Merry Christmas to you all :)

Working as a System Administrator always means you have to keep your systems up and running. If a system or service goes down, you usually want to know it before any of your customers notices. This is where Server Monitoring comes in. There are a bunch of services that provide server monitoring services on the net, either for free or for a small fee, but the usability and the number of configuration settings however are often unsatisfactory.

Free desktop monitoring software is rare and commercial products are likely to be very expensive. As a matter of fact, my server was under some heavy attack recently, and I would have been grateful if I'd had some desktop software for monitoring my server. In the meantime, I wrote myself a very simple tool telling me if my server is responding to ICMP echo requests - also known as ping.

My server is now back up and running without any loss of data. I began writing a monitoring software in C# 3.0 (C# 3.0 is supported by Mono 2.0) to keep track of my server and the services running on it. In the current pre-alpha state my tool is highly customizable to specific user requirements. An included small web server (http://www.codeplex.com/webserver) will supply XML-data to web services, making it easy to build a web interface.

JavaFX is now completely integrated into Sun's Java Website. Articles on topics like "How to Set Up JDK 6 and JavaFX on 32-bit Intel Macs" let us hope that the final release of JavaFX will come with support for the three major operating systems Windows, Linux and MacOSX.

The core functions and the language syntax of JavaFX Script have changed since the first preview release, but hopefully they are stable for now as I've just released the first six chapters of my "Guide to JavaFX".

- JavaFX Home - Home of OpenJFX Project

A couple of hours ago I finished a new article about Yahoo's BOSS API. I enjoyed writing the article and have to admit that Yahoo did a great job and gave us developers a really useful API to work with.

Furthermore I discovered the world of JavaFX, Sun's answer to Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash which is announced to be delivered by Fall 2008. Since end of July a preview of the JavaFX SDK, as well as the appropriate plugin for NetBeans 6.1 is available for download. Quite disappointing is that there is currently no support for Linux or Solaris, but referring to a Comment in the official JavaFX Blog by Sun they will continue to "evaluate" support for other operating systems than Windows and Macintosh. Hopefully there will at least be a version of JavaFX when 1.0 is released.

It's been a while since I last updated my blog. Redesigning software1987.de took me longer than expected, because I changed the concept of the page twice. The page will be released on August 1st, coming out with at least ten articles about general programming techniques.

My tool for packing and extracting PHP archives in it's current version extracts uncompressed phar files. Next step is to implement packing and compression (gzip/bz2) support.