My Blog

Imagine year 2020.  How would you be using your web? Somewhere I read this analogy: "the cars of early days mimicked ancient manual vehicles. Similarly the web of today mimic the books / newspapers / magazines of yesteryears".. then really how the web would be as the time progresses? Fascinating....  During the past 2 ~3  years webosphere has seen exciting new ideas. Blogs reaching the unprecedented capacity in terms of quantity and inclusiveness.. No need to explicitly mention about "Micro blogging" services like twitter , Google Buzz etc... Phenomenal growth .... Lets chart-out few possible web advaaaaaancements...(In my opinion:) "Web of Things" would occupy a major area of webosphere in the future..  Think about IP enabled Washing Machines, IP enabled Microwave ovens, Refrigerators.. all routing semantic content among them...  You might even get a oven/cooker which would suggest the possible recipes that you can make based on the ...

Stop guessing. This is not a chemistry post. Read furthur to know what is C3H5. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) marks the boundary between your actual data and the presentation. This clear-cut separation between data and presentation would make the maintenance of an application smoother. The recent addition to the CSS family is CSS 3. It provides  whole lot of new capabilities to the Web UI engineer. In one of the previous posts (RIA Re-Defined), I highlighted about HTML 5. CSS 3 is a very good friend of HTML 5. This C3H5 (Thats the title!. Just like that thought of this acronym. So it is my innovation...LOL) would change the way that we approach the Web UI. Few of the capabilities of CSS 3 are : Dynamic Media Management: You can specify different CSS for different sized monitors with lot of ease. Multiple Backgrounds. Photoshop like Text effects with simple CSS. Imaged Borders Ability to provide multi-column layout. HSL color support Voice Effects (Called aural CSS usin...

Countless number of times I have indicated in my lectures that without Javascript knowledge, you are not a web developer. Similar to HTML which doesn't has any replacement, JavaScript has also become "THE" choice for programmers across all technological platforms like J2EE, LAMP & .NET etc. To make the life of developers easy there are many JavaScript frameworks. To name a few: Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Dojo, QooxDoo (still remember the struggles that our team had @ merc with this) etc.  Surely jQuery is not simply yet another JavaScript framework. jQuery fully satisfies its tagline "write less, do more" (thats what most of us want, right ?) . jQuery is distinct, powerful and cool with the following features: Open source Light weight (only ~68 kb) Extensibility through plug-ins (so you need not to be a Javascript pro to use it; can simply copy & paste the code... afterall "reusability" is the most important software enginnering princip...

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have made the web more interactive and cool. Apart from the jargon "AJAX" there are many more things to it. The predominantly used tools for making the web richer are: Flash JavaFX Adobe AIR  Microsoft's Silverlight etc., Though these tools make the web more powerful there is a bottom-line constraint of installing the plugins. How many time we face this problem of plugin not found?. (Particularly in Linux platform) Qn : So what is the solution?  Ans: HTML 5. HTML5 can redefine RIA to a greater extent. HTML5 provides tags for "video" etc. So if your browser can understand HTML5 then no need for any of the above plugins. The major advantages of this approach are: Web would become "open" with respect to RIA. All of the above said plugins are proprietary. We want web to be open. So it is better to use non-proprietary tools. (at least for client side if not all) Being the native code HTML5 would possibly be more opt...

How many hours of a day you spend on-line?  Do you some time feel that you are on-line for most of your active time.. Hang on, internet (web) surfing can become an addiction or even a disorder.  Hey, I am not saying this.. There are detailed surveys on it. If you feel that you are  obsessed  with internet it is right time you check the below site. And take the on-line test there to find out your internet usage (or addictive) level: http://www.netaddiction.com/index.php?option=com_bfquiz&view=onepage&catid=46&Itemid=106 Be true while taking the test. I took that test and answered all the questions true to best of my knowledge (seriously, believe me). You know what, my score is 31. Perfectly normal (at-least in their scale) Yet another proof for the Tamil saying : அளவுக்கு மிஞ்சினால் அமிர்தமும் நஞ்சு 

"As We May Think" is a visionary article authored by Vannevar Bush. It was released during 1945. So you might think what is so special about an article published more than 60 years ago. Because most of us might have an opinion that computer science is a volatile subject i.e. a concept/theory which sounds valid today might not be so an year after (some times even days after). It may look correct at the peripheral level. If you have a deeper look in to the things, you might understand that only the representation and executions have been modified and the good old concepts remain the same. For example data structures like Stack , Queue etc.. If you take any programming language it's gonna be the same.Even for that matter, Ethernet is still the mostly used communication channel in most of the organization's Intranet. Coming back to "As We May Think", it provides an unbelievable vision that the author had during 1945. He speaks about "Memex" - a col...