A couple of weeks back I was at the TiE Summit 2007. There I could hardly find anyone who was not interested in the mobile space. Mobile phone space definitely is something which cannot be missed given that today the number of mobile phones far out number the number of personal computers. Also, with each passing day they are getting better memory and better computing power. It would soon become a necessity for all major e-commerce sites to offer their services over the mobile phone assuming that they are not already working on it. Apart from this there is a lot of potential for specific mobile phone applications which would help the consumer do better personally and professionally.

Almost coinciding with the mobile space euphoria, Google released Android. It is a a fully integrated mobile "software stack" that consists of an operating system, middleware, user-friendly interface and applications. The important objective is to deliver a vastly improved web experience on mobile devices, equal to what people can experience on a desktop computer, in contrast to the limited functionality on today's mobile phones.

At the TiE Summit I also heard many speakers saying that “portal is dead.” The next technology wave is dependent on the platform. Many applications and services would be built depending on the platform and a business would be successful depending on which platform does it align with. So if you align on the Android platform then assuming that Android is successful, you could be successful as an Android service provider, Android powered device maker etc etc. HTC would be launching Android powered phones in 2008.

Given all of the above I decided to check out the Android offering over the weekend and here are my initial findings
(more...)

Filed under General, Java | 1 Comment »

Most of the times we are content that our code is of the right quality, if somehow, we manage to get the Static Code Analysis (SCA) tools like Checkstyle, PMD etc. report less number of severe violations. As an example if we see that the class is big in size then we conveniently split it into two or more classes to get rid of the violation. The tool is happy and so are we and most of the times that is the end of the story.

However more frequently than not getting an SCA violation is the start of the story. If you start associating the question “Why' with every SCA violation found then the real reasons start unfolding.

This is similar to the way we resolve impediments on an Scrum project. The impediments rarely represent the isolated incidences of inefficiency. Rather, most of the times they are a part of a larger problem. The way to work out an impediment is fix it so that the team can work effectively and then to look at the root cause which caused the impediment so that the main cause can be fixed. This is called “Bottom-up process re-engineering.”

Similarly the way to work out an SCA violation is to remove it so that the code looks clean and good and then to hunt for the real cause.
(more...)

Filed under Articles, General, Java, Quality Assurance | 5 Comments »

The following post talks about my first brush with Guice based on a couple of hours that I spent on it for the past few days. I would not get into burning fire of comparing Guice with Spring as there has already been a lot of debate on that. Personally in my view it is comparing apple with oranges. We can probably just make comparison between how DI works on Spring and how it works on Guice but then we know that Spring is much more than DI, it is a feature full comprehensive stack.

So not getting into that path any further back to DI with Guice.

Guice wholly embraces annotations and generics. The idea is that annotations finally free you from error-prone, refactoring-adverse string identifiers and frees you up from the XML configuration hell. Guice injects constructors, fields and methods (any methods with any number of arguments, not just setters)

The injection process for Guice is a two step injection process.
1.Define the Bindings.
2.Inject the concrete implementations at the right places.

Let us look at how it is done...
(more...)

Filed under Java | 3 Comments »

When there is wealth of information available on the Xebia Blogs, would you really like to go elsewhere?

Using the Firefox plugin mentioned below you can search within the Xebia Blogs using the Firefox searchbar. once you install the search plugin and restart the Xebia option would start appearing in the search bar as an option

Follow the steps
(more...)

Filed under General | No Comments »

Recently, on one of our projects we had a requirement to allow the ROLE_ADMIN to login as another user without knowing or changing the password of that user. For example 'Jack' has the ROLE_ADMIN and 'Suzy' has the ROLE_USER. Now 'Jack' wants to login as 'Suzy' without knowing her password and carry out some tasks on her behalf acting as her when 'Suzy' is unavailable and some work needs to be done, of course you should provide a mechanism to audit and log whenever 'Jack' wants to play a different role.

This is fairly easy to implement using Acegi

The SwitchUserProcessingFilter in Acegi helps to achieve this functionality. The steps below will show how to configure and use it

(more...)

Filed under Java, Security | No Comments »

15 Stand-up commitments for those crucial 15 minutes

It is another great day, sun shining bright, traffic snarls continuing on roads, the team getting ready for another productive agile day with droopy faces! Droopy faces , why ???

Well because they have to get over the stand-up ritual first before they can get started with some real work.

But is the stand up a ritual??? Aren't stand-ups supposed to be exciting and energizing???

If this a common question disturbing you for a while then it is time to stand up for the stand-up. The details that follow are meant for any team practicing any Agile methodology like Scrum and who has started thinking that stand-ups are no more than an empty ritual which has to be pushed out at the start of the day.
(more...)

Filed under Agile, Articles | 2 Comments »