Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Apple iCloud first impression



In recent Apple world wide developer conference Apple launched its new cloud service with other major release like lion and ios 5. Well apple is known for its visionary product and game changer in the industry. Specially with recent success of iPhone and iPad. So before iCloud release huge built up happened, Steve Job's medical leave also raised lots of eyebrows. Cloud was not new to the market. Amazon, Google and Microsoft have already entered into the market with their cloud products. I found two features which make iCloud different form competitors.
1) Most of the cloud services available are some form of infrastructure( ex : computing, storage etc) are hosted on clouds. As Steve Job told iCloud is much beyond than a Hard Disc on space. In this case applications are focus rather than the platform.Various application sync with each other over cloud automatically. User doesn't have to do anything extra. Applications will automatically take care of connecting to cloud and syncing the content. In Apple's word "it just work".
2) Sdk of iCloud is open for developers. It means not only those 6 or 7 apps from Apple will be on iCloud, it will be much beyond than that. It will certainly bring out lots of innovation and amazing apps from all over the world to one platform in a nice way. 
I am waiting to have an experience of these and services. 
Oh yes one more thing iCloud is free for everybody :)

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Divide & Rule

"Divide & Rule" also known as  divide and conquer is a very famous way to attack the problem. History witnessed this strategy work in very complex situation. It is very famous in political and military circle. It is used to influence countries, win wars and play a big role in international politics.
In corporate people also take the help of this rule frequently. In Computer Science Design of Algorithm classes it is one of technique to attack a problem.
Mostly when we plan for enterprise software previous experience says that maintenance is more costlier than developing.  With time requirements, business rules change for which  maintenance is really necessary. As Change is the only constant in this world, we can not avoid the situation. So maintainability is the highest precedence while designing or developing an application. That is the reason Object Oriented languages (Java, C#, C++ etc.) are popular. They have the feature to mange the complexity of software better than procedural language. So basically OO design means managing the complexity. Divide the complex functionality into integration of smaller/maintainable  component. How to and what extend to divide ... These are some decision which designer has to take to have a optimum solution.
So next time we face a problem this will be an handy technique to approach it ......

Friday, May 6, 2011

Web services are Self Service

In my college days ... There used to be a techno fest. It is completely organised by students starting form event planning, marketing and execution. All students were contributing in some way. With some friends I had planned to put a food stall in the college for event. The college campus was 20km away from city, and in the event normal canteen service is shutdown. So food stall is hot cash business in that situation. We wanted to make some money by creating some value.But we had no idea how to manage a restaurant for two days. We decided to buy foods from a restaurant from the city and we will serve the same food in our stall with some higher price.
And the idea worked we made some handsome profit. And the students also appreciated the food quality.....

Some time to provide some service to end user the service provider need to consume some other service. In this scenario a system need to use service/resource of another system. If it happens on web (www) then it is called web service. It is a standard way how two system can interact. Normally one system host some service the other consume. At the end of the day user get the complete service :)