Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Back to Work

Been nursing a badly sprained right ankle for the past three days. X-ray results fortunately show no fracture or mis-alignment. Could walk decently now, just need to keep the ankle guard on for a few more days.

At least the downtime provided space for reading. Currently re-visiting Doug's articles and find out more about fork-join. Been there in my read-list for some time now. Got reminded when I read migs post on the matter.

Fork-Join should be interesting to try out with the batch process we had. Since most the tasks can be split and re-joined for results.

Back to the sprained ankle, the lesson is helping your daughter with Ballet lessons while your son is scattering his toys on the floor is not a very good idea. Otherwise, you need to be in decent weight to minimize the impact.

Oh well...

Monday, March 10, 2008

Pondering the future of the cube!


10/03/2008
Originally uploaded by nocs
Busy as a bumble bee! On the road to becoming an auto-bot!

Google Apps

Managed to pull some time to move edit my DNS entries and point everything to the free Google Apps. Am using Dynadot as the registrar, and the trick is to point everything to ghs.google.com. It will take around 2-3 days for the propagation, and viola! everything now hosted under Google Apps.

Google Docs is really slick, will test it under the bundled S60 Browser and see if it works nicely. Btw, noticed the default search page for my device changed from the standard WAP friendly one, to a bigger-better-fit version. Google you really rock!

First time also I have seen the Google Gear store. The 3/4 baseball shirt looks really swanky (if anybody cares to send me one, am medium size by the way.). The black and white shirt is really rockin' also. This sweater below screams shiny!



On the Flickr front, noticed my posts now defaults as draft, dear lazy web is there a way to make this auto?

The Changing Face of Software Development

I still remember my college thesis, a library for rapid application development in full VGA graphics mode modeled after Turbo Vision which back then runs in text mode. Back then I already thought someday, we will just draw user interfaces and the real value would be in domain specific knowledge.

A few days ago, I chanced upon an interesting application which allows to visually create applications from scratch at 60 beats per minute :). Unfortunately the application is crashing so we were asked to diagnose the cause. The local websphere master was quick to point out some configuration settings as well as presented analysis on the GC dumps. On my part, I quickly set up remote profiling (Jprofiler) so we could investigate the details further.

The interesting part is the application model, everything is rule-based. I was of course intrigued how it was able to achieve such a high level of abstraction, that for relatively small applications, very little coding is required!

The technique is templating! It creates a Java object based on a template (extended from base rule objects) code, compiles this code, serializes it and stores it in database BLOB columns. During runtime these objects are deserialized into objects again with plain vanilla class-loaders. This enables ui (forms etc), workflow, business logic to be created without requiring much Java skills. In fact it allows project team to concentrate more on capturing the business logic and flow together with business analysts (who by the way can also directly participate into the system).

So where does this leads us? This will even change the way we think outsourcing! Why outsource when much of the grunt work of creating user interfaces, workflow, business logic, interfaces with external systems etc, can already be handled by such systems? Is this software development 2.0? In the book "The World is Flat", it emphasizes that grunt work will more and more move towards outsourcing. Frack! in this case its moving towards outsourcing to frameworks/systems that can be bought off-the-shelf and might possibly allow your im-gonna-knock-on-your-door-ring-on-your-bell salesman to analyze his own software needs and create his own system without/very-little programming knowledge.

Peeking further into the future, imagine "cloud computing" with this kind of services? With such systems becoming widespread in usage, the battle will be for "business logic developers"?

So my advice to developers, don't stop on being technically capable, understand the business, or better yet build your own business.



technox
-procastinating the inevitable future

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Lifeblog post


Lifeblog post
Originally uploaded by nocs
Fri 07/03/2008 09:26 07032008163

The World Is Flat!

Tinapa at kamatis
Di ko matitiis
Malayo man sa bayan
Langit pag natikman

-puwetik nox