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Safe distribution of Spring based application

Im thinking about creating spring boot application that i would like to comercialize some day.
I planned to build a Jar that i would allow to download, and once client launched it locally and provided some license key, it becomes useable.
I have some doubts about this distribution strategy especially in the meaning of the safety of the code and licensing.
If i provided a Jar, anybody may try reverse engeenering on it - so its easy to be hacked or cracked.
Turning it into executable is more user friendly, also possibly may hide the code better, but still i think its relatively easy to be reverse engineered.
It made me think about obfuscation. If i completely messed up the app before prod build, it would be a way harder to understand or change the code. It may seem okay in the matter of "copying and modifying" the app, but still i think it would be easy to locate licensing limitations in the source files. For example: limit for 5 users can be easilly located in sources by value "5" or the message the user sees, and even if code looks awfull, this lines can be removed, project compiled again, breaking the limitation and wasting my entire effort.
It will be small application, I want to provide clients the instalator, and let them set it up personally. I dont want to be responsible for settting it up in the cloud for the client (without publishing instalator or Jar), as clients may not be interested in cloud based access.
Could You advise me some wise solution for this situaltion?
Thanks in Advance ! :)

The short answer is that there is no way to prevent reverse engineering if someone can run the software on hardware that they control.
The only way to 100% prevent reverse engineering is to ONLY run the software on a platform that you control ... and that can prevent them from getting a copy of the executables.
There are a couple of ways that can make reverse engineering harder:
Use an obfuscator on your JAR files. It will make it harder for someone to read the decompiled code. There are 3rd-party obfuscator products you could use.
Use jpackage (or a 3rd-party tool) to create a native executable for your application.
But beware that modifying an application to disable a license check is much simpler than full reverse engineering. A determined software engineer (or hacker) will be able to do that, given enough time and incentive.
Look at this problem another way:
There are many people and companies making money out of writing and supporting software without resorting to license keys, obfuscation and so on.
Conversely, there are probably millions of aspiring software entrepreneurs who never even turn their clever idea into a worthwhile (saleable) product.
Conversely, there are millions of apps (e.g. in Android app stores) that are simply not worth the effort protecting from IP theft.
Don't get lost in the problem protecting your IP before you have actually created it. And don't overrate its (hypothetical) value.

Java-based CMS with RESTful service / API to access content [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
For those who might vote to close this question due to "not constructive - As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format." - Would be great if you would suggest where should I post this question (https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ ? or any CMS-focused forum?)
Similar questions have been asked before:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/918722/java-or-php-for-homegrown-cms
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4005811/is-there-a-good-cms-for-java
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8298790/java-web-cms-recommendations
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4837502/recommendations-for-a-lightweight-java-web-cms
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1939238/can-you-recommend-an-easy-to-use-easy-to-develop-cms
All of them are a few years old, so I am wondering if there are new recommendations / discussions around this.
Some background: We are a Java shop, we create / maintain websites for our clients, our tech stack are Java, Spring, SQL, JSP, HTML5, JQuery, Tomcat, JBoss, Maven, etc ... the usual stuff. So far in terms of "content" we either put it in some properties file read in by the JSP for copies (eg. description of product X) or back-end service that provide dynamic content (eg. what's the current value of product X).
Now we are rethinking our approach to managing content because we are managing more and more properties for the client with the same content (eg. a website, mobile website, mobile app, etc), so we definitely want to avoid having multiple copies of the same content spread around.
A few things I am particularly looking for:
Java-based (because we are Java shop: 1) more expertise in handling Java-based stuff and 2) avoid introducing another tech to the stack)
Extensibility / customization. Need to be able to customize the CMS (which is why we want to stick within our Java expertise) so that it can be extended to connect with other web services to consume content, etc.
Focus on content - we need clear separation between content vs UI-render, going back to what we are looking for where we will need to deliver the content into separate properties.
RESTful service / API to access the content - same as above. We need the content to be accessible directly as a JSON / JSON-P /. XML feed.
Need to have a decent UI to work with and the more intuitive the better for business user because some of our client that might be moved to the platform will likely want to be manage their own content
Multilingual support
Open source / low cost
So far, several options that I have are:
Adobe CQ - Looks to be the most ideal solution, but unfortunately it's cost prohibitive
Hippo CMS - Looks to fit what we are looking for, I am unsure of how well it's documented, tutorial / how-tos seems to be quite sparse, their market share seems to be bigger in Europe than in North America.
Liferay - More focused as "portal" as opposed to CMS providing content
Alfresco - More focused on "documents"
dotCMS - Like Hippo CMS, seems like this one might fit our needs.
Magnolia CMS - Looks around the same alley as dotCMS and Hippo as well. From the comments I've seen seems like they are more focused on a single website and not clean separation between content vs UI.
I personally don't have much direct experience working with CMS before.
Your thoughts / comments on each of the options above, or if you have other solutions in mind not mentioned here, would be greatly appreciated! One of my challenge is that we need to make a really sound decision because whichever path we decide to go down with, we would likely be stuck with it, decision is not something that can easily be discarded and start over.

Personally I have some experience with Hippo and a lot with dotCMS. I do know a little about Alfresco, Liferay and Magnolia but I have not worked with them before. I have no experience whatsoever with Adobe CQ, because I never took the time investigating. This is because of the high costs being a no go for many of our clients. Alfresco is indeed a better solution if you're looking for an online document management system, which I think you aren't. You are right about Hippo, Magnolia and dotCMS being somewhat similar, which isn't that strange because they try to solve the same problem: being an Enterprise class Java based Web Content Management System. They focus heavily on managing the content which can be used in pages that are also manageable with the CMS.
To be honest: I have a bias towards dotCMS because I have worked with the systems a lot and know much about it. I thought I'd explain why it works for us so you can take that into consideration. I work in a Java shop that does a lot of middleware development for its clients using JBoss and the whole EE stack. We connect old (Cobol) and new systems together and put a shiny new web interface on top of that middleware that targets both admins and consumers. To be able to create these interfaces we need a CMS that does a few things well:
Java based (because we're a Java shop this enables us to have the same people work on the CMS and the middleware)
Horizontal scalable to tens of servers without too much hassle. In the classic case when scaling out to multiple servers the database and the assets folder are shared between the nodes. This could be a problem when you have many nodes, but in practice it's not such a big issue because most of the load will hit the index and not the db or the disk. In 2.5 and up dotCMS offers a "share nothing" mode where each node has its own database and assets folder, but this does requires you to use an additional (read: licensed) authoring server that pushes the content to each of the nodes. I have not played with this setup myself, but it sounds promising, especially because each node can be a simple and cheap box that only uses postgresql / mysql and tomcat and because there is no single point of failure anymore. In the classic case if the shared assets folder or the db would die all nodes would be down as well, except when you cluster the db and the disk as well which is expensicv to do. With this "share nothing" setup this is no longer the case. As I said: I have no experience with this, but it sounds like it might work.
Admin interface usable by both power users and non techie people (clients). Not everybody is "good with computers", but they too need to be able to manage the content (very often these people work in the marketing department of our clients). dotCMS offers ways to create admin interfaces that show only a few of the functionalities dotCMS offers. This prevents them for having to understand the whole system which speeds up training and acceptance.
Structured content. This is biggie. We want to be able to define many types of content all with a fixed set of fields, just like a database table. All without having to rebuild or restart the system. The people that would define content based on this structure (the name dotCMS uses for these types) cannot enter invalid data because the system protects against that. This makes building websites so much more future proof and convenient. Especially for developers.
Focus on content first. The first months that we used dotCMS we actually only used dotCMS for managing the content itself and exposing that through JSON API's. We did not use CMS features like defining templates and creating pages. This works fine and sounds like the stuff you're looking for. dotCMS has a JSON/XML Webservice that returns content based on queries. We use this a lot in almost all our projects, see here for more info: http://dotcms.com/docs/latest/ContentAPI. Using dotCMS itself for the whole frontend is also a possibility. Especially with the Spring controllers that it supports and the CSS-framework agnostic new template designer it is a nice way to build systems that require more than just some content.
Multilingual. dotCMS offers a few ways to do this. You can create content in all languages that you need, even non textual content such as images. Because of the "content first" approach many things are content in dotCMS , and can be treated as such, including creating a version for each language that you need.
Open source. dotCMS offers a community version that we use most of the time. Only for the pro features like load balancing, using oracle for the database, etc, a paid version is necessary. And even then the costs are manageable. See http://dotcms.com/products/editions/ for more details about this.
Internal caching mechanism. Because of the high load some of the sites we have build need caching. DotCMS uses the Google Guava for their caching which works pretty well.
Extendability, also a biggie. We needed to be able to extend the functionality of dotCMS for obvious reasons. DotCMS used to only offer an old school way of doing plugins that is kinda ugly and is based on an ant script that overwrites the dotCMS classes with your own. It works fine, but I always feel dirty after writing such a plugin. However since version 2 they offer an OSGi based plugin framework that is pretty sweet and much more developer friendly. It went out of beta in the 2.5 version. We're planning to port all of our plugins to the new framework.
Multi host. We need to be able to host multiple sites within the same CMS. DotCMS provides this natively. It's also a nice way to share common stuff between multiple hosts which we use a lot.
Of course there are also down sides. Here are a few:
Web CMSes like dotCMS store its content in a database and the assets as files on the disk. This makes versioning and synchronizing between different servers a pain in the butt. Starting from the 2.5 version dotCMS offers synchronizing tools that enable you to push content from one environment (for instance UAT) to another (for instance PROD), which helps. But not being able to checkout a single version of the content from something like GIT or SVN is very annoying. Especially since we as Java developers are accustomed to things like automated testing in a continues integration environment. Of course you can store the database as a SQL statement and the assets directory but that's slow and not so "nice". But then again all systems that store state in a database have this flaw.
DotCMS takes some time to learn. It's not a small CMS like Wordpress that you'll understand in one afternoon. It has many features and is very powerful, but you'll most likely need a day or so to understand the dotCMS way and then another couple of days to understand all the API's. I do encourage you to first read some docs and tinker with it before building a real production site: many ways lead to Rome, but some of them consist out of quicksand. :)
DotCMS is RAM hungry. To keep things fast it cached everything, so if you have a lot of content it will eat away at the RAM you have available. You can tweak this but it's easier to just give it enough RAM we have found.
Not all configurations of WebDAV + editing client are compatible with dotCMS. For instance on a mac I have found that you best use Cyberduck as a WebDAV client and Aptana as a text editor. Other setups do freaky things that dotCMS does not like much. You got to play a little to find out what the best setup is for you. I did find that if you file a bug on their github they get it fixed in the next release. They told me that WebDAV is hard to get right because it's not a fixed standard which I understand but it can still be a pain in the butt.
If you want to learn dotCMS read their -not so bad- documentation: http://dotcms.com/docs/latest/TableOfContents and also take a look at their demo site (http://dotcms.com/products/demo/). In the demo site you'll find examples of all the concepts that dotCMS offers. Oh and check out our own free dotCMS plugins as well. Especially the JavaScript and CSS minifier is very handy: http://geekyplugins.com/.
Hope this helps a little. Let me know if you want to know more.

Disclaimer: I work for Hippo, so I'll try to only answer with facts and not opinion :-)
Hippo is fully Java based, front end is language independent, but geared towards JSP or Freemarker, optionally you can use a REST-interface and use whatever.
Many plugins are created and collected at the Hippo forge.
Content-centric design has been a staple of Hippo development, should pose no issue.
Yes, by default all JCR calls are available. Apart from that you are able to define your own REST interface to suit your needs, example in the demo, documented here.
I dare say yes, in my experience most non-tech users find the interface easy to understand.
Multilingual is easy, part of the default multi-channel setup.
The community edition (which is complete, no bait-and-switch) is open source, there is some enterprise functionality behind a proprietary license. The license also opens up support avenues, besides the Google Group and Stack Overflow.
Now, on your comment about the documentation being incomplete, let me offer my opinion:
You are right, the documentation is an ongoing struggle. Most stuff is documented, but is hard to find. We are working on improving the overviews, introductions and tutorials, but we are obviously not done yet. If you can't find anything, usually the community is able to help and point you in the right direction.

Creating a Digital Audio Workstation

I am trying to write my own DAW, mostly just to learn about the mathematics of how signals are processed to get effects, but also for fun. (A rather large undertaking, but I have the time at the moment). I would like for it to work something like Propellerhead's Record as in the rack especially.
I'm running on a Mac, so I'm thinking of using Audio Units for the different parts, then Core Audio for the scaffolding parts. So, the whole thing would be written in C or Obj-C.
However, I haven't used either Audio Units or Core-Audio before, and the internet hasn't been any help for learning.
Does anyone know where I could learn about these?
Or would Java (The only other language I'd feel comfortable using) be better, or is there something I've completely missed while trying to find the "easy" way to do this?
Thanks,
Jon

if you want to write a DAW:
at minimum, get your feet wet with an existing project. if i were to personally choose a project, i'd contribute to Ardour.
the signal processing in a DAW is relatively simple. you'll have to work with mixers, files, and graphics. if you're already comfortable writing apps, then you probably won't learn much (beyond the basics). of course, you could find an existing project and extend it with features which relate to what you want to learn; you could write plugs or visualizations for it.
if prefer to work with signal processing:
AU or VST plugins will be a good intro - there are many existing projects which you may reference. eventually, you'll get tired of waiting for a host to load to test your program.
language:
objc is not usable for realtime audio rendering.
java is very unusual for this application. there are actually wrappers for AUs and CoreAudio... but can't name one commercial Java AU for OS X.
most audio shops (that I know of) are using C++ - not C. (Hardware is different). this really seems like an odd omission from your list - most DAWs and plugins use C++, and that is the language you'd find the most examples in. if you're already comfortable with C and Java, I'd recommend coming to terms with C++ because that's the standard language in the industry when targeting desktops.

Look at the cross platform C++ library JUCE, it is open source with the option to license the code (price isn't bad).
Plenty of professional DAW and VST developers use it, I'm one of em.
https://www.juce.com/
Warning, this library is a lot of fun to play with. It renewed my interest in C++, which was no small feat.

you are right-on in assuming that core-audio and audiounits could form the basis for a system (that may not need to be a fully-fledged DAW but may have some combination of multi-track audio recording, editing, playback, etc...) much easier than worrying about cross-platform concerns, massive all-encompassing frameworks like Juce, or ASIO and other os-bypassing hacks. i think you will find that audio programming is a specialized discipline and most folks here on stackoverflow are ill prepared to offer useful advice.
Java is rather unsuitable, as is C#, as are interpreted languages FOR AUDIO, in particular for multichannel audio, DSP, etc. due to time contraints and the need to work on a rather low-level for many critical loops.
you will find the documents you need on developer.apple.com (you'll have to make a login) and you can find shell-examples for your interest directly inside of xcode examples...
good luck

Java libraries and frameworks overviews

Which web sites could you recommend, where I shall find overviews of different java libraries and frameworks that are currently preferable to use in development of applications?
update: To be more precise, I've liked to find a site that will be like a magazine about java, where will be the overviews, comparisons, best practices, examples and other useful information about java (technics, libraries, frameworks and so on) for different purposes. The aim of magazines is not to cover all the things of their subject area, but to present more actual, interesting and useful things only.

I really like the design on Open Source Software in Java. They've got it laid out by type to start with, plus when you dig down you can find several competing projects for each category.
For example clicking on 'HTML Parsers' gives this (and more - this is just a partial clip):
I hope this helps.

The world of java has so many libraries that it would be practically impossible to recommend anything without some kind of understanding about what kind of application you are actually writing. Are you writing a blu-ray disc, a game for a java phone, an android app, a desktop application, a server side computation process, a web service, a web site.... the list of things that java can and does do is huge.
The same thing goes for frameworks too. I would always say (although many people on this site disagree) that you should only look for a framework when you are finding something difficult, and the framework makes that thing easier, without making other stuff harder. Some people say you pick your framework first.....
Perhaps if you gave more details on what kind of thing you were trying to attempt, the community might be able to point you towards some useful stuff.
As a side note, remember that the internet is full of people with opinions - just because they are loud, it doesn't make them right - after all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog

Pylons or TurboGears vs. .NET or Java

We're embarking on a project for a client. They plan on having about 50k users by the end of the year. We're pushing to use Pylons w/ Mako and SQLAlchemy, and our contact there is excited about it, but some of his colleagues are wary because it's not .NET or J2ee (they're used to enterprisey stuff).
Their web app will have some data analysis that we'll offload as well as a twang of social networking features. (basically all they have so far is some Flex mockups for UX)
I'm looking for some evidence with regard to development time, or other reasons that will help our argument to reassure the customer.
The other options is that we're barking up the wrong tree and have no idea. I hope that's not the case.
Any references to case studies or whatnot would be nice. The best I could find are
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/rubio-python-turbogears.html
and
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/devlin-python-oracle.html
which are a bit dated (wrt to TG2 and whatnot)
Thanks!

If you're looking for a success story for a customer, Virgin Charter is using Pylons with SQLAlchemy for their site. This is a high-value transaction system as people are booking very expensive flights through the site.
For a more high-traffic site, Reddit is now running on Pylons, along with Charlie Rose.
SQLAlchemy and Mako were both designed by Mike Bayer (A veteran Java programmer), SQLAlchemy being based on the best of Hibernate and with the same powerful principles and patterns that Hibernate supports.
If they're wary of deploying something they're not familiar with, Pylons runs on Jython, and the latest SQLAlchemy (0.6 branch) is about ready on Jython too. This would let you package up a full Pylons app into a WAR file for deployment which would reassure their Java-types.
For general Python, consider pointing out all the big animation studios that use it, and the other various srouces S.Lott points out.

It's almost easier to build a quick Proof of Concept service that demonstrates how clean and simple it is.
A simple SQLAlchemy mapping with a quick demo of query processing.
A simple template showing how cool Mako is.
A simple Pylons app to put the two together.
Most important -- use their application and their data. Not a lame hello world; not an existing tutorial.
If they want to compare your clean, elegant demo of their app with .NET and J2EE, they'll see that other languages lead to a much, much bigger code base.
Edit
Show them this: http://python.org/about/success/
Also, one of the best Python demos is to do things the way the SQLAlchemy and Django tutorials do things -- in interactive python from the >>> prompt. Nothing is more exciting than programming which is so simple you can do it interactively.
You won't find a lot of compelling case studies. Python is a community. .Net and J2EE are products. .Net has Microsoft's advertising backing it; Microsoft can afford to do extensive surveys and studies of their product. Same for Sun (soon to be Oracle) and J2EE -- lots of marketing hype backing up their claims.
Python just has what's on the Python.org site (http://python.org/about/). The various related projects (Pylons, Mako and SQLAlchemy) don't have lavish case study whitepapers. They do have a large number of downloads, and lots of word of mouth.
But if someone's looking for "proof" that Python works better than .Net, there's not going to be much.

They are crazy if they want to use j2ee imho. Visual Studio/C# is very nice, especially if you are not trying to do anything tricky. However, if you want to customize the C# way of doing things beyond what it was explicitly designed for it can quickly turn into a mess -- you get mired in automatically generated XML configuration files &c. Of course, I also think that Pylons with SQLAlchemy might turn into a mess because they too generate so much stuff that you ultimatly might end up having to reconfigure. If you want complete control, I would recommend a less intrusive environment, like Werkzueg. Please read my essay on writing MVC with no invisible means of support.