.T.h.e. .D.r.e.a.m.e.r.

Posted it from Word 2007

Veera — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:18:27 +0000

I have installed MS Word 2007 in my office system. Word 2007 comes with an inbuilt blog editor. Once can configure his blog service provider (WordPress or Blogger) and can directly post to his blog using Word 2007. This post has been posted directly from word. J

Love to be thin

Veera — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:02:33 +0000

I don’t know why, but i have this tendency to think about thin clients, whenever a new application idea is popping out my mind. It may be because of my interest in web technologies or because of my passion about HTML. But for one reason or other, I love to be thin.

For those who don’t know about thin/fat clients: Fat clients are the applications with networking capability that you need to install them in your local machine, in order to use them. Where as thin clients are light weight as their name suggests and do not require any software installation. Just use your browser to access these web applications.

It was the time, when I developed most of my application using Visual Basic GUI builder. All that applications had a n-number of dull-gray forms and controls.The end user of those applications had no choice, in terms of user interface, but to use what (s)he gets from the application installer. (S)He can not customize the application’s look and feel or to be precise the application can not tailer itself to suit the environment on which it runs.

This has other problems also. As I mentioned earlier, Fat clients needs installation. To install, you need the installer. How do you get the installer? Download it, but the CD or get it from GOD! Anyhow, the point is the vendor needs to distribute the application to each of the user who wants to use the application. Say, if you are the ONLY person who is gonna use the application, then there is no problem! The application developer can drive to your door and deliver the application to you. But what if a million’s of users willing to use the application!? Can the developer travel to all the user’s places and deliver the application!? Well, it is possible, but who the hell are willing to do that! So, the distribution is really a BIG problem with fat clients.

Also fat clients require the end user to setup/configure the system according to the specification of fat client. If the end user has no technical knowledge (but (s)he should be knowing that monitor is not a Television box!), then configuring the fat clients will require additional support from System admins. Its a work overload.

So, to put it short why I love to be thin:

Fat clients lack dress sense – no UI customization
Fat clients need special bus – distribution is a BIG problem
Fat clients require more time to get ready – configuring them needs special attention

In my next post, I will be explaining how to be thin.

Tags: Fatclient, Thin client, Architecture, Web

Great Indian Developer Summit – 2008

Veera — Sun, 25 May 2008 15:34:51 +0000

Got a chance to attend Java Conference at first Great Indian Developer summit, which was held at Bangalore on May 19-24. I have been nominated from my company, along with others, to attend this conference. The summit was organized at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and there were three different tracks of events, namely .Net, Web2 and Java. The focus of the entire conference is on “Enterprise productivity” and all the masters and geeks, who spoke at the conference, shared some useful tips on enterprise productivity.

I attended the Java conference on May 22 and 23. Most of the sessions were focussed on dynamic languages such as Groovy. Even some workshops taught how to set up and execute Groovy. Before attending this conference I have zero knowledge about Groovy. But, now I feel that I should start learning it.

There was a session about “Domain Specific Languages (DSL)”, taken by Dr. Venkat. He was talking about this DSL, and giving the programming task to the business users. i.e. in the current scenario, business users draft the requirements of the application (business rules) and programmers do the coding for that business rules. The Domain Specific Languages enables the business users to write business rules that can be executed directly.

And few sessions were talking about SaaS (Software as a Service) model. The speaker was telling about having a centralized application/database, which would be accesses by different customers/clients. A single database will contain the data about all different companies, signed up for that service. But, my concern is about security and privacy of the companies business data. I feel it not a good idea to store different companies information in single storage system. Anyhow, this was the thought of speaker, so better not arguing it further.

And, final day of the conference rocked by the Java Teenager party, which I didn’t attend. Overall, it was a great experience for me to see the geeks at action. I hope I will be attending the next year’s conference also.