How JAVA changed the Internet

The Internet helped JAVA to the forefront of programming and JAVA in turn had a great impact on the Internet. While simplifying the web programming JAVA innovated a new type of networked program called the applet that changed the way the online world thought about content. JAVA also addressed some of main issues associated with the Internet like portability and security.

1. Security : As we know when we download a normal program we are taking a risk, because the code that we are downloading might contai a virus of any other harmful code. At the core of the problem is the fact that malicious code can cause its damage as it has gained unauthorized access to system resources. In order for JAVA to enable applets to be downloaded and executed on the client computer safely, it was necessary to prevent an applet from launching such an attack. JAVA achieved this protection by confining an applet to the JAVA execution enviornment and not allowing its access to other parts of the computer.
2. Portability : It is a major aspect of the Internet because there are many different types of computers and operating systems connected to it. Some means of generating portable executable code was needed. For example :- In case of an applet, the same applet must be able to be downloaded and executed by the wide variety of CPU's , operating systems and browsers connected to the internet.

Tips to develop good web pages in HTML

Hyper Text Markup Language(HTML) is the language used to create documents for the World Wide Web. We can use HTML to specify the appearance of our text, or to insert elements such as tables, graphics or links to other pages. HTML allows us to mark selections of text as titles or paragraphs, and then leaves the interpretation of these marked elements up to the browser. HTML instructions divide the text of a document into blocks called elements.

  Tips  to develop good web pages in HTML are:-

1. We should use three letter extention ".HTM" as windows can support extension of more than three letters, so we use ".HTML" extension.
2. When we edit the HTML document, changes donot reflect in the browser. As changes have been made in the browser cashe but browser picks the information from local cache.
3. When the changes have made then browser doesnot know that changes . So in that case we press F5 button or refresh button to force the browserto read the edited page from browser cache rather than from local cache.
4. It is better to use commonly used web browser.
5. It is also recommended to use new versionn of Windows OS.
6. To view the source code of HTML file, click source option from VIEW menu of web browser.
 

Entry to IITs just got tougher

In coming year admission to IIT will get much tougher than most students thought. In 15 states and UTs whose boards hold their own Class XII exams, IIT aspirants will have to score more than 60 percent marks. From 2013, a student in Andhra will have to score minimum 87.20 percent marks in Class XII to become eligible for IIT entrance while in Punjab, minimum percentage is 70.80. For CBSE students, the qualifying percentage from 2013 would have to be a minimum of 77.80 % .
           On June 6, the IIT joint admission board(JAB) had approved the new class XII eligibility cutoff formula replacing the old one where only 60 % score in class XII across boards was needed. Under the new system, that gives more importance to school exams for IIT entrance, only those students will be eligible who come in the top 20 percentile of all the exam writing students in a respective board in a given year. Boards where more than 60 % marks in class XII for IIT eligibility are : Andhra 87.2 %, Bihar 64.6 %, CBSE 77.8 %, Himachal 63.25 and J&K 67%. Boards where less than 60 % marks are needed are : West Bengal 58 %, Uttrakhand 55.20 %, Orissa 56.33 % and Assam 54.20 %. These percentages are not likely to change much.  CBSE chairman Vineet Joshi said that students should look at these targets for IIT eligibility. He also insisted that the new system was more inclusive and took care of the fact that different boards awarded marks differently. In my view , students must work hard to achieve their target.

Few takers for Engineering courses

Today i read an article that the state of engineering and polytechnic colleges that mushroomed in himachal over the past few years is appalling . There are about 6000 engineering seats in various private and govt. engineering colleges in the state. However , now only 3000 seats filled in forms for attending the counselling being conducted by Himachal Pradesh Technical University. Sources said, only 1500 students were expected to attend the counselling. Only about 25 percent seats woukd be filled if all the students who attend counselling take admission to engineering colleges. The state of polytechnic colleges is even worse. The sources said there were about 10,000 polytechnic and engineering diploma seats in the state and only 500 students had come through counselling conducted by the state technical education department.
    Owners of engineering colleges and private universities are blaming politicians and certain vested groups of carriying out a slander compaign against the institutions that have come up in the state. The chansellor of a private university said that they had set up colleges investing amounts ranging upto Rs. 100 crore in Himachal with a view that the students from across  the country would be attracted to take admission here due to the serene enviornment in the state. The sources also blamed that the overall slow down and a sudden decline in the tendency of the students towards technical education for the poor state of technical institutes in the state. Moreover, this year many students had opted for courses such as B.Com and B.Sc than engineering and diploma courses.

Actors on the scene in DBMS

In this topic we identify the people whose jobs involve the day-to-day use of a large database which are called as the actors on the scene. In large organisations, many people are involved in the design, use and maintenance of a large database with hundred of users.

1. Database Administrators:  In an organization where many people use the same resources, there is a need of chief administrator to oversee and manage these resources. In database environment, the primary resource is the database itself and the secondary resource is the DBMS and related software. The DBA is responsible for authorizing acess to the database, coordinating and monitoring its use and acquiring software and hardware resources as needed.
2. Database Designers:  These are responsible for identifying the data to be stored in the database and for choosing appropriate structures to represent and store this data. It is the responsibility of database designers to communicate with all prospective database users in order to understand their requirements and to create a design that meet these requirements.
3. End Users: These are the people whose jobs require access to the database for querying, updating, and generating reports, the database primarily exist for their use. Various categories of end users are:

•  Casual End users: Occasionaly access the database, but they may need different information each time.
• Sophisticated End Users: Include engineers, scientists, business analyst and others who thoroughly familarize themselves with the facilities of DBMS inorder to implement their applications to meet complex requirements.

   4. System analyst and Application Programmers: System Analyst determine the requirements of end users and specially maive and parametric end users and develop specifications for canned transactions that meet these requirements. Application Programmers, document a implement these specifications as programs: then they test, debugnd maintain these canned transactions.

Govt. to give netbooks to 4000 students

I read an article in newspaper that the govt. has decided to provide netbooks instead of tablet computers under initiative announced in the Budget to promote computer & Information Technology literacy among students. Under this scheme 4000 meritorious students of class XI will be provided with netbooks free of cost. The students will be selected on the basis of merit in the class X examination of the state board of school education. The decision to go for netbooks was taken by keeping in view the convenience of students who had been well acquainted with  the windows operating system and various softwares of microsoft company. Tablets mostly use their own operating systems. Moreover, netbooks are 20-25 % cheaper than tablet computers, which was quite significant. There were three bidders : Hewlett Packard (Rs. 16,720) , HCL Technologies (Rs 18,050) and Wipro(Rs. 20,656) which quoted higher rates.

                The selected netbooks will have 10.1 inch LED display screen, 2GB RAM, 320GB harddisk, 1.6 GHz dual core processor, Wi-Fi, bluetooth and other facilities and have a 6 cell battery with 8 hour backup. It will be preloaded with the course content, MS-Office, other softwares, encyclopaedia and English dictionary. The implementation of the scheme will entail an expenditure of 6.40 crore. I think the decision by govt. to give netbooks will be beneficial to students.

Cutting Edge IT courses

Nowadays, Employers operate in a global competitive enviornment that demands new and  constantly developing talent pool to retain global competitiveness. Today, the problem faced by employers is that out of 5,50,000 engineering graduates passing out every year, anywhere between 10 and 25 percent cannot be readily employed by any technology firm in the country. IT industry looks for individual who have knowledge about a latest technology and are perpetual learners. There are various top emerging technologies like Cloud computing, IT services and Remote infrastructure management that get upgraded to stay ahead of the pack they need to look for the trainers. Training in these technologies can go a long way in increasing the employability of trainers.

1. Cloud computing:  It helps organisations to minimise capital expenditure by providing them an option of renting IT infrastructure and application services instead of owing them. To enrol in cloud computing course we must have basic IT knowledge. After completing this course we will get an oppurtunity to join data centers, cloud solution providers, cloud application developer and IT managers. The starting salary is around Rs 4.5 lakh per annum.

2. IT services: It includes portfolio like product engineering, custom software development , maintenance and testing services of software applications. This domain currently employs over 1 million programming professionals with specialised skills in Microsoft , Java , open source programming platforms. To enroll in IT services we should have basic programming skills. When this course is completed we can join software development centres as software engineers and testers. The starting salary is around Rs 3.5 lakh per annum.

3. Remote Infrastructure Management:  RIM is the remote management of IT infrastructure of company such as its workstations, communications and networking hardware and software, as well as applications by a service provider. We can learn desktop and server management, routing and switching, etc. When this course is completed we can join system integrators,RIM service provider, server suppot executive and system administrator. The starting salary is around Rs 2.75 lakh per annum.

  

When not to use a Database Management System

A database is a collection of data. DBMS is a collection of programs that enables users to create and maintain a database. There are some situations where DBMS may involve unnecessary overhead costs that would not involved in traditional file processing. the overhead costs of using a DBMS are due to following:

•  High initial investment in Hardware and Software.
• Overhead for providing  security, recovery and concurrency control.

There are some additional problems that may arise if the database designers and DBA donot properly design the database.  It may be more desirable to use regular files under the following circumstances:

• Simple, well-defined database applications that are not expected to change.
• No multiple user access to data.

Certain industries and applications have elected not to use general-purpose Database Management Systems(DBMSs). For example: Communication and switching systems designed by companies like AT&T were early manifestations of database software that was made to run very fast with hierarichal organised data for quick access. General-purpose DBMSs are inadequate for their purpose. This is how DBMS may not be advantageous to use.

How ASP files are processed

ASP is a technology that enables in the development of dynamic web sites. ASP was developed by Microsoft to allow HTML developers to easily provide dynamic content supported as standard by IIS. When a browser requests an ASP file from a web server  then following steps take place:

• We should type in the URL into our browser, for example: http://www.google.com/default.asp
• Our browser finds the appropriate web server and says that "It needs to look at the file /default.asp".
• ASP code is in between the ASP script delimiters(<%.....%>)
• As all of the ASP is parsed into HTML the client sees absolutely no ASP code.
• The browser collects this HTML text and parses it.

The whole process starts with the client requesting a file with a .ASP extension. The server notes the extension and parses the contents of the requested file before sending it to the client. The server locates the HTML file on Hard drive. At last when we view an ASP file through Internet Explorer or Netscape, our browser doesn't know that the .asp file is different from the standard .html file.

HOW we can embed Javascript into HTML document

Javascript is added to an HTML page using SCRIPT tag. The script tags should be placed inside the head tag of the document. Javascript code should be placed inside an HTML comment tag set. Example : <!-code->
   When it is used with javascript's the ending comment tag will also start with 2 slashes // which is the javascript code for comment. This comment tells the javascript interpreter to ignore that statement . This is a standard way for adding javascript to your HTML pages so that it works properly for browser that javascript are enabled and those that donot support javascript.
Syntax of embedding javascript into HTML document is:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Web page containing Javascript</TITLE>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT">
<!- hide Javascript code from browsers that are not javascript enabled.(Javascript statements are written  here)
//end hiding of javascript code ->
</SCRIPT>
<BODY>
(HTML document is written here)
</BODY>
</HTML>
We may also put in a single line of code that is attached to an event. In this statement must end with a semicolon. Javascipt is a case-sensitive language . This is how we can embed Javascript code into an HTML document.

About HTML

HTML i.e. Hypertext Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML is written in the form of tags, surrounded by angle brackets. HTML can also include embedded scripting language code like javascript that can affect the behaviour of web  browsers and other HTML processor. HTML was defined by Tim Berners Lee in 1990 as the method of marking up pages of information to be looked at by a browser. HTML 2.0 was the first real standard definition for HTML. HTML 3.2 added tables, applets, images, superscripts, subscipts and was compatible with HTML 2.0. It can be created  using a simple text editor. An HTML file is a text containing small markup texts. These markup tags tell the web browser how to display the page. HTML file can be created using a simple text editor. Tags are instructions that are embedded directly into the text of the document. There are various HTML tags like :

• <a>           Defines an anchor
• <b>           Bold text
• <br>          Inserts a single line break
• <caption>  Defines a table caption
• <form>      Defines a form
• <img>        Defines an image
• <input>      Defines an input field

Links are also used in HTML for e.g. :
 <a href ="http://www.w3schools.com">W3 Schools </a>
The element a stands  for "anchor". href is hypertext reference that specifies where the link leads i.e. an address on the internet or a filename. Attribute href has value  http://www.w3schools.com which is the full address of the website and is called URL. The sentence  W3 Schools is the text that is shown in the browser as link and </a> is the closing anchor tag. Various background images and colors are also given in the HTML. HTML is very useful language and its coding is used in making websites.

NITs to give 40% weightage to class XII marks

I read an article that from 2013 the National Institute of Technology and other centrally funded engineering institutes awarded 40% credit for class XII marks to students seeking admissions. At the fourth meeting of NIT council chaired by Human Resource Development minister Kapil Sibal, today decided to select students based on their combined scores in the proportion of 40% class XII marks and 60% AIEEE points. From now, there will only be one AIEEE whose 60% weightage will be combined with 40% school exam scores to conduct students.

The Director of NIT Jalandhar Prof. Sameer Das said that this exam will be identical to the AIEEE and will have multiple choice questions. The new process will admit students to 15000 seats in NITs and 3000 in other institutes. The Director of NIT Rourkela, Prof. Sunil Sarangi said that will be ranked within the board. Ranks will be converted into student points so that topper always get 40 points. NITs have resolved to retain the process of NIT entrance test as AIEEE and not JEE main. Sarangi also said that "IITs can also used the term JEE which they still use".

What can we do with ASP

ASP i.e. Active Server Pages are web pages that contain server-side scripts which includes text as well as HTML tags. Server-side scripts are special commands that we put in web pages that are processed before the pages are sent from the server to the web browser of someone who is visiting our website. ASP is open and compile-free application component in which we can combine HTML, scripts and reusable ActiveX server components to create dynamic and powerful web-based business solutions. With the help of ASP we can display date, time and other information in different ways.

•  We can also make a survey form and ask people who visits our site, send emails or can save the information to a file, etc.
• We can have a database through which people can access via web.
• We can also make our website password-protected and only some users can use the personal informationof our website.

To run ASP we need Microsoft Internet Information service and Personal web sever. IIS can only run on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 professional and Windows 2000 server. Personal web server is a stripped-down version of IIS and supports most of the features of ASP. It can run on all windows platforms including windows 95,98 and Me 

About Javascipt

Javascript is used in millions of webpages to improve the design, validate forms, detect browsers and create cookies. Javascript is very popular scripting language on internet and works on almost all browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, etc. It is usually embedded directly into HTML pages. Javascript coding is also used in making web pages. Javascipt is a scripting language with a very simple syntax. We can put small pieces of codes into their HTML pages. It can be set to execute when something happens like when a user clicks on an HTML element. It can also read and change the content of HTML element. It can be used to  validate form data before it is submitted to a server. It can be used to store and retrieve information on the visitor's computer.  Browsers that donot support javascript will display it as a page content. Javascript is a sequence of statements to be executed by the browser. Javascript statement is a command to the browser. The purpose of the command is to tell the browser what to do. In my opinion Javascript is very useful scripting language.

How to acess the webpage

When we have to acess the webpage then firstly we have to start the web browser and then enter the the address into the address bar i.e. http://localhost/
Whenever we connect to a remote computer using it's URL then we call it by its hostname. For e.g. http://www.google.com/
When we type the above URL then we ask the network to connect to a computer named www.google.com . This is called as the "hostname" of that computer. Localhost is a special hostname. It always references its own machine.  For testing all its pages, we will need to use localhost as the hostname. This is also a special IP address that is associated with its localhost i.e. 127.0.0.1
We can also write as http://127.0.0.1/
And we will receive the same page.

IIT's agree on new percentile based admission formula

On wednesday, the IIT council decided to end the joint entrance examination row by fixing new eligibility criteria for 2013. The formula does away with existing eligibility criteria for 60% marks in boards. In the new proposal candidates will first appear for JEE main test which will filter out the top 1.5 lakh students for the JEE(advanced) test. The final IIT ranking would depend only on the All India rank in JEE. The top 20 percentile will vary across boards from year to year. The students who got more than 78% marks in CBSE last year would have made the eligibility.In U.P. boards students with more than 65% are eligible. This new pattern was agreed by IIT council.The All India IIT faculty has welcomed the new system. The main objective to the proposed exam changes was based on weightage on board marks.