Web Development

Why "Cloud Computing" ?

pramodkc — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:23:26 +0000

So why the term “Cloud Computing” ?
Let’s first see how the internet became a cloud. Remember the basic network diagrams you see for internal networks ?

The network is clearly visible. In this case you probably know all the equipment used ( the routers, switches, cables etc). The important thing is that you pay to install them, maintain them and use them.

Now think about the internet. It is rarely shown like the image above. It is usually shown like

internet as a cloud

So why is the internet always depicted as a cloud. Because we do not really know or want to know how it operates. There are multiple vendors using various kinds of equipment. It has satellite links, trans-atlantic cables, fiber-optic cables and I don’t know what else. But that is the essence of it –

“I don’t know how it works” but “It works”.

When ever I need to use it – it is there. Different parts of it can be failing but on the whole it is there. Also as it is being upgraded – new cables/equipment being added/removed – users are not affected.

And I think people want the same thing with computers and ergo the metaphor of the “Cloud” and “Cloud Computing”.

Over the next few posts we will cover different products and how they try to meet these basic needs of people.

It should be available when needed
Don’t want to know the details of how it works

Clouds and Computing – What is it ?

pramodkc — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:04:28 +0000

Frankly – there are as many definitions as people so I do not want to add to the confusion by trying to define it yet again.

So let us explore all the different things that people are calling cloud computing and keep our minds open till a consensus definition is reached.

In the next series of posts we shall just explore the different products that are deemed Cloud Computing and compare them. Once we explore the lay of the land I think even if we cannot come up with a definition of Cloud Computing we will have a pretty good idea of what it is – and hopefully be able to figure out what is and what isn’t Cloud.

HTTP – Why it works !

pramodkc — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:12:46 +0000

I was watching Tim Bray’s interview on InfoQ. One of Tim’s point was – while the heavy-weights were creating protocols like CORBA and DCOM, what they were trying to do was already happening on a massive scale on the Web – millions of disparate computers talking to each other irrespective of all the other niggly parameters like OS and network speed etc.

I have been worked on ONC-RPC, DCE-RPC, Corba, DCOM, SOAP and other such “open” standards for program to program communication.

The interesting thing is that before Http I always preferred a plain vanilla Socket and now I just open an HTTP connection and send XML payloads and the interview clarified some things for me.

Simplicity is paramount not features
The protocol should not try to abstract things too much. e.g: Http does not try to make a network connection look like a local method call.

Inversion of Control Tutorial For Java

pramodkc — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:24:38 +0000

One of my client projects really needs Dependency Injection to untangle the code. But before anything I need to get the team comfortable with IoC. Essentially need to a good sales job . There are a lot of skeptics who don’t believe in it and with an offshore team in the picture anything complicated is just going to be done wrong by the offshore team putting the whole trial at risk.

So I obviously just turned to google to find the best tutorial I could find – and it seems there are not really many decent ones out there.

The simple requirements I have for a good Tutorial are

Should be easy to setup – something novices cannot mess up easily
Actually do something useful to actually prove the usefulness of IoC

The simple ones don’t do anything useful and anything which actually is useful points to Spring and I am sure that most of the team would just turn around and say is the setup cost of Spring worth IoC.

Maybe I need to create one.

The future for SOAP looks dim

pramodkc — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:26:13 +0000

If you look at the apis on programmableweb.com, most newer apis do not support SOAP. Is that a harbinger of the future ? I think so. The reason for the explosion of HTTP was its simplicity. Think of why Java applets failed over Javascript – because it is simple to put together stuff in Javascript (non programmers can do it).

SOAP does not pass the simplicity step.

If a developer wants to call a REST api – he just opens a socket connection to the server and posts/gets an XML which he parses. Time taken to try it out – about an hour

If a developer wants to call a SOAP api – he has to

Pick a stub generator
Read the documentation
Figure out the jar file dependencies
Generate stubs and skeletons
Write the code to call the stubs
….

The list is even longer on the server side. No wonder SOAP adoption is decreasing. But really what does SOAP buy you over just sending XML over HTTP. So the demise should really be celebrated

Does J2EE belong to the past or the future ?

pramodkc — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 04:22:05 +0000

Most experts seem to be heading towards relegating java to the past when it comes to web development. And in someways I do agree. Anybody who has done any development in J2EE vs Rails or PHP will tell you how much faster it is to get an app up and running in Rails or PHP compared to Java.

The more I see rails the more I like the simplicity that Rails has brought to web development on Ruby. Just think of developing web apps in J2EE apps.

In rails
Install Ruby, the Rails gem and you are pretty much up and running

In J2EE to get the equivalent functionality

Pick a Container – Tomcat, GlassFish, WebSphere …. (In some cases you might have to install jstl seperately.)
Download and setup Hibernate (Core ,EntityManager , Annotations )
Download and setup Struts
Commons jars
Log4j
And then spend a long time unraveling the jar file dependencies of all the above packages to make them work together.

But does it really have to be that way – is it the fault of Java or the overly complicated frameworks that have sprung up around it – or even the complexity of J2EE itself. Maybe fixing the frameworks can get re-establish Java as the language of choice for web development.

Renting Cars and Operator Overloading

pramodkc — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:20:57 +0000

Let us say you went into Hertz and rented a car. Except as soon as you started trying to drive it you realized the brake and gas pedals are reversed. Would you be able to drive the car ? But the bigger issue is – would you trust that car anymore ? The location of the window controls, the radio controls etc are routinely moved around. But the location of certain things is sacrosanct and that is what allows people to drive different models of cars. Unless you can trust that the basics are exactly the same you would not drive the car! That is the same thing with programming languages, you can change a lot of things but I have found that operator overloading is one of the things which always throws a curveball to the maintainer. The initial developer will always have wonderful things to say about it – but remember that the maintenance period of the code is a lot longer than the initial dev and it is usually done by others. So please don’t do operator overloading – Yes it is cool and might save you x lines of code but it will make the code so much more difficult to maintain.

Long overdue :)

pramodkc — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:44:38 +0000

My starting this blog has been long long overdue. I have been thinking about writing this blog for the past couple of years. Just never got around to it. Hopefully I will stick to it – not that I have finally started.

So what would you find here !

My thoughts on Web Development, Java, my experiances with other technologies like Rails and PHP.

And ofcourse anything else I find interesting.