About 2 weeks ago, myself and James were asked to write a small utility that would take progress messages produced by the RTD product and write them to the console output. The messages currently have no way of being viewed so a quick utility was required to do this.

Over the week we designed and wrote a utility to do this. We needed to take an odb database, extract the necessary information and print it out. We had never experienced working with JDO (Java Data Objects) so this was a great task and our first bit of proper Java coding. We completed the task after a bit of trouble figuring out how to connect and extract information from the database.

We tested the finished utility and ensured that no errors were produced during runtime. The utility we developed is being sent out to customers who require the fucntionality it provides. It was a good feeling and great experience to produce something (even just a small utility) that is actually being sent to customers!

I am hoping to write another post soon with some more information on JDO and how we completed the task.

I have been quite busy these past few weeks so havn’t had a chance to post much but I thought I would give a quick overview of the product I am helping develop at Anristu.

The team I am working on is called the RTD tool team, the RTD (Rapid Test Designer) is the product we work with.

A base unit is produced in Japan however European customers require more complex functionality than the base unit offers, in the UK we write a software implementation that runs on the base product to bring it up to the standard required by European customers.

The RTD is a product which allows customers to create, execute and analyze tests for their devices. Users can test specific functions and protocols within the UE without having to be an expert on all the protocol layers. It has an intuitive graphical user interface which allows tests to be run in a fraction of the time taken for traditional methods. After tests are completed, the RTD matches criteria against actual performance and reports on the success or failure of each criterion.

The basic RTD system provides a simulation of a W-CDMA/GSM network with up to four W-CDMA cells and one GSM cell. The RTD system consists of a personal computer running a Windows OS connected to the Anritsu MD8480 W-CDMA Signaling Tester (system simulator).

See http://www.anritsu.co.uk/products/default.php?p=155&model=MX786201A for more information.

I am going to write a short post about what Anristu actually do, very few people seem to have heard of them, however they are a worldwide company who have had their hands in alot of top technology.

Anristu is a Japanese company in the test and measurement product market. The company is over 100 years old! In 1990 the company aquired the US company Wiltron to expand into a global market. In 2008 they had net sales of 84 billion yen. They have approximately 3700 employees in 20 countries. European headquarters are in Luton (which is where I am working).

A bit of history here, the Annaka Electric Company (one of two companies which would later merge to form Anritsu) produced the worlds first wireless telephone service and Japan’s first automatic public telephone!

Anristsu’s customers are typically telecommunications companies such as QualComm and Sony Ericcsson.

Their two main technology areas at present are 3G and the new technlogy LTE (Long Term Evolution), which is cutting edge technology not yet available on the market! It is great to be working for a company that are pushing the boundaries and moving into new areas of technology.

Before 3G and LTE they worked with GSM. GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) is the most popular standard for mobile phones in the world. Estimations state that approximately 80% of the global mobile market use it, so roaming accross countries is common allowing people to use their phone almost anywhere. Signalling and speech channels are digital, so GSM is considered a second generation (2G) system. This subsequently meant that it was quite simple to build data communication into the system. GSM was also responsible for an alternative to voice calling, SMS (short message service), which has become an extremely popular feature! One thing I did not know until researching this standard was that it incorporates a worldwide emergency telephone number, 112. It allows people to contact the emergency services no matter what country they are in, without having to know the local emergency services number!

GSM provided the foundations for something called 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), which is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations, to make a globally applicable third generation (3G) mobile phone system specification. 3GPP defines the standard for mobile broadband.

LTE is the next big thing in mobile communication. It is the last step towards the 4G (4th Generation) of radio technologies, designed to increase the capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks. LTE is a set of enhancements to the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS).

The LTE specification provides downlink (download) peak rates of at least 100Mbps and an uplink (upload) of at least 50Mbps (Mega bit per second). Part of the standard is the System Architecture Evolution, a flat IP-based network architecture (all next generation networks are based upon IP (internet protocol)) designed to replace the GPRS core network and ensure support for non-3GPP systems. The main advantages of LTE are high throughput, low latency, improved end user experience and simple architecture resulting in low operating costs.

We have just finished doing our Interim builds (which is a build of the software that goes out to customers). We ran into quite a lot of problems as usual! Most of the problems we encountered involved having to edit batch and properties files. I have never really worked with these types of files before so I thought i’d post up a little information about them.

In Microsoft Windows and DOS a batch file is a text file which contains a series of commands to be executed by the command interpreter (command line). When you run a batch file the shell program (cmd.exe) reads the command, normally line by line, and executes them.

They are useful for running a series of executable commands automatically and are often used to automate tedious processes. In DOS a batch file has the extension “.bat”. When you read through a batch file, you can see the indivudual commands as they would be typed in the command line.

A properties file has the extension “.properties”. It is mainly used for files in Java related technologies to store the configurable parameters of an application. Each parameter is stored as a pair of  strings, one storing the name of the parameter (called the key), and the other storing the value. The format would be written like: key = value.

Each line in a .properties file normally stores a single property. .properties files can use the # or the ! as the first non blank character in a line to denote that all text following it is a comment. The backwards slash is used to escape a character.

Today hasn’t been the busiest of days, which I guess is okay soon as its a Monday. I finished building my development environments after running into a few problems compiling some files. Had to edit some batch and XML files, changing a few file/folder references here and there. Nothing too serious. Having solved all the problems and finished the build, myself and James updated the existing documentation (which was very out of date!) so that others following it would not run in to any of the issues we did.

We are now beginning on something called an Interim Build Process, which as yet, I have no idea what it is!