Congratulations on Getting Promoted

What with the double-dip recession, the ridiculous hike in petrol prices and year-on-year reduction in the number of promotions, especially at senior levels, the minimum that your organization can do is create designations that really sound cool!

Limping From Scratch

Setting up the technology stack is usually the first stumbling block encountered while developing with PHP and MySQL. The common practice is to use Apache web server as the HTTP gateway. Setting up these three components separately is not a trivial task because of the variety of configuration parameters, file system paths and launch options…

Dynamic Networks for Enterprise Applications

Modern enterprise applications are characterized by a preponderance of distributed computing paradigms and methodologies. In consequence, the network between different application elements (services) now play an increasingly significant role. Typically, the network layer for most distributed environments possess the following three characteristics: the nodes in the network (e. g. the services themselves) encapsulate complex functionality.…

Jetty and Eclipse Integration

The Jetty web server is a standards compliant J2EE container that is regularly updated to conform with the latest servlet and JSP specifications. Because of its embeddable nature, it is a popular choice with developers who need to incorporate a servlet container /web server in their applications. It is also a natural choice to quickly…

Hits and Misses: JAX India 2007

JAX India 2007 finally got over today. A quick Google search just before I started on with this blog entry, gives me the general impressions of ‘let-down’ and ‘not up-to-the-mark’ that is being shared by many of the attendees. After sitting through nearly three days worth of seminars and presentations from technology thought leaders, my…

The Dependency Injection Meta-Container

Of late, the dependency injection pattern has gained prominence as a common feature provided by many object-oriented frameworks. Included in this list are new entrants like JBoss Seam and Google Guice as alternatives to the more popular Spring framework. Existing platform, such as Struts and EJB, are also making a move towards this paradigm. The…

The Portable Workspace

The term ‘workspace’ means different things to different people depending on the context in which it is used. In this article we shall use this term to denote the set of applications and associated data pertaining to an user’s daily activities on a single computer. The user’s workspace is a dynamic environment. Applications are added…

Scripting Web Graphics

Creation of even the simplest graphical elements can be a tiresome experience without a prior background and training in visual design. Most developers would rather work on the next application functionality than fiddle around with Photoshop and similar imaging tools. Usability and aesthetics are considered to be the prerogatives of Web designers as a distinct…

Engineering Effective Frameworks

The rise in popularity of object-oriented frameworks is synonymous to the growing prevalence of Java and .NET platforms for enterprise application development. With mature frameworks numbering in the hundreds, it is only natural that there is a significant overlap in the target scenarios addressed by these solutions. While this poses a problem for application developers…

Injection and Inversion

A lot of programmers I interact with are unable to differentiate between dependency injection and inversion of control. Thanks to the popularity of Spring framework and EJB 3.0 there is now a tendency to use these terms interchangeably, even as they represent distinctly different concepts, resulting in a lot of ambiguities. Inversion of control has…

The Elusive RIA

Nine years and several technologies later, rich Internet applications are yet to attain maturity. Though AJAX and Flash have become widely accepted as the latest technologies for building RIA, these are far from being perfect solutions. This article presents a summary of the common problems that have assailed RIA development across successive generations of softwares…

Information Vending and the New Web

Traditionally, the Internet has always been about information hosting, with the power to contribute in the hands of a select few. The Web 2.0 paradigm has changed all that, bringing the power of publishing to the masses. With such a volume-driven approach, it is only natural that every submission to the write-enabled Web cannot be…

Browser on Steroids

The last couple of years has been an era of unprecedented information growth. In 2006 alone, 161 billion gigabytes of digital information were created and copied. Even if we were to take a small percentage of this information as ‘relevant’ and ‘useful’, it still is a staggering volume to digest. If you are a power…

The Community-Powered Brand Success

In a previous posting, we had an overview of community-powered applications as products that are being continuously enhanced, maintained and supported by their respective groups of end-users. The measurement of success, here, is not just acceptance but also user involvement. This article explores the factors that contribute to the success of community-powered applications.

Community-Powered Applications

Community-powered applications have a significant amount of their development effort and post-rollout support provided by external users1. While Linux remains by far the largest and probably the first community effort, there are many others that deserve mention under this category.

I Know I Read It Somewhere

An Internet clipbook is a collection of Web page snippets, documents and links organized for easy browsing and quick accessibility. The imagery is drawn from a “real” paper scrapbook that contains among other things, photographs, handwritten memos, newspaper and magazine cuttings.

The Next Big Thing in Online Search

Online information is growing at an unprecedented rate with more communities and users taking to the Web than ever before. In the face of this explosion, the top three search services (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) are encountering serious challenges to maintain the relevance of their results. New solutions are constantly being proposed to augment (and…

My Desktop Aggregator Wishlist

I took a break from feed reading because I found it to be too addictive and eating into my daily schedule. But now I am back at it again. FeedReader is my current favourite although at times I do miss the features provided by RSS Bandit.

The Zone is up!

It took me the better part of an hour to setup my profile and get ready for blogging. This delay was primarily due to the fact that I could not make up my mind about the user name to use and WordPress does not allow you to share the same email address between accounts (at…