Is Information Technology maturing?

Dec 1, 2 – 2006. I was at a Java Conference No; it was neither in the US nor at Europe. Guess what, it was in India at amacha pune.

IndicThreads.com did a fantastic job of hosting a Java Conference for the population which today writes real java code for a lot of fortune 500 companies.

I was also impressed by the objective Harshad had out of the conference. He talked about the fact that although Indian IT industry is a strong force of lacks of IT professionals, we lag in developing world class products or very strong open source contribution. Its time the Indian IT industry and the developers to start taking this seriously and start innovating.

The two day sessions were fun. It included a lot of information, technology, frameworks and discussions. It was interesting to see people bashing and appraising every other technology very hour. If EJB 3.0 was a hit now, you might see someone really hitting it hard the next hour and pitching in for spring. The hour after that you find EJB 3.0 is back in the game… wow!

The session on the first day started with Raghu talking about “Integrating BPEL workflow and business rules”. This also showed Oracle’s SOA capabilities to some extent. Atul kahate explained Enterprise Java Security thereafter. Atul was really clear and simple in explaining basics of security. There was a surprise show by Janaki Ram from Microsoft following that. I must admit that Janaki did a good job of throwing enough light on the .NET 3.0 architecture and salient features in the 45 mins. allocated to him. The next session was from Ramesh. I admired ramesh’s frank thoughts about SOA and web 2.0. The stage was then taken over by Debu. Debu is a real fun to listen to and explained EJB 3.0’s power to the community. Peter demystified spring for us the next. He also showed the JTrac open source project he worked on which was among the top 100 downloads on sourgeforge. Following that there was again an interesting talk about “Apache Geronimo” server by Kishore. Finally the first day session was closed by Harshad showing the fancy power of Groovy and Grails.

The second day started with Hibernate Guru, Gavin talking about JBoss Seam framework and its advantages. Janak following the session explained about the Rich Internet Technologies and the methodologies to choose them. Gavin and Debu replied to queries regarding Java Persistent API. The session following that was by Sanjeeb who talked about the difference between J2EE and Java EE 5. He also showed a demonstration of Glassfish application server and developing and deploying applications over the same. Jitender Singh from persistent made a surprise entry replacing Jitendra to talk about ruby and rails. All in all the conference covered a whole gamut of technology, frameworks and servers.

There were many things that a lot of them talked about in the entire conference. However the one common thing that I could extract out other than all the good technical stuff was that the IT industry is now showing signs of maturity.

If we look at any traditional engineering stream they have a very strong engineering background. A 2-stroke engine for example is based on all the mechanical engineering fundamentals and the pipelines built do take care of the correct fluid mechanics fundamentals before design. IT applications, although uses some engineering principles were not strongly coupled with the engineering basics. Traditional engineering applications have a lot more process focus. Each and every application has well defined processes and clear flows defined to track the processes. The software applications developed do not guarantee such process focus. Traditional engineering applications are optimized for simplicity in implementation and undergo constant improvements.

With business process managers, coming in a big way (BPM’s are not new, what’s new is the fact that they are getting popular and expanding horizons) there seems to be an alignment with the traditional process focus. The applications being built with processes are much more in sync with the actual business processes. This also gives the domain users understand the flow of the software application much easier then showing them some HTML prototypes of how the system will look like. The heterogeneous systems are getting more standards based which are again what the traditional engineering systems are. Components are becoming more loosely coupled and have clear interfaces. This allows real and easy plug and play support over various heterogeneous environments. This can further allow some components of a big system to be developed by company x whereas company y can develop other component and a company z integrates x and y. Automobile industry for example functions the same way in case of a traditional industry. There is a lot more focus on simplification of development. This gives the implementers an easy way to produce quicker outputs and better productivity.

All this makes me believe that Information technology is maturing. It’s getting more aligned to the traditional engineering stream which is a welcome sign.

Life Is - Lights

On 22^nd of this year, India will celebrate yet another festival of lights – Deepawali (Diwali). Deepawali as the name suggests is series of lamps. Entire Indian land seems as if the sky is turn around with stars twinkling in each and every house. The aerial view of the nation on this day is simply phenomenal.

There are quite a few legends behind Deepawali. One saying is that God Ram started ruling Ayodhya from this very day and every one in the country was happy that good days were back. This also meant the birth of “Satyug”. Also goddess “Laxshmi” came to earth on this day and people lit lamps so that lakshmiji can enter their houses. This is also the day when Lord Krishna saved the innocent “Gokul” gwals and gwalins, from Indra and lifted “Govardhan”.

People all over the country have a social get together and parties. They will celebrate the evenings with lots of fireworks. There will be all kind of sweets served.

This land has a unique tradition of enjoying whatever small and beautiful thing that occurs. And there is a science behind everything and every celebration. People clean up their house during diwali. The essence behind this is, after the gloomy monsoon we enter into winter. Its time to clean up the things and we wrapped it up into a festival to do it happily. The same goes for many more Indian festivals. What better way a season of cold (winter) be welcomed than by lighting small lamps to make the whole atmosphere warm! This also marks beginning of a new harvest season and we begin this with distributing and preparing sweets…wow! I am sometimes amazed at the knowledge, creativity and innovation of our great grandfathers. They had everything we crave for today. They were far more knowledgeable far more creative and a lot more innovative than the best of lots today.

However with globalization taking its toll the zeal and enthusiasm of these festivals is getting weak. I see more cards getting exchanged on Valentine day than on Diwali. Most of them might not know why we celebrate valentine day. The warmth of meeting the loved ones is declining. With distributed families all across the globe the greetings are nothing more than a telephone call.

All is not lost yet though. The need is to feel the warmth of a relationship. Distance does not matter, what matters is the warmth of the feeling. Also understanding our culture and the reasons behind them will help associate us more with it. India posses a rich set of heritage and values. It is only when we continue to cherish these traditions and festivals, the heritage will remain intact.

Let us celebrate this Diwali a totally Indian way.

Happy Deepawali.

Life Is - Child Philosophy

Life’s:- Child Philosophy

These days I watch Shashank (my 6 month old kid) grow. I simply love the whole experience. Sometimes it is tiring, sometimes very tiring and sometimes painful. But all this just get washed away by a single gentle, true and pure smile of the little one. The innocent face which smiles when you are on the verge of frustration, in the middle of the night, takes out all the pains and compels you to bow down and serve your little one.

Another amazing thing to watch is the passion they posses. The remote control of our TV set is shashank’s best toy. He has tons of them. Stuffed ones and lighting ones but he just loves the plain remote. He will do whatever it takes to get hold of that remote. He can be located anywhere; his sharp eyes will catch hold of the item and yahoo…! Its time for action. He will put all the intelligence he posses with whatever little movement he is allowed as a 6 month old kid to get to the device. He might lose out on energy in the process. This will not put him down. He waits for sometimes. Takes rest and valla ….back to work. Only when he gets hold of that device will he stop. Not that he will play with the device too long though … but that is altogether a different story.

Whenever he wants something and could not get that, the only weapon he posses is cry. He will shout and force you to attend you to get his things done. He will be happy once the thing that he wanted gets done. He cannot explain then very correctly but he continues to cry till you understand him and he is satisfied with the service.

This brings very simple but useful principles. A little kid teaches some of the very fundamental realities of life.

Be focused

Whatever it takes never let your objective affects that and there is nothing in this world that stops you from achieving the goal.

Keep the end objective in mind

Before beginning any task, think of the end. Once you are clear of the end, proceed to make the task a success. All possible ethical methods to achieve the task should be tried out before giving it up.

More to this follows as I learn more ……….

Njoi