On demand test and development environment on Cloud

Cloud computing holds a huge appeal for enterprise IT organizations in that it helps ramp up/down infrastructure resources in development and test environments based on demand. Test/development environment otherwise is a tricky area:

• In a typical IT environment, a considerable part of infrastructure is ear marked for development and testing environment, but they remain under utilized almost 90% of time.
• Discrepancies in test and production environments results in large number of problems faced by deployed product/project. However, creating a test environment which is an exact replica of production environment is not a practical option in most cases because of huge cost involved. Moreover testing has to be done for varied hardware/software platforms which the product has to support which is all the more expensive proposition.

Thus cloud based on-demand test/development platform will be of great value to IT managers:

• Substantial cost savings: no need of maintaining a dedicated testing/development environment which otherwise remains idle most of the time.
• Reduced time-to-market: development/testing will not have to wait for availability of a suitable environment and can be undertaken as planned.

A typical cloud based test/development platform should have provision for service request management, automated resource provisioning, resource management, configuration management, user self-service, charge back (metering and billing), SLA management.

What route should an enterprise take for realizing this platform – private, public or hybrid cloud?

• Enterprises that have already made considerable investment in internal test/development infrastructure should go for resource visualization and then transition to private cloud based test/development platform. The cloud can then be shared among business units or groups that don’t share resources today. Further usage of cloud resources can be tracked and charged back.
• At times private cloud will not be able to cater to all needs. Private cloud will be relatively smaller and can scale up to a certain limit. For example for very high end performance testing, once private cloud resources are exhausted, additional resource has to be provisioned from public cloud. Here we have hybrid cloud scenario.
• Small and medium enterprises that haven’t yet made substantial investment in internal test/development infrastructure can leverage public cloud for the same.

Clouded with Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is the latest buzzword in IT industry. Every analyst, evangelist, vendor is trying to add new meaning to it. If all these noise leaves your mind clouded and frustrated, you have good company in Larry Ellison. Following useful resources available on the web can demystify some of the confusion

• Artifacts (whitepaper, presentation etc.) by Berkeley.
• Peter Laird’s industry map
• OpenCrowd.com’s Cloud Taxonomy
  

Top 25 Hottest Indian web companies

AppAppeal, a website that aggregates reviews about web applications worldwide, has release a video Top 25 Hottest Indian web companies -

REST applications: Identifying resources

One of the first step in designing a REST application is to identify resources and define their representation. Oft heard advice in this regard is "nouns are your resources". Go through your application and its requirement/use cases, identify all the nouns, model them as resources and use HTTP verbs on these resources to add their operations. GET is to get the resource, PUT is to modify the resource, DELETE is to delete the resource while POST is to be used to create a new resource.

However, this only serves to arrive at the 1st set of resources. It has to go through multiple iterations wherein this initial resource set is refined to add/prune/modify to arrive at the final list of resource. Often it helps to run the list through a few questions.

Which resources are important from client's point of view ? All nouns or entities that are used internally inside  an application behind the scene may not be relevant to clients and so shouldn't be part of resource list. At the same time there would be a number of not-so-obvious resources. Some applications may like to expose some derived information to client as web services,  an example would a valuation calculator that provides calculations like average,standard deviation, percentage against ceiling or floor values. Thus "ValuationCalculator" can be modeled as a resource.

Can all actions/operations be handled by using HTTP verbs on existing resources ? For example in a banking application how to handle an AccountTransfer operation wherein an account is transfer from one branch to another. As this operation involves changing the representation of Account resource, we can add an attribute branch to Account resource ( this attribute can be an URI of Branch resource). Then we can apply PUT verb on Account resource to implement AccountTranfer operation.

However some other actions are more tricky to handle. For example - processing of account opening  application in a banking application. Which resource should handle this operation - Account, Customer, Branch. Herein, we need to introduce a new resource - AccountApplication which will have an status (with possible values of approved, declined, under process, on hold etc.)  attribute in its representation. Thus as the application goes through varied approval processing, PUT verb can be applied on AccountApplication resource to keep track of status.

REST for restless

REST web services has caught the imagination of the developer community because of its simplicity in implementation and usage. JAX-RS is a JSR that provides API for implementing REST web services in Java. Jersey is an open source reference implementation of this JSR. Here is a simple example of implementing REST web services using Jersey:

• Download Jersey (jersey-0.8-ea.zip in my case) and add required jars in classpath. Following jars are required:

asm-3.1.jar
jersey.jar
jsr311-api.jar

• Add the Jersey servlet in web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="2.4"
xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd" >

<servlet>
<servlet-name>JerseyWebApplication</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</servlet-class> <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>JerseyWebApplication</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/rest/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

</web-app>

• Add the service

package com.test;

import javax.ws.rs.*;

@Path("/helloworld")
public class HelloWorld
{

@GET
@ProduceMime("text/html")
public String getMessage()
{
return "Hello World. This is a test REST service";
}

}

Build the war file (restApp.war here) and drop it in webapps folder of tomcat. Now start the tomcat and browse to url http://localhost:8080/restApp/rest/helloworld. The browser should throw "Hello World. This is test REST service".

That's it - a simple REST implementation. This simplicity in implementation and usage is the main reason behind its immense popularity among developer community.

Download the source code.

Web 2.0 Reference Model

Web 2.0, the second phase in the evolution of Web is based on a set of principles that focus on architecture of participation, user-centricity, collective intelligence, multi-channel and multi-device services, simplicity, openness, transparency, innovation and long tail of economics. It offers enterprises new means to engage and empower different stakeholders more effectively. Though enterprises have started experimenting with different aspects of Web 2.0, very few have actually applied Web 2.0 principles in more than trivial ways. This can partly be attributed to the fact that all the principles of Web 2.0 may not be applicable to all enterprises. Moreover, technology enablers of Web 2.0 are not available out-of-box as a single technology product or as one business application product.

At present there are several disparate technologies available that can be used to realize individual features of Web 2.0. For example Rich Internet Application (RIA) tools/framework like Ajax, Flex/Flash can provide richer and more intuitive user experience, information syndication technologies like RSS/ATOM can be used to aggregate information from different sources, while blogging, wiki enables collaborative authoring/publishing. However a holistic approach towards realization of Web 2.0 in enterprises is lacking. Challenges before enterprises in successful realization of Web 2.0 principles are manifold:

• How to identify Web 2.0 services and initiatives that are relevant based on business and stakeholder priority ?
• What are the basic building blocks required for an enterprise to realize Web 2.0 features ?
• How does Web 2.0 relate to and integrate with other existing computing infrastructure within an enterprise ?
• What services does an enterprise need to support Web 2.0 features and derive business benefit out of it ?

Therefore there is a need for a model that should act as a reference for realizing Web 2.0 principles in an enterprise. In a recent two part article we have proposed a Web 2.0 Reference Model which provides a conceptual model that will allow an enterprise to consider, in an organized manner, the many constituents and factors of Web 2.0, their purposes and inter-relationship.

Check Part I and Part II of the article in Cutter.

Related Post - Web 2.0: What's in it for Enterprises ?

Nature in its mystic splendor

A few snaps taken during my recent vacation in Tripura, my home state ....

Web 2.0: A bubble about to burst ?

Well this video seems to think so ..... one of the funniest videos in Youtube.

Oracle's bid for BEA

CNN has reported that Oracle is attempting to buy BEA Systems at $17 a share, a 25% premium over the normal share price. Supposedly its latest effort to up the ante against Microsoft and Germany's SAP.

Wonder what will be Oracle's marketing strategy once the deal is through. There are so many redundancies in their product portfolio including application server, process server, SOA stack etc. Most interesting will be the portal stack. BEA already has two portal servers in its portfolio: Weblogic Portal Server and Aqualogic User Interaction (repositioning of Plumtree Portal server which BEA got because of its 2005 acquisition). While Oracle has its own Portal as part of its Fusion Middleware product family.

The punchline used by BEA for its Aqualogic User Interaction is - Putting a Face to SOA. Wonder if it will get rephrased to - Putting 3 Faces to SOA !!

Web 2.0: What's in it for Enterprises?

Web 2.0 is creating quite a splash as it stretch the boundary of what traditional web can do. Be it enriched user experience through rich internet applications (RIA) or fostering community or encourage end user collaboration, Web 2.0 has added many a new dimensions.

However, the implication of Web 2.0 phenomenon in larger enterprises is still not well understood. Web 2.0 is often associated with startups and technology companies, while enterprises still perceive it mostly as irrelevant. At times, the open and decentralized nature of Web 2.0 is even seen as a threat; enterprises are wary of giving more control to end users.

But there are many opportunities outside, within, and across the enterprise firewall wherein Web 2.0 can be leveraged. In recent past Cutter has published my article (as Executive Update) on this topic. The article explores some of these possibilities and examine how enterprises can leverage them to engage and empower different stakeholders -- end customers, employees, and partners.

Check the article in Cutter.

Menace of email overload

These days there is so much of hype around Enterprise 2.0 and its advocated role in improving the efficiency of knowledge workforce. However even the very basic of collaboration tools - email can be an overkill and prove counter-productive if not handled properly.

Every day I spend a sizable part of working hours in reading, replying or taking action on emails. I believe most will identify with this plight.

Stever Robbins has shared some tips in this regard in this Harvard Business School article. Catch is, you can not put a few of the tips into practice if you are not 'at or near the top of your organization'. For example, try out 'charge people for sending you messages' on your boss !

Moon present: An amazing photo

Source: Moon Present by Ahmed Zahid

Open source car: Tatas got competition !

In the recent AutoRAI show in Amsterdam, working model of an open source car was in display. The vehicle's specifications, technical drawings etc. are available to everyone. The car named c,mm,n (common) is the first output of the OScar project. This car was designed by the online community over the past eight years.

Seems Tata's one lakh car has got a competition :)

Source: The OScar Open Source car finally debuts (forwarded by a collegue)

Time to ditch PowerPoint presentation ?

A recent article entitled Research points the finder at Powerpoint challenges the way most often powerpoint presentations are made. The article highlights findings by researchers from the University of New South Wales, including John Sweller. One of the findings mentions that it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you both verbally and in written form at the same time. Since people can not read and listen well at the same time, the reporter suggested, then this may mean "the death of the PowerPoint presentation."

The article mentions a quote by Professor Sweller: "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster, it should be ditched."

He further adds: "It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

So what does all these lead us to? Its time to ditch the way usual presentations are made and not the medium (powerpoint). Time to realize that putting the same information on a slide that is coming out of our mouths usually does not help. If sum total of all the information in the slides can convey the full message, what are you(presenter) there for ? Might as well email the presentation and the receiver will go through the slide at leisure.

The Coop: Firefox addon for social networking features

Mozilla is working on adding some social networking features into Firefox. The project codenamed "The Coop" will help the browser users to keep track of what friends are doing online and share content with them.

Users will get to see the image of online friends, and a click on the image will list details about the friend like recently added Flickr photos, favourite YouTube videos, tagged websites, composed blog posts, updated Facebook status, etc. Sharing interesting stuff with your friend is as simple as dragging that into their face. Similarly, if your friend sends something, his avatar will glow; notifying you that he has sent something. Things cann't get any better !

Just wondering what would be the implication of this add-on on memory and performance.

Pics from Bangalore Barcamp 3

Different sessions in progress ....



Related Post: Bangalore Barcamp 3 is just round the corner

Bangalore Barcamp 3 is just round the corner

Bangalore BarCamp is back. This time it is scheduled on 31st March and 1st April at IIM Bangalore campus. The theme is "Internet, Mobile and Society".

The vision of Barcamp Bangalore is to bring together technology enthusiasts, thinkers, designers and visionaries together and thereby create an ecosystem for the ideation, cross pollination and germination of ideas that could lead to realization. ..... We hope to have stories like Indian copyright law and innovation in music and celluloid movies, e-governance electronic record keeping and what it means for those without access; and the resultant impact of these in shaping of society and culture.

Already more then 500 campers have registered for this edition. The two days surely will be interesting - full of ideas, discussion and networking.

Post related to earlier BarCamps:

• Bangalore Barcamp 2: post1, post2 and post3
• Hyderabad Barcamp 3: post1, post2

IT Architect Skills Library from IASA

IASA, the International Association of Software Architect, has published IT Architect Skills Library. The library contains articles for each primary skill set that an IT architect should possess.

The current skills library consists of 633 pages of valuable information written by practicing architects from around the world. The skills project was commissioned by Microsoft and designed and executed by IASA for the professional community. This library will remain free to architects and it provides the first ever practical description of what IT architects do and how they do it.

The articles are grouped into areas like IT Environment, Business Technology Strategy, Design, Software Architecture, Infrastructure etc.

India the Superpower ?

Among all the hype around 'India Shining' or 'India Poised' or the recent much talked about multi-billion takeovers by Indian companies, Fortune's Cait Murphy does some reality check. He points to some startling numbers about not-so-shining side of India :

• 47 percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted.
• The adult literacy rate is 61 percent (behind Rwanda and barely ahead of Sudan). Even this is probably overstated, as people are deemed literate who can do little more than sign their name.
• Only 10 percent of the entire Indian labor force works in the formal economy; of these fewer than half are in the private sector.
• The enrollment of six-to-15-year-olds in school has actually declined in the last year. About 40 million children who are supposed to be in school are not.
• About a fifth of the population is chronically hungry; about half of the world's hungry live in India.
• More than a quarter of the India population lives on less than a dollar a day.
• India has more people with HIV than any other country.

There are many hurdles to be negotiated before it can lay claim to the tag of a Superpower. But for now 'its waxing self-satisfaction seems sadly beside the point'

Read full article.

Related Post: Tatas Chorus buy out.

Web 2.0: Digital Ethnography

A nice YouTube video forwarded by a colleague ...

A Million Penguins: Wiki powered collaborative novel

As Wiki become increasingly popular, publishing house Penguin has launched a wiki powered novel, A Million Penguins to allow budding writers to collaboratively tell story. The wiki site will allow writers from across the world to write piece of the novel.

A Million Penguins is an experiment in creative writing and community. Anyone can join in. Anyone can write. Anyone can edit. Let’s see if the crowds are not only wise, but artistic. Or will too many cooks spoil the broth?

Last checked, the novel has seven chapters.

So are we in for a great novel ? Quite unlikely. The Wisdom of Crowds talks about some key criterion that separate wise crowds from irrational ones : Diversity of Opinion, Independence, Decentralization and Aggregation. However, writing a good novel doesn't confirm to these criterion. Author(s) usually starts with an end in mind and builds it up through character development and story telling.

Nonetheless a good experiment and a PR exercise. Penguin wont mind the buzz this has created.

Related: Wikicamp: Wiki Unconference in Chennai

Wikicamp: Wiki Unconference in Chennai

WikiCamp, a one day event is scheduled on 25th February at Tidel Park, Chennai. The event aims at understanding and harnessing the power of Wiki.

In line with other unconferences like BarCamp, WikiCamp will be an informal gathering of like minded people enthusiastic about Wiki. There is no passive audience, everyone participates either as a speaker or in helping organize the event.

The star participant in this WikiCamp will be Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia & Wikia and President of Wikimedia Foundation. So hear about Wiki straight from the horses mouth !!

Add your name to participate.

Related:
- Hyderabad Barcamp snippets
- Hyderabad Barcamp3 : Web 2.0 - What's in for Enterprises ?
- Bangalore Barcamp: Agile Development at ThoughtWorks

Keepvid: Download videos from video sites

KeepVid is a very handy site through which you can download videos from most video sites including YouTube, Google Video etc. You just have to submit the URL of the desired video and the site provides you alternate URL(s) from which the video gets download.

Wonder why the name of the site is KeepVid and not KeepVideo.

Tatas Corus buy out: Sign of changing time

When Tatas proposed to set up a steel plant in early 20^th century, Sir Frederick Upcott, the then Chief Commissioner for Indian Railways commented - Do you mean to say that the Tatas propose to make steel rails to British specifications? Why, I will undertake to eat every pound of rail they succeed in making.

Legend has it that the Tatas sent the first ingot from the plant, neatly packed to Sir Upcott with a note - For your culinary delight !!!. In fact, Dorabji Tata was later to comment wryly that - Frederick Upcott would have had a slight bout of indigestion since Tata Steel went on to ship 1500 miles of steel rails to Mesopotamia during World War I!

Today Tatas snapped up the British firm Corus, becoming the 5th largest steel company in the world. I was watching an interview of Philippe Varin, CEO of Corus, and he termed the event as a 'Sign of changing time'.

Indeed.

Related Post: India Poised: Pulsating, dynamic India

P2P lending - leveraging Long Tail in retail finance

Long Tail, brainchild of Chris Anderson is today the most talked about business concept. His research suggests that market for items that sells a few units is often as large as items that sells a lot; though it's the later that hogs all the attention. Anderson has shown that irrespective of how niche a product is there is always some customers for it. And the sum total of sales of all niche products can bring in substantial revenue and profitability to businesses.

As discussed by Guy Kawasaki, there are a number of tactical items that businesses need to fulfill to capitalize on the potential of long tail - infinite product choices, low cost production, near-zero selling and marketing cost, near-zero distribution cost, near-zero support and training cost etc. Herein lies the challenge for established retail bankers. Traditionally banks have seen their customers as a single mass market, and have taken a "one size fit all" approach in designing their products. Moreover, most established players are large institutes and lacks the agility to scale down. Anderson identifies "scaling down" as one of the core Long Tail competency.

These challenges for established players has however proved to be an opportunities to new P2P lending players to enter retail financial services space. The likes of Prosper, Zopa, FYGO are leveraging the Long Tail and user community (a trait of Web 2.0). They allow users to post a request for loan while other users can make offer to fund part/whole of the loan at an interest rate of their own choice. Once multiple offers are made the system finds the least expensive offers and the deal is made ! While different players differs in execution details, the basic concept is the same. In FYGO transaction can occur only between known participant while the other two allows the same among unknown participants. Now, why would you go to a bank if can get loan from a known person at an acceptable term without much hassle ?

These P2P lenders have democratized the production of financial products (loans); any one can create a loan product. Infinite product choices - lending interest rate and terms are set by lenders; low cost production - lenders create their own loan product online; zero cost distribution - loan is matched online; near-zero selling and marketing - network effect of user community is leveraged.

What is the long term implications of P2P lending on established players ? The jury is still. Though it's still early days for P2P lending concept, business and technology leaders in established banks should take note of this new phenomenon. It has the potential of taken some wind out of their sail. Long Tail and participatory user community opens up new opportunities as well as challenges; success depends on how you play the game.

Sunrise in Google Earth for lazy-bones !

Google has launched a new layer in Google Earth that brings the sun's ascent right to your computer screen. This layer displays Discovery Channel placemark icons showing the locations for video clips from the Discover Channel Sunrise Earth program.

Source: Official Google Blog

Related Post: GeoGreeting: Send greeting Google Earth Way

Swedes virtual embassy in Second Life

Sweden will become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual world of Second Life. Second Life, 3-D virtual world created by San Francisco technology company Linden Lab is currently inhabited by 3,049,553 people from across the world.

The embassy would not provide passports or visas but would guide users how to apply for the same. It will also provide information about the country. The service will be big boon to people planning to travel to Sweden, hitherto tedious job of getting visa will hopefully get simpler.

With the saturation of other advertisement channels and burgeoning popularity of virtual world, Second Life has opened up a new marketing channel. Many organizations including Dell, Sun Microsystem, Reebok has already joined the bandwagon. Sweden however is the first country to do so.

News Source: thelocal.se

Doxory: Outsource decision making

Doxory is a community site that lets users outsource their decision making; you can post questions and solicit answers from other users. And hopefully answers provided by others will help you in making decision.

It took me some time to get the real meaning of the name , it's "Do X or Y?".

And how serious is the site ? As pointed by FAQ

Not terribly. But hey. It's Web 2.0. We've got to pretend that we don't have any sort of plan for how to stay afloat, right?

Related: Is your site Web 2.0 ?

Bullying in the blogging era

Seems A-list bloggers will become better role models for their kids !!

Picture credit: Blaugh

Many Eyes: IBM's data visualization service

IBM has recently released their collaborative data visualization platform called Many Eyes. According to IBM press release Many Eyes is

an innovative new service that allows people to explore different visual representations of large amounts of data and share it with others to help them collectively make better sense of the information.

Users can upload their own dataset or use the existing datasets available in the site. There are a number of visualization options provided in the site including Pie chart, Treemap, Stack Graph etc. Users can leave their comments on the site regarding dataset, thus many eyes (or collective intelligence) will help better understanding of the data in a collaborative way.

As with any user contributed content there is no control over the authenticity of the data uploaded by the users, but as the usage increases the quality of data will also improve.

Many Eyes is currently available as a free service in IBM's alphaWorks service site, early adopters can access and use the same. This will be very useful for researchers.

Other similar visualization services which provide compelling ways of data comprehension, navigation, mining and visualization include Swivel, Data360 and Grokker.