Recently there was a situation in one of the  project where in the existing legacy CORBA had to be replaced with some other technology .  One of the technologies which was considered was webservices though i thought like it might not be a right replacement , i always thought like th EJB would a perfect replacement. But again due to some unfortunate reasons , I understood that the requirements (not technical though it was of the management constraints…) even EJB or  any thing would fit the bill.

Web services is not a right replacement for corba because for the reasons such as webservices are not as fast as the CORBA which is understood due to the under neath parser which need to do the parsing. secondly the webservices are value based where as CORBA is of reference based. Thirdly the asynchronous messaging is not  some thing like what we get in CORBA(even though AXIS 2 has this asynchronous messaging ..).  I was pretty clear that WebServices is not a solution. So under this circumstances, we were kind of more than happy to explore the new technology called as the Apache ETCH , basically its developed by CISCO and has been submited to Apache . I was really excited to explore this new technology which says like its light weight and  its a perfect replacement to the bloated CORBA. Secondly Its very easy to use , Thirdly it really suits our requirement as its having an apache license.

Anyways i am in the process of  going through the ETCH code and i have decided to be an apache contributer to ETCH project. I am sure i will have loads to learn and  at the same time lots to share in this blog.

I wanted to trek to some isolated place, and i was always speaking with people about it. Finally i got a chance to trek for mukthi holey falls which is near the honnavar. The place is absolutely brilliant and completely isolated.
We were 6 people Sandeep, Krishna , Raju, vinod , sahil and offcourse me. Initially it took lot of time to get this trek planned and going because of people being on/off to the trip due to one or other reason.

So it was on 30th around 9 PM we left Bangalore reached hadinbala around 9 next (31st dec) morning, stuffed some idlis and buns. It was time for us to find the hirebailu, People at hadinbala said its around 1 KM But it was actually more than 20 Kms from Hadinbala , The road was bad at its best! Our driver started nagging about the road, some how reached the Hirebailu by 11 i believe. And We spoke to Mahadev Nayak about whom i had read at dreamroutes.org. We requested for some one to guide us through to the Mukthi Holey, But no one was available because it was the season to work in the fields so none of them were free , Finally after much await one guy by name Udaya came with us to guide us till mukthi holey. All was set and we just packed our selves and started the trekking. I was feeling really good to trek after a very long time. Initially we had to travel through the forest for say around 10 kms and the inital trial had a forest route in between some narrow shrubs and some cliff. finally we reached the place where we were suppose to take a diversion which is kind of not really easy to spot as its not easily visible. This guy who was a guide called udaya told us to take a right and we were wondering where the hell is route , because its such a route which is steep and covered completely by shrubs, hardly one can imagine that we could actually go through it to reach mukthi holey river bed. We trekked for around 30-45 mins in that route , they had marked on the trees as a clue and we were going in a zig zag way finally we reached the river bed , It was great feeling to reach till here, We spent some time hanging around and taking some good snaps of this place , Raju suggested to have some food before we move further , I had a loaf of bread and which we were suppose to share but unfortunately once the Raju took couple of slices and threw it to me and i couldnt catch hold of it , as a result the entire bread fell into the water. There was a small well kinda thing happened due to the water corrosion , it was filled with the water, Our bread fell in there. Sandeep was against leaving the bread just like that inspite of we arguing that it might become a food for fishes in the water (even though we couldnt spot a single fish out there), finally he took that water soaked bread and packed into the plastic cover but still some of the bread remains was left out in the water( some how this left over bread in the water was a big help when we were coming back ).

We started trekking against the flow on the river bed , After some time we saw some village people and we were shocked to see people out there , we just asked them like how far is the actual Mukthi holey water falls for which they saild like it takes 20 mins, we wer kind of relieved to know that but still we had quite a ground to cover. i was completely drained out, made me understand that my stamina has taken a beat after my college days due to less physical activities.

After some more trekking we reached the Mukthi falls and it was really great to have been successfully done so. Now we were extremely hungry and we were badly in a need of some food. Raju and Vinod mobilized themselves and got some water from the river (water is crystal clea r) cooked some rice it took more than 20 mins and we just mixed the rice with gojju which krishna had got and started eating and it was one of those times you understand how good a food can be :0) , It was getting dark so sandeep , Raju, Krishna got ready to get some fire wood, we all switched our torches , sandeep had his own head lamp which was awesome , chopped some wood from tree and now it was time for us to reach the other side of the river as this side didnt had enough place for us to sleep more over the curds and rice had make the place messy and some rats were around to have a feast out of it. So we crossed the river in the dark with the help of torches carrying the fire wood, some these were very lengthy and was quite a big log. We finally settled down and lit a fire an took some snaps. finally we slept on the  mountain which was big enough for 5 of us on the sleeping bag, I some how didnt get the sleep, some of them had a good sleep.  It was 12 am night Krishna woke every on and wished “Happy new year” but none of them were that enthusiastic to reply back to his wishes as the trek had taken toll on most of us.

Next morning we woke up and planned to reach the next level of the water fall.  We just tried to ascent from the left side of the water falls, the land was very loose so we had to watch out every single step , it was a very tough part of the trek, some of us went ahead and found out that there is yet another big mountain which is next to impossible with out ropes to climb , hence we dropped the idea of reaching to the next level of the water fall and started to climb down, it was so steep  that we had to just sit and get down very slowly.

Once we got down some of them went for swimming and after that we had our break fast and started our trek back to hirebailu. The river bed trek was very smooth while coming back  didnt really tire us or atleast me . The place which i mentioned that we had to take a diversion from the river bed had arrived but none of us identified and we moved further, there we came to the place where in we couldnt move ahead  as there was water around , we started wondering if we had come across this place , Sandeep took his GPS and tried to figure out if we were on the right path, unfortunately  that GPS was not ble to  communicate with the satellite in that deep valley, But we all knew that we have come further so we started walking towards the opposite direction , Now we were just walking blindly because that was the only option left , secondly we didnt had the services of GPS to figure out our actual path,  We  had just reached the place where we were suppose to take diversion , but not all of us had found this out but all of the sudden vinod pointed out the bread which we had dropped previous day and we were shocked to learn that we  had failed to figure out  this place inspite of the confidence that we could.

We then took the diversion which our guide udaya had informed us previous day, and it was again a steep assent which we had to climb and it was tiring. Once we finished this assent we had to walk  back in the forest and reached the hirebailu and we met our driver and sahil, went to the honnavar, had good meals and left to Bangalore.

All in all it was a good experience . But one thing which was bothering me was the stamina which i had lost after my school days.

Here is the screen shot of my blog in different language(rather alien language):)

I was just going through the my blog url referrers and found this url which points to my own blog but in different language. I  certainly dont understand or know what language is this and i am certainly sure that its my blog because it show case my  writeup on blueclove which happens to be a bluetooth stack on windows xp, by the way this also happens to be one of the most read writeup.

i was just going through the documentation section of the Google Apps. There was some videos which i thought is the best way to get to know things. I must say this was the best ever presentation i had come across till now. it was just specific to the point and will have a impact on its customers . whats the big deal its google! might be the kinda first reaction from people. We all know google ’s expertise in xyz blah blah stuff, But thats not the point. The fact of the matter is of the creativity of the presentations. it just ease its essence to customers.

The presentaitons links are as follows :-

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/video/salesforce_video.html (excellent presentation)

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/apps_video.html

Well,its been some time since i penned for my blog. But better late than never… I came across a issue  which was quite interesting. It had atleast 5k loc, which i was wondering like wat made the previous developer to code so much for a functionality,after all 5k is some amout of code right?   Initially when i went through the code i was kind of felt that  previous developer has compromisd with the OOP concepts ,and after understanding the code completely i felt like both the design and OOPs principle is compromised.

Now the problem is quite simple which involves checking for some elements if its same and offcourse the data is quite a lot, again the way the data objects were designed is some thing which i wanna forget as soon as possible. I think this code is the perfect example for “code smell” (any thought work guy will agree with it once he goes through that code :p)

So the problem is as simple as this , it has N number of  data objects of set x and N number of objects of set y. it needs to be just verify if these data is same and there is certain constraints like say if some option is checked (ie in checkbox) or if some option is selected in the combobox , only that attribute needs to be verified.

So, when  i am given to code , first and foremost thing i  think is about the data structure of the data object. secondly  the algorithm to use which results in maximum performance and least cost of both memory and CPU time , which is directly proportional to the number of passes you take to verify.

As the basic task is to just verify i would have used some generic algorithm which verifies any kind of data, (I would like to keep the explanation simple as i will be writing an algorithm in my next post).

secondly when there is a constraints, one thinks of using series of  “If else ” conditionals , but offcourse your code clutters and i personally feel the “if else” conditionals is just too much for say N number of conditonals, and its bound to change later , so its important to use an “if else ” breaker design pattern

The design  abstract is some thing which is a combination of  a proper use of data structure + verifying algorithm + “if else ” break design pattern thats it and  if required we shall refactor the code once its done.

In my next post i will device both the algorithm and code in either java or groovy or python.

The main purpose of this title is because i had lots of questions which needs to be answered. they are as follows:-

1. why developers wont follow the proved practice and why the management wont encourage to go with the proper design and allocate enough time for the same?
2. why the OOP concept is compromised?
3. why people just give excuses when asked about the good design and coding standards?
4. Is management just worried about the productivity and is  the good design and proved software development practices a cost we pay for it ?
5. Do the  management think about the maintenance problems with such a haphazard design?
6. Is the concepts of “software engineering” and “system analysis and Design” which we studied is just meant for exams ?
7. should Project managers(technical managers who review it ) be blamed for it or is it the software engineer responsible for it.
8. In spite of knowing the repercussions of the bad design and horrible coding standards why many well known product based / service based companies dont bother to give importance to it?

Still i cant think of any answers for these…..

Its been early days for me with LISP. A great deal of time went in searching the tools like tutorial , IDE , LISP compiler etc (its indeed a confusion to choose). finally everything is settled down , guess which editor is chosen for LISP? its Eclipse, the CUSP plugin is great though the lisp purists argue that emacs or slime is the ideal one. I feel eclipse + cusp = great LISP environment.

As for as tutorials for LISP is concerned SICP is the best but i feel the Apress publications Practical Common LISP is some thing which i can digest. I have been using the LISPBOX which is tailor made for the newbie like me. Its just simple download , decompress and launch the SLIME else install the CUSP (be sure to choose the CLISP of LISPBOX instead of SBCL which is a default LISP for CUSP plugin). And there you are up and running your LISP environment.

LISP is extremely interesting. I initially had an idea like its only meant for stuff like AI, or some mathematical computing, but i was thrilled to learn that its not the case. You can use LISP to develop some webapplication as well. it has a persistance called Elephant and the web server called Hachentoot.

LISP is really cool and i am sure i shall get use to it in some time. do check this section for more updates.

Yes, I am alive.. its been long time since i blogged. This post is kinda to say that i am alive I have been playing around with groovy,Common LISP. I feel Common LISP is one language to learn properly. will be back in near future with my experiences with LISP and Groovy…..

Sessions:

JRuby Meta Programming
Design Patterns
Open JDK (Tentitive)
Date :-23rd December 2007, Sunday
Time :-10-30 am.
Venue:-
ThoughtWorks, Diamond district(building name)
Airport road, Bangalore

There is an hands on Lab kinda session on Design Patterns. So dont forget to get your Laptops.

I just went through this article from one of the blogs, which says like Ubuntu will have HDD in trouble when your laptop is running on the battery. The reason is that, the disk heads are parked as part of the power saving strategy. When the disk needs to be accessed, the heads are unparked.This can only happen about 600000 times before a disk becomes likely to fail :p.

Its been found that “Feisty and Gusty releases of Ubuntu do this up to 4 times per minute, which is _bad_, considering that kind of frequency gives your hard disk a life expectancy of 104 days! ” it seems , which is really an alarming issue to the Ubuntu team.

All said and done , now whats the solution? The solution is to turn off this power management issue by executing the following commands.

” sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda ” :- to turn off the power management.

“sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count” :- to check life left in your hard disk :p

I hope that ubuntu team team take this issues seriously before it looses its faithful users.

I have tried Python, Jython, Groovy. Now on JVM if you really wanna get some functional programming recipe on JVM, Groovy the one to look for… I am very much impressed by the simplicity and flexibility of the groovy. Recently i was trying some of the webframeworks for Python(as python hosting is free ) , did try out web.py, seems to be quite compact and simple but its still in development phase so bound to change. I also had a look at the cherryPy, which is more or less on the same lines as web.py. The web framework for python is pretty good but one thing which i wasnt comfortable was that of the templates. They have umpteen number of templates , one of the prominant one is of cheetah, web py has its own template now…. hang on.. my blog title says that this post is about some thing called GRAILS right? yep, I did try out groovy on Rails, Its the best framework i have seen till date for web application. The process of development is fast, agile , simple. The groovy scripting itself gives productivity and GRAILS , which can be thought of as an combination of well known frameworks such as spring, hibernate is just awesome. I could develop an basic application of CRUD in less than 10 mins, which is unbelievable. The amount of code required is hardly 2 lines.

GRAILS doesnt require groovy to be installed as groovy-all.jar(if i am correct) is embedded with the in GRAILS, It also has hsql(inmemory DB) and the light weight Webserver(Jetty webserver). So there is no need to set up an environment. Infact you dont even need to have an sophisticated IDE.

Grails can be integrated with well known frameworks hibernate, JPA etc. The integration with ejb3 and any other Java EE framework is like a breeze. I think Groovy and Groovy on Rails or Grails is the next big thing on JVM. It adds the whole new dimension to the JVM platform.

BTW I am delivering a session on Groovy and Grails on November 3rd,2007 at Qsoft Systems & Solutions. The details of the meet is as follows. If you are in and around bangalore and interested to attend the UG meet, can attend.

BOJUG meet Details :-

Venue :- Qsoft Systems &Solutions,

#253/19, 1st Floor, Kanakapura Road,
Jayanagar 7th Block,
Bangalore -560082.
Tel : +91 80 2663 9207, 2654 4135, 2244 0507
Fax : +91 80 2663 7692

Date & Time :- Nov 3, 2007, 11-30AM

Topic:-

Pushlets by Harish Singh

Groovy and Grails by  me