Monday, June 29, 2009

JavaFx- Skeptical Student's point of view

Why JavaFx right now? This is a question that has led me to be skeptical about this technology. As of now, the 1.2 version is out which requires at least a java 6 update 13 JDK, which essentially means that this technology is growing at an immense rate. However, the market out there of RIAs is quite ripe and in the next few years is going to be the ‘in’ thing. Keeping that in picture, a lot of companies have brought out their platforms (like silverlight, flex, etc). Only time will tell us the fate of these technologies as it is their adoption by various mobile/hardware vendors, which will decide what would be the preferable one amongst them, when it comes to their marketability.
Sun Microsoft is currently developing and promoting their JavaFx and this reminds me of JSF, which was launched in a similar fashion. Based on my observations, I’ve drawn quite a lot of parallels amongst them. Both have excellent integration with the Netbeans IDE as well as compatible with other products as well. Excellent documentation and tutorials are available for these (thanks to efforts by sun and everybody else). The development style of both is quite revolutionary and, I’d say, surprisingly pleasing if you’ve had the right tools.
However, JSF didn’t quite achieved what it was meant to do- a replacement of struts. The ui model is complicated for many and for me, jsf does still have those dark corners which make me hesitant to use them. Here, I am not going against JSF, but I’d like to make a point that currently, frameworks like spring have brought in innovative technology and are currently, the most sought-after when it comes to job requirements. However, as frameworks mature, like JSF, there comes a bit of stability as well as integration like what Jboss Seam did to JSF, increasing flexibility and keeping it simple(or even more easy).
So, what lies in store for a student?
Keeping in view the current market status, investing one’s time in JavaFx looks like a risky proposition to me as arguably, one can learn technologies like LAMP (configuration and app. development) to be marketable instead of this JavaFx scripting language (just comparing job prospects, and not the technologies here).
On the sidenote, JavaFx is one of the most promising and exciting technology but the pace of its development certainly is a source of concern as not everyone has an adequate bandwidth to cope up with the frequent updates. For a student, it’ll require a lot of efforts (or time) to keep abreast with the latest changes in JavaFx, a thing which we do not have the luxury of as a vast majority needs to build their skills in basic programming and then, enterprise development.
As a personal note, although JavaFx looks quite promising to me (I’ve been hearing about this for an year now), there are enough reasons for me to postpone the learning of this technology as currently, I’d just wait and watch.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Be Heard!

In order to increase the traffic on your blogs, you need to market them. Apart from the word-of-mouth publicity, you'll need some technology to back yourself. This is akin to having a P.R. manager of your blog.
A ping (not to be confused with the ping command in operating systems that resolve a dns address) is basically a XML-RPC (xml Remote Procedure Call) that allows the destination server to register your blog and its new post. Since there is intense competition amongst these blog ping allowable servers, so you have to manually ping these servers separately.
Some of these are:
pingoat
ping O matic
blogflux
bloggers
Technorati

These are knowledge sharing websites and act as brokers of information between your blog and the general internet users.
To ping, you need a client. Stupidzombie is one such free software that runs on java and is quite easy to use.
Lastly, after pinging, you can expect increase in traffic/hits on your blog and thereby make you one step closer to being a professional blogger.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Is sex a taboo over internet ?

Seems like we cyborgs have moved back into dark ages.Microsoft's newest search engine(currently in beta), bing is reportedly blocking search queries like sex.
My opinion is still divided as on one hand, it is a right step in curbing the menace of pornography over internet and, on the other, is an open threat of a corporation that is trying to dictate what internet should be.

Currently in beta, the indian version on bing reports sex search as: "The search sex may return sexually explicit content.
To get results, change your search terms."
One wonders whether it'll cause any good as if a person is intended to search for a lascivious content, a search engine is not an effective stopping solution for it. Rather, we'll need to regulate these websites, which, unfortunately are quite profit making concerns.
So, just blocking the users from the result will not be enough for Microsoft as they'll have to hold some sort of agreement with all other search engines.