What if you are creating a lib for production ready applications with good or reasonable performance. The range of frameworks available kept confusing me for a while on what to use. I can write JavaScript code, but had to decide on the library to use. Finally it came down to two – Ext and SC(Smartclient-free-LGPL).. I like jQuery too, but it did not fit in very well in the core. I prefer SC over Ext due to its licensing and arguably its better performance while dealing with lots of data. (fyi… I am an Ext developer too)

When I started with SC, I needed a lot of patience to work with it. Getting started is difficult. The documentation isn’t so clear. I usually don’t read text but skim through it, so if there is some important point in the corner or in middle of lots of text, I would miss it. Additionally community interaction is more on smart-gwt (SC-GWT)… Mapping that gwt code to JavaScript code was sometimes painful. In the process, I always wanted to jump back to Ext. But later the patience paid off. In the end I came out more biased towards SC and still am. If you explore the not-free server features of SC, you’ll be further amazed.
So I decided on SC. But what about GWT, why not use it? I am not a java developer and in fact a better JavaScript dev. So the basic idea of writing java code to generate JavaScript eludes me. Plus java really means unnecessary lines of code to me. I am a .NET dev and then a fan of Ruby (and Rails) — so now you know what I mean. With those params, GWT wasn’t an attractive for me earlier.

That said, GWT isn’t just java to JavaScript. It goes well beyond that ..in minimizing multi-browser issues. Its easier to implement some of the best practices for Web 2.0. Its easier to unit-test too. Further, the road-map looks good too. But the UI is dull. I learnt that Google has hired good designers to make GWT look good and that further we may see better out-of-the-box UI. That’s future…so for now, I am looking into SC-GWT (smartgwt-LGPL)
Hey … wait … you might say… GWT has introduced UI binder which is almost similar to the thing you am trying to do…. so why re-invent the wheel? The answer for now is simple. GWT compiles the UI binder xmls and these are not available at runtime – i.e. the JavaScript does not deal with the xmls. One possible way to re-use it is to figure out a way to re-use the GWT compilation mechanism at runtime — it should be possible, but I haven’t tried it yet. And obviously GWT compilation is in itself a time-consuming process to be performed at runtime.
GWT obviously brings in few benefits but one big inconvenience for me…. writing lots of lines in java code and not using JavaScript and losing some of its flexibility. You can always mix stuff, but I think that should be avoided when possible.

You can achieve all the goodness of GWT and beyond that if you maintain good javascripting discipline….. how hard would it be?….really a lot harder when working in a team… If you have worked on writing enterpise web2.0 apps with large teams…everybody writing JavaScript at some point of time… where its hard to expect everybody to understand javascripting very well …. you’d know the scripting-disaster that comes with it….I think in that scenario, GWT helps minimizing the problem…obviously GWT cannot prevent somebody from writing bad code.
Another thing I like about GWT is its integrated development with Google App Engine. Although I am pretty new to both, I think it would result into better developer productivity. When I mention Google-app-engine, I must say that its easy to get lost into the different persistence techniques that come with it and you are likely to ask “Why? Google, Why?”. That’s when I miss the simplicity and certainty with MS technologies.. even if it means dealing with sub-standard at times.

References:
To get started with GWT, you can check the article below… it covers up a lot of stuff and I hope I knew about it earlier…

http://www.vogella.de/articles/GWT/article.html

To get started with SmartGWT) and AppEngine, check this video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIfeLaYxNts

Article: http://jumanor.blogspot.com/2010/12/primeros-pasos-con-smartgwt.html (The article is in Spanish …  use Chrome/Google translate for English)

In case you are interested more in architecting real world GWT apps… i.e. something beyond “hello world” apps… check out these videos from Google IO:

Best Practices for Architecting GWT App

]]> http://anupshinde.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/to-gwt-or-not-to-gwt-dealing-with-the-scripting-hell-my-learnings-so-far/feed/ 0 anupshinde http://anupshinde.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/rbi-makes-otp-mandatory-for-ivr-the-good-and-bad/ http://anupshinde.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/rbi-makes-otp-mandatory-for-ivr-the-good-and-bad/#comments Fri, 31 Dec 2010 05:27:42 +0000 Anup Shinde http://anupshinde.wordpress.com/?p=76 ]]> Starting from Jan 2011 all the payments made via Master and Visa credit-cards over phone (IVR or m-banking) will require an additional One Time Password. This has been made mandatory by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

The intention of OTP is intended to reduce fraud and protect customers. The principle behind this move is  Two-factor authentication (2FA). 2FA uses something you know – like username/password/CCno-expiry-cvv with something you possess – like a security token/token generator/one-time-password.

Starting tomorrow, a customer can obtain the OTP by either calling his / her bank over phone or sending a SMS to his / her bank. The OTP is valid for only one transaction, and it expires within few hours of issuance (this validity period depends on the bank).
Some of us would have already encountered 2FA… Example. a Security token for bank account or trading account or VPN access. I have one in front of me… changing numbers every 30 secs. I have one more for my trading account and one for viewing CC statements - I have no idea why the last one was needed, the bank forced it on me  and it doesn’t work.

3 security tokens and I am already frustrated having to carry those all the time. I like the idea of having a 2FA through mobiles. You register your mobile once and then whenever require a token you just send sms to your bank. All you need to carry is your mobile.

But is it really so simple? Maybe not. Think about it. First — you need to have your mobile up and running — this shouldn’t be a problem for most people unlike me – I still carry 2 handsets instead of using dual-sim-phone. Second — You need those SMS numbers handy to request for OTP. Its very simple if you saved these numbers and created sms-drafts and use one CC only for IVR and m-banking. Third – The response shouldn’t be delayed a lot. This concerns me a lot since my first try today sent me a response half-an-hour later.

This news frustrated me a bit initially – although I very well understand the security aspect. That’s because I use IVR a lot (if not m-banking). In fact when I have both the PC and mobile, I prefer IVR systems for the regular transactions like paying bills. And sometimes for booking hotels or tickets. Now, I’ll have to generate this OTP every time I want to use it – even for the regular transactions. This also reminds me of a similar case – how people tend to move away from some websites that require them to register to view some content. And obviously my IVR usage is going to drop significantly due to this OTP overhead. Being an engineer, some questions do come to my mind: Why should I need OTP to pay my regular mobile-bills through IVR using the same mobile or the pre-paid costs or the DTH connection with my mobile registered? Why not have a singular OTP than per-bank-OTP? How about having some common-sense intelligence in the systems out there?

Happy Reading.. Please leave your comments… and wish you all a Happy New Year !!!

Today I had somewhat of a bad day… I woke up late but feeling tired… and then early afternoon my air-bed started leaking out air… the puncture was perfectly positioned to not allow for a simple fix of applying the adhesive patch…After 2 hours I could fix it, but not without breaking one of the internal frame connectors…deforming the air-bed a little… Later in the evening… in the parking, I forgot to put out my bike stand before leaving control…duh!… and the bike crashed with me over it… dint hurt but that did break one of the turn-signal- lights….

Later when I opened my Gmail…it triggered my thought process. I had so many new mails. I have 13500+ unread emails in my Gmail Inbox… WTH… These exclude all the filtered mail and all the spam. I have an hotmail account addressed only by important services and that has 2900+ unread mails. Then I have an yahoo mail account, which was my fav before gmail and that I dint even care to count right now. Above all these accounts I have a Facebook (and Orkut)  … virtual socializing is somewhat important… but sometimes I feel pressured if I don’t contribute to facebook.. duh!… My anxiety comes down  only when I sing to myself “Facebook is a stupid idiot” (see the video, therez some truth to it) … Fortunately I am not addicted to Internet games. I  once was addicted to some “vampires” game on Facebook and I remember how out of control it gets…..Then there is Orkut… I dont check nowadays since I switched to FB. I closed down my first Orkut account, bcoz I thought it was sucking the time out of my life and it had a lot more “orkut only” friends. Later social networking turned so important that I decided to open a new one. Its easy to stay in touch with some people over a social network than anything else…. but anyways… there is so much information…

Then I also have a Twitter account… Whenever I see that, I feel I don’t tweet enough… i hope I had a song similar to what I had for FB… Then therz a linked-in account… then therz digg… my head wants to go <bang bang bang>… and then bank accounts…cc accounts..trading accounts..telephony & broadband accounts… Thats so much of an account overdose

I get on an average 35 mails a day (20 on Gmail, 5 on hotmail and 10 on yahoo) on my personal accounts, after all the filtering (like group subscriptions or FB notifications) and spam removal… now thats just an average and I am sure the median is on the higher side of the average.

I can ignore some of the emails in my personal account just by filtering and the subject lines…. Now what about the office e-mails – I can’t ignore those and mostly have to read all of those. I get anywhere between 20-100 mails per day – around 40 looks like the average. Some problems that team-emails are “unnecessary group e-mails”, “misplaced subject lines” and “multi-threading”…. people might cut out the newer responses… mostly managers start that unintentionally (I can understand what they face in their Inbox everyday)… and people just don’t care to correct it… So if you want to follow a thread you have to read all the mails.  And finally, since I am not just a passive receptor… I send mails too. Its simply amazing to see how some people work with at least 4 times the amount of email I receive and lots of meetings. Fortunately, I don’t have account overdose at the co, its pretty well integrated and organized.

Thats about the emails and accounts…What about the 4 domain names I own? And the one which is active/more-visited website… I feel genuinely pressured to contribute to that too… I have a LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) program ready that I made 2 years back and wish to document and share, but I have forgotten LSI concepts by now. Then there are things half-done that got lost when some other work took priority…. duh!

Working as a technologist in software, I cannot avoid technology and software. Sometimes I feel “software engineering” is analogous to “true lies”.. We have IT (Information Technology) to solve our problems and then we have ITSM (IT Service Management) to solve the problems that IT creates…. And as I write this, I realize tomorrow morning I would be checking the work-related-emails while working at the co that makes ITSM software

Happy Internetting !!!

Samir is a generous guy – girls always call him the nice guy and the sweet guy (he’s single too), an actor, a good sports person, captain of cricket team, plays golf, a lucky gambler and not the least – a senior developer in our team. I think I missed something more..but anyways …  Sometime he’s also a geek like most of us, and most geeky somebody told me.. he was using 4-5 machines simultaneously. He sometimes also becomes the drama-magnet and thats when we call him Poserruddin. He never gets angry at anything and this level of emotion-control is definitely super-human. Well, we also have a Superman picture of him in office with all the pretty girls around him.

Samir is omnipresent. No, I am not crazy. There something about him that everybody likes. No matter what we do and where we are and where Samir is, he is always on the back of everybody’s mind. And his name would always pop-up in a conversation.

Samir… you ROCK!!!

Many people have come and asked me why I chose to work from home? how is it to work from home? Is it good? Is it comfortable? Is it productive? Is it fun?

Let me talk about a few things on this first. Work from home isn’t for people who don’t like to work at all unless there is some strong bureaucratic miracle happening. Most of the time work – i mean WORK – would look the same as it were in office. If you like it its fun, if you detest it, its not.

My job profile mostly requires me to work from my desk and through meetings. Anything that I did other than that, which in fact I did a lot for my own learning and experience, is undoubtedly above my pay-grade. In India where work from home concept is pretty new and not well accepted, it is going to be difficult. Part of that is due to tradition – people don’t understand it and in a highly social culture we tend to follow the herd. And partly its due to terrible execution by an individuals – you are responsible for your results – at least in this country people avoid risks simple because they want to avoid responsibility – it ends up in blame games and this isn’t only in the govt organisations but also in most private organisations – obviously this is changing a lot – even if one percent was your fault, you have to accept the responsibility and move on. Coming back to the point…  the question for me was: how much difference would it make to me if I worked from home? There is a high risk of stalled career growth or being replaced, so I have to make efforts to reduce that risk and be ready to accommodate that risk in entirety. You miss out on socializing with the team (not FB/Twitter)

Work-from-home is a big risk if you are not self-motivated. I knew, it wouldn’t be a huge problem for me after having worked as a freelancer for a significant time before joining the industry as an employee. After getting the option from the employer (thanks to them), I did take multiple opinions, calculated the risks and accounted for my preferences.

For me it has definitely been more productive relative to the time spent to do a similar task in office. One of my friends said about work-from-home as “You just have to wake up in your bed and start working”. Well, its not like that. Its comfortable and has its own advantages if you overcome personal challenges there. Few reasons why I chose to work from home is increased personal time, personal ambitions, diminished liking for any office (read: needed a long break), and then finally, employer’s permission to do so. This post is already has a lot of content so I’ll write down some stuff on effectively working from home as I understand it in a next post.

Happy Reading!!!

A thing about writing, it’s not boring but when I have to format text and review article, that irritates me too much. I’d like to write at the speed of thought, but my fingers are still slower after so many years of practice. I have my website, and it’s not too cool-looking either (except some articles where people have sent a lot of appreciation). But when you write articles, especially the technical ones, there is a lot of hard work other than just writing it. You have to format the text, keep the diagrams in place. Check the flow again and again and again until you think its correct. And then check it again the next morning after a good sleep to check if something was missed. Well, it has improved with practice with lot less mistakes, but never got it right at the first time. I had been a freelance programmer for many years and I do give that a credit of whatever writing skills I have today. Since this is my first blog, I am going to throwaway whatever comes up as I write, probably some parts of intro to myself.

I come from electronics and then software background… so you’ll might find my language in IFs and BUTs. But… (didnt i just use that again). So I was saying that the flow in my texts usually go in a logical manner. And don’t mind if you find some place where the logic gets really complex. My 8-12 hours job work every day consists of writing complex software systems. Few of them are really really compressed, generalized and complex (not messy) that I have to read the documents to understand those if I left working on those for some time. I have been following some of the best programmers in the world and all I can say is good programming is an art that requires time,  hard work and practice over and over and over again. It’s unfortunate that I find many programmers/engineers and, in general, people who make no effort to improve.

Started writing in my early years… I remember the first thing I wrote out of my imagination and so-called knowledge was on the Big Bang theory… I had written 5 pages of literature at the age of 15 arguing that the theory was incorrect. That’s nearly 13 years back. I argued about that theory to a newly found friend at the new school and he giggled. There I was feeling stupid about myself. Well how can an academically average kid in an average school at that age argue that theory? Till date I don’t know if the theory is correct or was proven wrong. I never majored in physics and opted out to electronics at my UG college. But almost a year back, when I found the same paper while cleaning up my stuff … those 5 pages… I took those and sat down there in the mess and read it completely. The theory I wrote might be wrong or right, but the argument was pretty good for a 15-year-old in those times when we dint use computers (forget internet or Google).  I am not a researcher, but have worked with a few and at a time was just about to start off as an academic researcher (that doesn’t fit my mindset yet). I have learnt to take criticism, analyze it and to learn from it. Being a natural auto-critique definitely gives me an edge at the learning process. Those “5 pages” motivate me to this day.  As shown in the movie “Pursuit of Happyness”: don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. Had somebody motivated me at that young age, may be I’d be a researcher in physics now. Fortunately I am better off now. I stressed on “may be” because I am still not good at reading. I dislike reading for marks or money (or fun) until there is a motivating factor. Not that I have a learning disorder, but I am more of an audio-visual learner. Sometimes I feel bad about being educated the way I was…It might have been due to the time… lack of technologies like today… lack of good schools/teachers… country … and/or just lack of motivation from my end… I never liked that “meaningless education” that also produces “educated idiots” … I’ll leave that topic there for another post.

Somehow the intricacies of science used to fascinate me. Those days it was physics and now its more about economics & psychology. And there’s a lot more in between. Life has been an exciting journey with few successes, overcoming lots of challenges and slightly more failures but definitely a lot of learning. After couple of years of break, that is: doing the rudimentary work and a bit of personal reformation, I have taken on an unconventional endeavor. And that I have been forewarned will test all my limits of patience and perseverance (No. Its not a girl…phew). So, I hope I’ll be able to post more and will leave you folks now with a quote that popped up in my head.

Happy reading & comments are always welcome !!!

Life is very precious and lifetime should not be wasted on activities that don’t excite you to the very depth of your soul. Be Human!