create  public/422.html
create  public/500.html
create  public/index.html
create  public/favicon.ico
create  public/robots.txt
create  public/images/rails.png
create  public/javascripts/prototype.js
create  public/javascripts/effects.js
create  public/javascripts/dragdrop.js
create  public/javascripts/controls.js
create  public/javascripts/application.js
create  doc/README_FOR_APP
create  log/server.log
create  log/production.log
create  log/development.log
create  log/test.log
The next step is to change the config file to use mongo. This is done by first creating a mongo.yml file in the config folder that will contain the following
development:
server: localhost
database: guestbook

test:
server: localhost
database: guestbook-test

production:
server: localhost
database: guestbook-production

Then we need to create another file which is the initializer, called mongodb.rb under the folder initializers and which contains the following
require ‘mongo_mapper’
configfile = “#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/mongodb.yml”
if File.exist? configfile
config = YAML.load(File.read(configfile))[RAILS_ENV]
if config
MongoMapper.connection = Mongo::Connection.new(config["server"], config["port"] || 27017)
MongoMapper.database = config["database"]
end
end

To start the mongo db I used the command
mongod –dbpath /data/db or
\mongodb\bin\mongod –dbpath /data/db

Now I will generate the guestbook controller by typing the following command
ruby script/generate controller guestbook and the result.

To create a mongobase, I created a file named mongo_base.rb in the folder models unde folder apps. The program read like this
class MongoBase
include MongoMapper::Document
end

Another file is created in the same folder as above, this time the file is the guestbook model. This file will inherit from mongobase. All the fields will be created here, and there is no need to run the migration process.

class Guestbook < MongoBase
key :title, String, :required => true
key :name, String
key :comment, String
validates_presence_of :comment
end

Finally the controller is created created with the following codes
class GuestbookController < ApplicationController
def index
@guestbook = Guestbook.all
end
end

After starting the server with the command “ruby script/server”, I started Mozilla Firefrox and use the url “http://127.0.0.1:3000/guestbook”, and here is the outcome.

As expe

References

http://blog.rubyhead.com/2009/12/07/introduction-to-mongodb-part-iii-mongomapper-rails/

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/MongoDB+Data+Modeling+and+Rails