Business Intelligence (BI) software allows you to view different components of a business using a single visual platform, which makes comprehending mountains of data easier. BI is everywhere. Applications that include reports, analytics, statistics, and historical and predictive modeling are all examples of BI. Currently, we are in the second generation of BI software—called BI 2.0—which is focused on writing BI software that is predictive, adaptive, simple, and interactive.

As computers and software have evolved, more data can be presented to end users with increasingly visually rich techniques. Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies such as Microsoft Silverlight can be used to transform traditional user-interfaces filled with boring data into fully interactive analytical applications that quickly deliver insight from large data sets. Furthermore, RIA applications now include 3D spatial-design capabilities that move beyond a simple list or grid and allow for interesting layouts of aggregated data. BI 2.0 implemented via an RIA technology can truly bring out the power of BI and deliver it to an average user on the Web.

Next-Generation Business Intelligence Software with Silverlight 4 provides developers, designers, and architects with a solid foundation in BI design and architecture concepts for Microsoft Silverlight. This book covers key BI design concepts and how they can be applied without an existing BI infrastructure. Author Bart Czernicki provides you with examples of how to build small BI applications that are interactive, highly visual, statistical, predictive—and most importantly—intuitive to the end-user.

BI isn’t just for the executive branch of a Fortune 500 company—it is for the masses. Let Next-Generation Business Intelligence Software with Silverlight 4 show you how to unlock the rich intelligence you already have.

• Design rich BI solutions for the masses
• Discover tips for using engaging BI designs for application presentation
• Consume BI data as a service
• Understand and create SaaS models in BI
• Craft BI solutions using the most advanced Silverlight 4.0 technology through C# 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010

There are four core audiences for this book:

# Business intelligence professionals/developers: Cube designers, report writers, SharePoint administrators, and others in this group are looking for a resource to gain additional wisdom on cutting-edge BI concepts. These readers will gain ideas that go beyond the capabilities of the traditional BI tools they are used to.
# Senior developers or architects: Developers who are familiar with writing traditional software applications and want to broaden their understanding of concepts in order to include BI fall into this category. Some may have never written any BI applications in their careers but are interested in what BI has to offer. These readers will understand the core BI concepts and how to apply them using application techniques.
# CTOs/BI directors: These are senior managers who make strategic decisions with BI. The technical examples will probably be overly technical for these readers. However, the numerous visual aids within this book will help these strategic managers make better decisions after seeing next-generation BI concepts implemented.

Information infrastructures are integrated solutions based on the fusion of information and communication technologies. They are characterized by the large amount of data that must be managed accordingly. An information infrastructure requires an efficient and effective information retrieval system to provide access to the items stored in the infrastructure. Terminological Ontologies: Design, Management and Practical Applications presents the main problems that affect the discovery systems of information infrastructures to manage terminological models, and introduces a combination of research tools and applications in Semantic Web technologies. This book specifically analyzes the need to create, relate, and integrate the models required for an infrastructure by elaborating on the problem of accessing these models in an efficient manner via interoperable services and components.

About this book:

• Includes the common framework for integration of terminological models into information infrastructures, covering the different management steps (acquisition, storage, and access).

• Provides a revision of the main requirements of terminological models in different information retrieval systems and proposes integration solutions to facilitate and simplify its management.

• “This book is essential for those who will have to create ontologies from existing terminological databases,” comments Dr. Jacques Teller, University Of Liege, Belgium.

Terminological Ontologies: Design, Management and Practical Applications is geared toward information management systems and semantic web professionals working as project managers, application developers, government workers and more. Advanced undergraduate and graduate level students, professors and researchers focusing on computer science will also find this book valuable as a secondary text or reference book.

Programming knowledge is often necessary for finding a solution to a biological problem. Based on the author’s experience working for an agricultural biotechnology company, Python for Bioinformatics helps scientists solve their biological problems by helping them understand the basics of programming. Requiring no prior knowledge of programming-related concepts, the book focuses on the easy-to-use, yet powerful, Python computer language.

The book begins with a very basic introduction that teaches the principles of programming. It then introduces the Biopython package, which can be useful in solving life science problems. The next section covers sophisticated tools for bioinformatics, including relational database management systems and XML. The last part illustrates applications with source code, such as sequence manipulation, filtering vector contamination, calculating DNA melting temperature, parsing a genbank file, inferring splicing sites, and more. The appendices provide a wealth of supplementary information, including instructions for installing Python and Biopython and a Python language and style guide.

By incorporating examples in biology as well as code fragments throughout, the author places a special emphasis on practice, encouraging readers to experiment with the code. He shows how to use Python and the Biopython package for building web applications, genomic annotation, data manipulation, and countless other applications.

In the SOA world, managing distributed services and service infrastructures is critical. Oracle Enterprise Manager - an all-encompassing management product - facilitates increased management capabilities for databases, application servers, and packaged applications. BPEL PM and OSB are two compelling, market leading products that are driving Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation across enterprises.

There is a lack of clarity around real-world operational use cases that would help operational administrators in their day-to-day tasks. Further, the documentation available online does not provide much information on administering BPEL PM and OSB with Enterprise Manager Grid Control efficiently.

This book will help you set up the framework for managing operational tasks from a central location using Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control in a step-by-step functional approach. You will learn to automate various operational tasks that are essential for the smooth running of Oracle SOA products in production, thus increasing the efficiency of your SOA projects.

This book shows how top-drawer management capabilities from Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control can be used to effectively manage your Oracle SOA environment. You start by discovering one or more BPEL and OSB components centrally. The book then explains how to monitor BPEL processes and OSB services, and how to get alerts on service availability and performance problems. It covers the management of BPEL and OSB infrastructure components and how to manage their configurations in a central repository. It follows a hands-on approach, showing you how to use an automated approach for deploying BPEL processes and OSB projects.

By the end of this book, you will have learned several techniques to set up a framework that will help you manage your SOA environment from a central location.

A step-by-step guide to using Enterprise Manager Grid Control to automate common operational tasks essential for the smooth running of Oracle SOA products such as BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Service Bus

What you will learn from this book

• Explore BPEL Process Manager and OSB targets
• Monitor BPEL processes, partner links, OSB proxy, and business services using a combination of server metrics and synthetic tests
• Monitor the BPEL instances causing errors by creating SOAP tests
• Manage the BPEL and OSB infrastructure by monitoring configuration changes
• Manage service-level expectations around SOA services
• Create a dashboard to monitor critical SOA services, key metrics, and SLAs
• Deploy BPEL and OSB artifacts in an automated fashion to ensure that the deployments are conducted in an error free manner
• Manage the configuration settings of the BPEL and OSB infrastructure, including setting baselines and comparisons
• Clone an existing SOA Suite from one instance to another to automate the creation of a new SOA Suite environment

Approach

This book is a step-by-step tutorial on how to automate the management of BPEL Process manager, SOA Suite, and Oracle Service Bus. Each chapter has a problem-solution approach, starting with a real-world problem and then providing the solution to the problem using illustrative examples.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for BPEL and OSB administrators who deal with Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle SOA Suite, or Oracle Service Bus in a production environment and who need to automate operational tasks. If you are an SOA architect or associated with SOA governance, this book will serve as an eye opener for the many available features to provide production assurance in complex SOA environments.

A general awareness of Service-Oriented Architecture is expected, as well as an awareness of Oracle SOA products such as BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Service Bus. No specific management or operational expertise is required.

Silverlight makes it much easier to build web applications with highly usable, interactive, and exciting user interfaces. However, with so many new options open to designers and developers, making the best use of the tools available is not always so easy. It's ease of use and rapid development process has left one area completely uncovered - how to design, build, and implement professional and usable interfaces, and create an enjoyable user experience and interaction.

Written by a Microsoft MVP and Silverlight Prototyping Specialist, this book is the first and only book on developing Silverlight User Interfaces. Clear, step-by-step instructions show how to build all the user interface elements that users look forward to in a cutting edge app. This book offers essential recipes, with each recipe depicting the commonly used user interface patterns built with Silverlight, and in some cases, with WPF to showcase the possibilities.

The author's experience in designing and developing user interfaces enables him to share insights on creating professional interfaces in a clear and friendly way. The book starts off with recipes dealing with fixed and fluid layouts, building custom command link controls, working with navigation, and collapsible panels, and then moves on to the more advanced topics such as calendars, alternating row colors, and task panes. The author covers a number of different UI patterns, controls, and approaches accompanied by XAML and C# code where needed (and explained), along with usage context and practical, proven, and professional techniques for specific controls and patterns.

From maps to task panes, and web cam support to pixel shaders, this Cookbook provides you with a rich selection of Silverlight UI recipes. It covers all that you need to know in order to design and implement a user interface, together with professional user experience and interface guidelines to make your solutions and applications pleasurable for your users.The author has found himself in the role of both, a designer and a developer, at different points in his professional career, and his motive was to create a book that will serve as a useful resource for designers and developers trying to find their way with Silverlight and Expression Blend.By the end of the book, you will be able to create a rich, professional, and standards-compliant user interface.

Design and implement professional user interfaces with Silverlight.

What you will learn from this book

• Implement liquid versus fixed layouts to choose the best design for your application
• Build custom controls like navigation pane, split button, and command link button to suit your application's needs
• Good design practices for patterns like wizards, tabs, status bar area and window locations
• Menu usage practices-classical and contextual ones together with guidelines
• Design and implement navigation patterns, expanders, tiled sections, task panes, and collapsible panels for saving space and minimizing visual distractions
• Design and implement calendar controls to allow user-specific time and date input
• Represent large data sets using alternating row colours as a design technique
• Create a responsive UI and remove the visual noise from the interfaces for a rich user experience
• Enable full screen Silverlight experiences for interactive applications such as games, maps, and media players.
• Add and utilize the maps and geo-based UI controls for a truly immersive map experience for your users
• Use the pixel shading techniques to achieve amazing visual effects on images and controls

Approach

Written in a Cookbook style, this book offers learning and techniques through recipes. It contains step-by-step instructions for designers and developers who want to learn about how to design and implement numerous user interface patterns with Silverlight. It will take you a step further by providing you with professional and proven user interface and user experience guidelines wherever possible. The book is designed in such a way that you can explore it chapter-by-chapter, or read it in any order.

Who this book is written for

If you are a developer or designer who knows the basics of Silverlight, has a smattering of C# and XAML, and wants to build applications with elegant and attractive interfaces, then this book is for you.

JavaFX Script enables you to easily create rich Internet applications by embedding multimedia components. Although you can create stylish Internet applications by modifying these default components, even advanced users find it challenging to create impressive feature-rich Internet applications with JavaFX. Also, there are limited JavaFX components to work with and by default these components don't look visually appealing.

This book explores limitless possibilities to style your application by coding JavaFX components to display your content in a more appealing fashion. The recipes in this book will help you to create customized JavaFX components with which you can make modern, feature-rich applications.

First, you will be introduced to the JavaFX SDK and other development tools available to help you be productive during development. You will create an application in JavaFX by arranging complex graphical components (and non-graphical libraries) with simplified declarative constructs. You will then explore the fun side of JavaFX by using transformation techniques to manipulate the location and dimensions of objects. The next chapter is about the GUI components that are available in the framework, which provide a high level of interactivity. You will learn how to use the media component to play media content. Then we will access data and manipulate data locally or remotely. You will explore many deployment options and integration tips and tricks to take advantage of runtime contexts. Finally, you will interact with pure Java code to read and write files in JavaFX and to establish interactions with computing platforms.

Get quick solutions to create modern rich Internet applications using the various JavaFX features ranging from JavaScript fundamentals to more complicated topics including visual controls, custom components, multimedia, animation, effects, web and data services, deployment practices, and much more

What you will learn from this book

• Dive into the JavaFX scripting language fundamentals by creating and declaring classes, functions, trigger variables, and more
• Create complex graphical components with simplified declarative constructs and arrange these building blocks to create applications in JavaFX
• Effortlessly make your objects visually appealing by applying cool effects
• Quickly build an application that provides a high level of interactivity by using JavaFX GUI controls
• Seamlessly play audio and video in several formats using built-in media components
• Access data and manipulate data locally or remotely using tools that are available in JavaFX
• Achieve data visualization using the newly added feature - JavaFX chart components
• Make your applications available for easy access and use by implementing deployment options such as Java WebStart and applets available in JavaFX
• Take advantage of runtime contexts to interact with the executing environment with integration tips and tricks

Approach

This book is a comprehensive collection of recipes that elaborate on known use cases. You will find an organized step-by-step procedure to accomplish each task followed by detailed explanations to better understand how and why each step was undertaken, and many links to online references and other related sections in the book that supplement the subject in question. The book is written so that you can work through the recipes in order or go straight to the recipes that interest you; where a recipe depends on other recipes they are clearly referenced.

Who this book is written for

If you are a Java developer, Rich Internet Application content developer, or graphic designer who wants to build RIAs featuring animations, videos, and other feature-rich content, this book is for you. Knowledge of Java, JavaScript, and JavaFX components is not essential, but will help you exploit this book to your advantage.

JavaScript is an important part of web development in today's Web 2.0 world. While there are many JavaScript frameworks in the market, learning to write, test, and debug JavaScript without the help of any framework will make you a better JavaScript developer. However, testing and debugging can be time consuming, tedious, and painful. This book will ease your woes by providing various testing strategies, advice, and tool guides that will make testing smooth and easy.

This book shows you the most essential features of JavaScript, which you will be using in your daily development, testing, and debugging tasks. You will learn to use the most basic functions of JavaScript to perform ad hoc testing quickly and efficiently.

This book is organized in an easy to follow, step-by-step tutorial style to maximize your learning. You will first learn about the different types of errors you will most often encounter as a JavaScript developer. You will also learn the most essential features of JavaScript through our easy to follow examples.As you go along, you will learn how to write better JavaScript code through validation. Learning how to write validated code alone will help you improve tremendously as a JavaScript developer and most importantly, to write JavaScript code that runs better, faster, and with less bugs.

As our JavaScript program gets larger, we need better ways of testing our JavaScript code. You will learn how to go about various testing concepts and how to use them in your test plan. After which, you will learn how to implement the test plan for your code. To accommodate more complex JavaScript code, you will learn more about the built-in features of JavaScript to identify and catch different types of JavaScript error. Such information helps to spot the root of the problem so that you can act on it.

Finally, you will learn how to make use of the built-in browser tools and other external tools to automate your testing process.

Learn how to test and debug JavaScript through example-driven tutorials.

What you will learn from this book

• Relationship between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Different types of JavaScript error
• How to perform ad hoc testing
• How to validate your JavaScript code
• Different testing concepts
• Create a test plan and implement it
• How to test more complex code by using JavaScript's exception handling
• Learn how to test the user interface controlled by JavaScript
• How to debug your code using tools such as Google Chrome, Javascript Debugger, and Firefox's Venkman Extension.
• How to further automate your testing process using Sahi, Qunit, and JsLitmus
• Other testing tools that will make your testing process easier and less painful

Approach

This book is organized such that only the most essential information is provided to you in each chapter so as to maximize your learning. Examples and tutorials are given in an easy to follow, step-by-step manner so that you can see how the testing process is being carried out and how the code is being written. The source code also contains detailed explanation so that you know what the code is doing. Multiple screenshots are used in places that matter so that you have a visual sense of what is happening.

Who this book is written for

Beginner JavaScript developers looking for essential ways to write, test, and debug JavaScript for different purposes and situations.