• Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, Andrew S. Tannenbaum and Maarten Van Steen, Second Edition. Prentice-Hall. ISBN: 0-13-239227-5.
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler. Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0-321-12742-0. (this book is also used in COMP 461 and COMP 650)

• Beginning Java EE 6 Platform with GlassFish 3 from novice to professional, Goncalves, Antonio, Berkeley, Calif. : Apress, c2009 (New York : Distributed to the book trade worldwide by Springer-Verlag New York).
  This book is available electronically at Franklin University library.
• RESTful Java with JAX-RS, Bill Burke, O'Reilly Media, Inc., Pub. Date: November 17, 2009, ISBN-13: 978-0-596-15804-0
  This book is available electronically at Franklin University library.

• Franklin students can download Visio for free from ELMS
• cURL (Linux command-line client for http and ftp)

Other resources

• The eight fallacies of distributed computing (details are in a whitepaper by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz)
• Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz's blog (includes many posts on distributed systems)
• 25 most dangerous programming errors (from a security point of view)
• Don's security-stuff notebook
• Doug Schmidt's pattern-oriented software architecture links. POSA-II (Patterns of Software Architecture II) has a strong emphasis on distributed systems.
• The Java EE 6 Tutorial -- Building RESTful Web Services with JAX-RS
• Character encodings
  • UTF-8
  • UTF-16 (in this encoding, the byte order mark indicates whether little-endian or big-endian byte order is used; if no byte order mark is present, big-endian order is assumed; the Windows name "Unicode big endian" means UTF-16 with big-endian byte order and a byte order mark)
  • UTF-16LE (UTF-16 with little-endian byte order; strictly speaking, UTF-16LE should NOT start with a byte order mark, but many tools allow it and ignore it if present; the Windows name "Unicode" means UTF-16LE with a byte-order-mark)
  • UTF-16BE (same as UTF-16, but without a byte order mark; many tools allow and ignore a byte order mark if present)
  • ISO-8859-1
  • CP-1252 (IANA name: Windows-1252, Windows name: ANSI)
  • US-ASCII
  • Endianness
    • little endian means least significant byte comes first
    • big endian means most significant byte comes first
  • Windows Notepad knows about UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE and CP-1252. It writes a byte-order mark at the beginning of a file with any of the UTF encodings. This sometimes causes problems if the files are used in UNIX systems.
  • Some Windows programs support keyboard conventions (that I can never remember) for entering non-ASCII characters. The Windows Character Map tool is not perfect, but usually works for entering non-ASCII characters and checking what characters are supported by a given font. The easiest way to start it is Start > Run > charmap
  • Here's a sample file in the four encodings supported by Notepad:
    • UTF-8 encoded
    • UTF-8 encoded, with no byte order mark
    • UTF-16 encoded
    • UTF-16BE encoded
    • CP-1252 encoded (in IE, select View > Encoding > Western European (Windows) ... notice that the alpha and gamma aren't representable in CP-1252)
  • The character encoding demo in class in week 3 uses coder.jar (source code included)
  • For information on how to use it, download it and run the following at a command or shell prompt

    java -jar coder.jar help