Sounds pretty exciting huh !!

So let us dump what we have and start developing in HTML5.

Nope not so fast . Hold on to your hour horses. Yes it is true that HTML5 is becoming the new standard . But at this stage neither all the browsers are ready for HTML5 , nor the clients would be ready with new browsers. So you might have a new website/application built in HTML 5 , using new tags but the clients are still with IE6 !!

You do not want to land in this situation.

Aditya Yadav’s  interview on Info q Deploying HTML 5, talks about some of issues around this new standard and he has put together an excellent table detailing compatibility level of each browser with HTML5 features.

For $40 million , Prometric has done a very lousy job.  When students went in to take the exam on 28 Nov, the servers crashed. And not all of the 250,000 students were taking the test. It was only 20% of them.

The students who took the online Common Admission Test, some of them were not quite convinced about the new format of the examination. And their fears had come true.

Well 50,000 stduents concurrently taking test should not be a rocket science . Compare to ebay , Amazon and twitter which handle multiples of traffic every minute. Looks like prometric did not even bothered to conduct a pilot run.

No update on when the service will be restored and if IIM can afford to have this kind of glitch again.

They had tried to find a solution to this in house and had spend some time and resources but without much luck. So they they threw this challenge for people  to come together and solve this problem. The grand prize of US$1,000,000 was reserved for the entry which would best Netflix’s own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10%

You can read the details about the problem from wikipidea

This challenge although is not the first one in which companies had thrown open the problem to a group of people or team but the amount at stake was very high this time. This is an example how crowdsourcing is being used to create innovative solutions. In the coming years we will definitely see the growth in this kind of approach where in companies can use social platforms like facebook and google wave to find solutions to complex problems.

On September 21, 2009 Netflix awarded the $1M Grand Prize to team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” .

Netflix challenge winner

The Complete report can be found at Media Post

Now this data along with other news abut click fraud on face book , would not sound sweet to ears of those who are paying for google adwords or facebook ads. There was another story on techcrunch Facebook Click Fraud 101.

I think the way to combat the problem is performance based ads.  Companies like google and facebook should get paid only if some transaction happens. The banner ads can help in getting brand awareness but this is good for only big companies or those who have big budgets. A small medium to size business is more interested in getting revenues in order to sustain long enough for the brand to be recognized.

Hibernate :

The Object-Oriented Programming is widely used programming techniques to develop any application. Persistence is the basic concept in application development.  Without data saving the applications can do little. The Relational Database Management System is widely used to save/persist  the application specific data.

When your software system is developed using an object-oriented programming language and data persisted in RDBMS, there is always a mismatch. You can’t save data from a java object / bean directly to the database table.  You usually have to extract data from beans / objects, prepare the SQL statements and should be persisted /saved to the columns of the table. In such scenarios much of the persistence work like saving data and fetching data  is done by writing complex query by the developers. They copy values from JDBC result set to java objects and assemble, handle multiple joins etc. Major disadvantage in such scenarios is that the developer’s time is not fully utilized for the business logic and productivity will be affected. Changes in one part of db tables will affect widely on the application. So the code will be less maintainable. Also writing direct SQL statements into the code makes it directly dependent on the vendor of your DB.

The solution for these would be a middleware between the DB and your java application, which save data stored in the beans directly to the tables without much hassle. Object / Relational Mapping is a technique used to do so. The term used for the concept where we can relate the bean properties and table columns so that, a middleware can do the saving and loading operations for the user.

Hibernate is such a middle ware. It helps mapping the objects to tables and manages the persistence. In Hibernate you can specify the relationship between the table and the java bean by mapping the table columns to the bean properties using xml files and the objects can be saved directly to the database. Hibernate core can be used will all java versions.

Hibernate and EJB 3 can’t be compared. Both are different concepts. EJB 3.0 is a specification of architecture for developing and deploying server side managed components (beans). The architecture manages the lifecycle of beans and also provides services like security, transactions, persistence management, Timer services etc.

EJB 3 specification has many parts. Java Persistence API specification is one. This specification deals with the object / relational mappings, persisting the entities, defining the persistence management interfaces etc. The EJB 3 specification made the Java Persistence engine independent from the EJB container. According to it the persistence engine should be pluggable to the container so that users don’t rely on single vendor for persistence. Also persistence engine should be able to run outside the EJB container so that it can be used for simple java programs without an EJB server.

Hibernate implemented JPA on top of Hibernate core. One can map the java objects using java persistence API’s annotations for entity etc and without an XML mapping file the object becomes persistent. Hibernate uses its own objects like Session, Transaction and Query to persist data in its own way. But JPA specifies separate Interfaces for managing the entities and querying. Hibernate also implements these JPA interfaces in Hibernate Entity Manager. So if your beans are mapped using JPA annotations and you use an Entity manager implementation then your code becomes portable across multiple persistence products which implements JPA specification. (One can use same entities on EJB 3.0 server also)

Companies were hoping that recession will end this year therefore most of them honored the offers given to college grads last year.

But looks like they do not have enough work for them. Infosys has doubled the training time for its 18000 freshers which were hired last year. It also assigning them to mock projects in order to give them some real time experience.

While this may not be good enough but at least it is better than sitting idle. This is not good for students  who graduated  this year and are facing a tough time in job market.

Read the complete story here

During discussions with one of the colleagues, I came to know that core of  twitter has been written in Scala. And that set me going . Twitter had really high load going to 5000 tweets per minutes at times.

I really wanted to find out more about Scala and learn about it.

What is Scala ?

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

Many top-notch programmers and industry leaders have already been captivated by Scala. James Strachan even says that scala is the long term replacement of java and javac.

Find more about scala here

Iwill be covering more about Scala in next post and how is it more efficient over Java.

Baltimore-based Prometric, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Educational Testing Service, focuses on technology-enabled testing and assessment services with test development, test delivery and data management services. The company delivers and administers more than 7 million tests a year for 450 clients in industries such as education, health care, government and information technology. It offers online testing or use of a network of more than 10,000 test centers in 163 countries.

To handle the CAT deal, Prometric will use its 185 employees in India and add resources, including test development and support staff, in India, according to the company. Prometric began doing business in India in 1997 and has worked with companies in the country such as Microsoft Inc., Oracle Corp., the Project Management Institute and Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Prometric had been in the middle of a strong stretch of growth, with five years of 7-8 percent growth annually. The company was purchased by Educational Testing Service in 2007. Brannick expects continued growth in 2009. This year, the company is also increasing investments in test center security and Web-based services and operations.

When you own a computer , except all the computer game junkies and programmers most of us open up a browser ,surf internet, use MS office suites , email , listen songs or download pictures.

Since google had integrated its own application suite in the web, there was very little use of an Operating system. So why can’t a browser like Firefox(Chrome was not out then)not be installed  on Linux and sold to customers.

So on browser you surf internet , upload and share pictures. For work you can use google office suite which works very well within browser . So you do not need a full fledge OS.  A lightweight linux can be used and you save your $100 which you pay for OS.

And this I was saying before Chrome(Google’s browser ) was released.

Today google has announced they are launching Google Chrome Operating System in second half of 2010.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Read it here in google blog

Currently they are targeting net book , but no reason why it cannot be upgraded for laptops in coming years.

There is a lot of business learning from this piece of news and with what Microsoft has been doing for years. We will cover that in next post.

What is cloud computing ?

Cloud computing refers to term where in a company where instead of running software , applications on in house servers or storing data locally , are doing it on a third party resources which are being termed as clouds.

So what are these clouds ?

Clouds are thousands and thousands of computers connected via internet to each other and these computers are shared by companies to host their application and manage data.

One of the best examples of the cloud computing is salesforce.com which had been working on this concept since long. Another recent example is New York Times which has provided fully searchable access to its 1851 to 1922 archive—more than 15 million articles. This has been achieved without hosting any application on its own servers. They are using Amazon’s Cloud Computing service.

Google’s business suite launched in 2007 has 0.5 million clients and it uses the power of cloud computing by offering the companies and individuals business applications hosted over internet.

Now this would give you a fair idea of what is cloud computing and what is achievable with this.

Some other players who are in the field of offering cloud computing services are

a)      Amazon’s cloud computing

b)      Google App Engine

c)      Sun Microsystems

These companies are now providing cloud services to individuals and companies. One has to sign up then they are given access to their space in the clouds. The developers or application management team can connect to these clouds through various tools and deploy their application.

The price ranges on how much bandwidth is used and what is the traffic on the site.

The concept behind companies selling the cloud computing is that your infrastructure is not always loaded 100% .  So during the times US has its peak load, Europe is just waking up and Hong Kong is sleeping.

When Hong Kong is utilizing 100% load, the peak load is fallen 80% in US.

In this way the resources can be managed much more effectively if they are being managed by a central vendor.

Advantages : One of the biggest advantages of cloud that I see for small to medium sized companies , they do not have to rely on in house server management.

Another advantage is that sudden spikes in load or traffic can be handled by cloud servers with companies having to manage extra servers or anything. They only need to pay for this extra load.

The offerings are reasonably priced for one to try out and google offers free version as of now.

Limitations : Now all versions of hardware have been supported by clouds . Amazon is now offering the open source web server tomcat on its cloud.

Google is also offering deployment of java applications. More information of google app engine supporting java can be found here. (I think it is free)

Sun Microsystems has also has a very goof offering on the clouds. They offer Virtualization in the cloud and also prevent vendor lockout.

Update : I have added a post to demonstrate First Step working with Cloud Computing