Idées Distribuées – Distributed Ideas

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DevoxxFR 2012 is over.

We ran and livened up our stand with some success. We showed our company and explained our jobs through presentations and several workshops.

Our online quiz was a success. More than a contest, it was a demonstration to illustrate our know-how. The application ran in an Amazon EC2 datacenter in Ireland, and we automated its deployment thanks to Cloudify, an Open PaaS fabric tool provided by GigaSpaces.

We will publish the videos of these demonstrations soon. Meanwhile, here an excerpt of the questions we asked for the quiz.

A constructor is used to

• Free memory
• Initialize a newly created object
• Import packages
• Create a JVM for applets

What is the number of bytes used by Java primitive long?

• The number of bytes is compiler dependent
• 2
• 4
• 8

Which of the following statement is False?

• The throw keyword denotes a statement that causes an exception to be initiated
• A class that is declared without any access modifiers is said to have package or friendly access
• A class inherit the constructors of its superclass
• The primitive types are byte, char, short, int, long, float, double, and boolean

A mechanism of moving the session from one server to another in case of server failure is called as

• Session Hijacking
• Session Migration
• Session Tracking
• None of the Above

Which one of the following method is not Agile?

• The Scrum method
• The XP method
• The Rache method
• The RAD method

Who did create the mechanical calculator in 1642?

• Blaise Pascal
• Sir Isaac Newton
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Alan Mathison Turing

What is Corba?

• A free Java tool that calculates the percentage of code accessed by tests
• A broker for building distributed object-oriented applications
• A member of the family Elapidae
• A man with a Psycho-Gun in his left arm

Consider the following piece of code byte x = 0; x += 1;

• Results in x having the value 1
• Will require a cast (byte) before 1
• Will give syntax error
• Will cause an error during execution

What are Java varargs?

• A keyword to denote non-constant values
• A syntax to write methods that took an arbitrary number of arguments
• An object reference that may be updated atomically
• A keyword to indicate that a variable’s value will be modified by different threads

In java, which mechanism allows to use a same function with different argument types?

• Inheritance
• Overriding
• Overloading
• Encapsulation

Choose the statement that best describes the relationship between JSP and servlets.

• Servlets are built on JSP semantics and all servlets are compiled to JSP pages for runtime usage.
• JSPs are built on servlet semantics and all JSPs are compiled to servlets for runtime usage.
• Servlets and JSP are competing technologies for handling web requests.
• JSP and servlets are unrelated technologies.

In java, which one of these statements is true?

• An anonymous class can be declared as both extending a class and implementing an interface
• An anonymous class can extend a class or implement an interface
• An anonymous class can only extend a class
• All statements above are false
• An anonymous class can extend a class or implement an interface

Which of the following is not a programming language?

• Luminaire
• Eiffel
• OCaml
• Smalltalk

What means JIT in Java?

• Java interface transaction
• Just in time transaction
• Just in time compiler
• Juvenile in training

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.

As for my previous article, I would like to talk about a not well known subject: How to color your console?

As administrator, and in particular when my eyes are tired, I am happy to read “OK” in green and “Not OK” in red. If you google with this subject, you will find many pages with simple tricks, but few with good explanations.

The purpose of this article is not to give hints about colorization, but to explain how it works and the main differences between a Linux terminal and a Windows console.

Linux terminal

History

A long time ago, a time that the youngest can not know, a computer terminal referred to an hardware device that was used for entering data into (a keyboard), and displaying data (a screen) from a computer. Somehow the end of a network.

VT100 was a video terminal. Its detailed attributes became the de facto standard for terminal emulators.
It communicated with its host system over serial lines using the ASCII character set and control sequences (a.k.a. escape sequences) standardized by ANSI. The VT100 was also the first Digital mass-market terminal to incorporate “graphic renditions” (blinking, bolding, reverse video, and underlining) as well as a selectable 80 or 132 column display.

Today we use mostly virtual terminals (in Linux, the first six virtual terminals provide a text terminal with a login prompt to a Unix shell) or emulators as xTerm that provides VT102 compatible terminals.

Here few escape sequences commonly used by VT100 compatible terminals.

How to colorize my VT100 terminal

The following lines should show “OK” in green and “Not OK” in red.

echo -e '\033[32m OK \033[0m'
echo -e '\033[31m Not OK \033[0m'

The previous script mingles Bash and VT102 escape sequences. Bash interprets and replaces "\033" by the escape ASCII code. Then the VT102 emulators interpret "<ESC>[32m" as set the foreground color to green.

Portability

A good script should work not only on your computer but everywhere. So we should test the capabilities of our environment before relying on it. I found a lot of examples on Internet that perform tests based on $SHELL or $TERM environment variables. From my experience, these are not a good practices as I will explain.

Shell capabilities

$SHELL contains the login Shell, not the current Shell. Therefore scripts that use it are often buggy and people that use several Shells (like me) are very unhappy.

Simple is beautiful! I advice to do a non-portable script or to insert directly the escape character into your script in order to be independent of the Shell (its implementation of the escape characters and on its possible echo builtin command).

Good text editors show special characters, but it is painful to write "<ESC>" on a keyboard (on Windows you can press "ALT" and type "0027" on the keypad...)

echo '<ESC>[32m OK <ESC>[0m'
echo '<ESC>[31m Not OK <ESC>[0m'

Terminal capabilities

A script should check the terminal capabilities before to use VT102 color sequences. We can use the $TERM environment variable and the "test -t fd" conditionnal expression. But it is not easy.

$TERM can take a lot of different values (aterm, xterm, cygwin, etc.) Therefore it is difficult to create an exhaustive list of all terminals that understand the color sequences. Elsewhere, if you are bound to a pseudo-terminal it is not always possible to know the real capabilities of the real end-terminal. And I already experienced few bugs so...

Finally, I think the best practice is to implement a color parameter as the ls command:

• never means the script will not generate VT102 color sequences
• always means the script will generate VT102 color sequences
• auto is where you try to implement a smart default behavior

function print_help() {
	cat <<EOF
# ...
       --color[=WHEN]
              control  whether color is used to distinguish file types.  WHEN
              may be 'never', 'always', or 'auto'
# ...
EOF
}

#...

if [ $color = always -o $color = auto -a -t 1 ]
then
	function print_KO() { echo '\033[31mKO\033[0m'; }
	function print_OK() { echo '\033[32mOK\033[0m'; }
else
	function print_KO() { echo 'KO'; }
	function print_OK() { echo 'OK'; }
fi

Windows console

History (source Wikipedia)

MS-DOS 1.0 did not support the ANSI or any other escape sequences. Only a few control characters (CR, LF, BS) were interpreted.

MS-DOS 2.0 introduced the ability to add a device driver for the ANSI escape sequences – the de facto standard being ANSI.SYS. This continued to work through Windows 98. Extreme slowness and the fact that it was not installed by default made usage by software almost non-existent.

Console windows in Windows versions based on NT (Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008) do not support ANSI escape sequences at all. Softwares can manipulate the console with the ioctl-like system Console API.

Few examples

Many script languages (Perl, Tk, and so on) provide library based on the Console API to change the color of a Windows console. If you use them, the commands to change colors is interlaced with the text output.

Another solution is to use a library that provides an ANSI support. So POSIX guys can keep their habbits.

So how you would color your Windows console depends on the programming langage you chose and its helper libraries.

MS-DOS

MS-DOS is a very poor language (not only for color). We can change the color of the entire Windows console, but we cannot change the color of a particular line.

REM MS-DOS example
REM Creates a Black background with light bright green text
COLOR 0A

My advice, do not use MS-DOS to colorize your output or do not use MS-DOS at all if you can.

PowerShell

I'm not completely a fan of PowerShell because of some strange syntaxes, supposed to make life simpler. But it is a very powerful language and, obviously, we can change color output easily.

Here is a powershell function that I use in my daily work. It is able to print a string with ANSI escape sequences to control colors. I use it basically when I run a remote command on a Linux machine.

### Author: Cyril Martin (mcoolive)

function Write-ColoredHost
{
	Param(
		[switch]$noNewLine,
		[String]$separator=" ",
		[System.ConsoleColor]$foregroundColor = $HOST.UI.RawUI.ForegroundColor,
		[System.ConsoleColor]$backgroundColor = $HOST.UI.RawUI.BackgroundColor
	)
	BEGIN {
		$fgc, $bgc = $foregroundColor, $backgroundColor
	}
	PROCESS {
		$token, $coloredTokens = ([Regex]"\033\[").split($_)
		Write-Host $token `
				   -noNewLine -separator $separator `
				   -foregroundColor $fgc `
				   -backgroundColor $bgc
		foreach ($coloredToken in $coloredTokens) {
			$colorCodes, $token = ([Regex]"m").split($coloredToken, 2)
				([Regex]";").split($colorCodes) | foreach-object {
					switch -regex ($_) {
						"^0{1,2}$" { $fgc, $bgc = $foregroundColor, $backgroundColor }
						"^30$"     { $fgc       = "Black"                            }
						"^31$"     { $fgc       = "Red"                              }
						"^32$"     { $fgc       = "Green"                            }
						"^33$"     { $fgc       = "Yellow"                           }
						"^34$"     { $fgc       = "Blue"                             }
						"^35$"     { $fgc       = "Magenta"                          }
						"^36$"     { $fgc       = "Cyan"                             }
						"^37$"     { $fgc       = "White"                            }
						"^39$"     { $fgc       = $foregroundColor                   }
						"^40$"     {       $bgc =                   "Black"          }
						"^41$"     {       $bgc =                   "Red"            }
						"^42$"     {       $bgc =                   "Green"          }
						"^43$"     {       $bgc =                   "Yellow"         }
						"^44$"     {       $bgc =                   "Blue"           }
						"^45$"     {       $bgc =                   "Magenta"        }
						"^46$"     {       $bgc =                   "Cyan"           }
						"^47$"     {       $bgc =                   "White"          }
						"^49$"     {       $bgc =                   $backgroundColor }
					}
				}
			Write-Host $token `
					   -noNewLine -separator $separator `
					   -foregroundColor $fgc `
					   -backgroundColor $bgc
		}
		if (!$noNewLine) { Write-Host }
	}
}

### A little test
$plink= # path of plink (see PuTTY)
$linuxServer= # hostname
$login= # username
&"$plink" -ssh $login@$linuxServer ls --color=always / | Write-ColoredHost

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.