Think of three local online brands, which started in Cluj and came to succeed at national or international level. They are not so hard to find, are they? However, if you think about the major IT centers in Romania, Cluj is in the first three. We have many IT practitioners who are absorbed by outsourcing companies. Few are the companies that have developed their own products.

In the previous issue we saw the most important changes in Google’s search algorithms. In the current issue we decided to write an article to present some of the most important techniques of search engine optimization, applicable in the area of internal SEO. These techniques, although easy to apply, offer very good results in long term – concerning the increase of the organic traffic.

As promised in the previous article I’ll continue presenting Google Guice also for web applications. In order to do this you’ll need to get the servlet extension – part of the standard distribution, along with other extensions like JMX, JNDI, Persist, Struts or Spring. Using Guice, the web.xml will be reduced at minimum - just make the Guice container start. The rest of the configurations will be easily done in Java in the same type-safe manner presented in the previous article.

A modern overview of the IT universe reveals mobile technology as a particularly dynamic domain. This market sector is presently disputed between three major competitors, namely Apple, Nokia and the extended family of Android devices (Samsung, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, etc.). Since recently mobile devices only offered users access to basic applications (e-mail, browsers, calculator and rudimentary games), yet nowadays we are bombarded with financial, health and insurance applications, personal assistant applications and advanced graphics games.

I would like to emphasize from the very beginning that this article does not bring anything new to Android programming, but it’s rather a synthesis of the information available through the Android system. One of the problems that the Android application developers face is launching an application that works correctly on all supported platforms.

There is no better way of describing the essence of the Agile Mentality than starting from the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development „We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
agilemanifesto.org

Welcome to debt era! America owes about 16 trillion dollars and if you didn’t have the chance to go to New York’s Times Square you can see this debt directly online on sites like http://www.usdebtclock.org/. Is not a surprise to anyone that Europe is in a debt crisis and countries that excel in this chapter are Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal with almost 120 billion euros borrowed. Also Romania is affected by this crisis or participates in it with various political or economic actions. Thus, debt is everywhere! Do we need to pay the debt? When?

User experience Design(UX) refers to a concept that places the end-user at the focal point of design and development efforts, as opposed to the system, its applications or its aesthetic value alone. The requirement for an exemplary user experience(UX) is to meet the exact needs of the customer. One of the primary goals of any good designer is communicating the intended message in such a way that it leads to a positive user experience.

Knockout is a Javascript library helping us to create desktop like web pages. These pages have a clear data, and it is synchronizing perfectly the UI to data model. Knockout is an open-source project, created by Steve Sanderson, who is developer at Microsoft. Knockout is his personal project, it doesn’t belong to Microsoft. The source code can be downloaded from GitHub and a relevant documentation and notifications can be found at http://www.knockoutjs.com

For sure everybody heard about „Social Networks” because lots of articles were written on this topic, about the history of Social Networks, advantages and disadvantages or confidentiality of the information. But, the purpose of this article is to identify the impact that this kind of site could have in the recruitment process. There are a lor of Social Networks, but I will present in the following pages only 2 of them: Facebook and LinkedIn.

Core Data is an object graph and persistence framework provided by Apple. Is a relatively small but very robust framework, it provides solutions for many general problems and fits perfectly with Cocoa and other API provided by Apple. (In the MVC pattern Core Data takes the place of the Model). Core Data API or stack, can be decomposed to the following three components: Persistent Store Coordinator (NSPersistentStoreCoordinator), Managed Object Model (NSManagedObjectModel) and Managed Object Context(NSManagedObjectContext). All these three parts are working together to allow storing/retrieving Managed Objects (NSManagedObject).

This article presents 5 Java practices that I use while coding. It’s interesting that simple things make your developer (and fellow colleagues) life easier. I have no intent to create some sort of top here, but just to illustrate things I consider helpful. Implement equals, hashCode and toString methods inherited from java.lang.Object. All 3 methods are part of java.lang.Object since JDK 1.0. They could be really useful when used in your classes as follows: Object#equals(Object obj): determines if the current object is equal with the object supplied as parameter.

In our previous issues, we introduced a code sequence involved in initiating Kinect and we built a quick Hello World application type. In what follows, we will continue the development of the application through a new functionality: displaying the entire skeleton of the user.

The field of software testing has become increasingly dynamic, new test methods are introduced, more concepts are refined or reinvented. The famous phrase „anyone can test” begins to be increasingly difficult to be confirmed, due to the high technical level and technologies used in application development.

New features in WCF 4.5 tend to fall into two aspects: simplicity and scalability. The biggest problem there is when it comes to WCF configuration. What they wanted from the new version was easier and simpler configuration. We all know that is not easy to configure a WCF service. Indeed, after being set up and go, it becomes a great advantage in any system of distributed applications.

The first CTP of Windows Azure was announced in 2008 and after two years the commercial version was launched. Since then each new version of Windows Azure has brought new functionalities. If in 2010 the web role and worker role were the main strengths, Windows Azure from now is more complex and allows us to do things we could not imagine.

Android, the operating system for Smartphones, the most popular OS mobile in the U.S. and perhaps the most popular on the planet, enjoys increasing global attention due to the diversity of the gadgets on which is installed. Unfortunately, Android doesn’t escape the attention of hackers and cyber criminals just waiting for new technologies to become popular in order to get informational, technological and financial illegal earnings. However, what is the present situation of Android?

The Chief opened the door and, by looking at him, Gogu soon realized that something was wrong. The truth was that if he had looked around, he would have noticed that the entire office was shocked: everyone found it hard to believe the way that Mişu and Gogu were fighting and yelling to each other. Well, that’s because he’s so stubborn! Gogu said to himself. But wait a minute, we’ll settle it right now…