Ashwini's Tech-Talk

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Location: Bangalore, Karnataka, India

There are many things that interest me.Apart from the technological interests,I like medicine. My blog will definitely contain notes on varied areas of life! Thanks for sparing your time on my blog. Be assured, your comments are valued by me! Ashwini

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Views on Open Source

With the growing usage of open sources, and the clients asking for more solutions on open source products, it looks like open source is going to be the buzz word.

Major benefits of using open source, as seen from a distance are:
1. Cost benefit. Clients don't have to pay hefty amount for the licenses but have to pay for the maintenance
2. Time saving
3. Free to change and add the new features

And the tricky points of using an Open source are:
1. The bugs found may not be fixed quickly. You never know the time when the next release is coming
2. Quality of the product may not be very good as most often it's developed by a group of individuals with individual thought process than a collective one.
3. If the Open Source prodcut is not yet bought by any company, then there could be no support, especially at critical stages of development


A few points to keep in mind about Open source products are:
1. Open source is a strategy to eventually be bought by a company! The client who has started building the system on open source will be forced to purchase the products negating the first benefit, he was looking for. (In this case, it might be only the Suppot cost)
2. Heavy systems, which integrate with so many applications, and it's risky to go for open source for one or two applications and loose out on many things
3. You never know when an Open source product looses it's shine and stops to grow further

With all these analysis, Open source can be used for benefit. But that will be in the following scenario's:
1. When a company is looking for a shift in technology or architecture, they can do a PoC with the open source products, study the feasibility and then invest in the similar products.
2. When the Top Management is of doubt about a new concept to venture, Open source can be used to prove it's abilities.
3. Can be used for work-around and quick solutions while the actual one is being developed

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Spring, Hibernate - Is it really light?

I have seen the configurations that have to be done for using Spring and Hibernate. Despite being told that it's easy to use, I feel it's cluttered and requires lot of configuration to be done for one usage.

Same is the case with Hibernate. I am of the opinion that they are still heavy weight and do have their own overheads during usage.

What's your opinion?

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Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Page Load Time - Usability Perspective!

This is what Jakob Neilson, one of the Usability Guru tells in an interview, the standards for standard page load time. Interesting!

Can we match the page load speed of one second to e-commerce sites and Portals? I doubt!

Part of the interview excerpt:

"Do you reckon any of the traditional rules about usability need updating? The eight second rule for page loading, for example, with the rise of higher speed connections?

Well, the real rule is actually one second. There are three rules for response times and they don't really change as they are based on fundamental human characteristics.

The rules are; if it is faster than one tenth of a second, you don't feel like you are waiting at all. If it is more than one tenth of a second, you can tell you are waiting, but up to one second, it still feels like smooth navigation. Between one and ten seconds is the limit for your attention.

As you wait from one to ten seconds, your attention starts drifting off, and after ten seconds you are asking 'where is this thing?'. The recommendation is that it doesn't need to be one tenth of a second, but it should be faster than one second as it's about free flowing navigation. The only reason we used the eight second rule is that we couldn't get down to one second in the past.

If you go the best websites, like Google, that's what they do - they give you the page like that [clicks fingers]."

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Agile offshoring!

A good post by Vikas Hazrati. Read it at The ServerSide.com. A good mapping of Japenese terms to IT!

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Sunday, May 13, 2007

ATG Portal - Copying Portlets

I have been wondering why one of the Leading portal of times has not kept pace with the competitors! ATG was the pioneer in many streams, technologies. The portals like IBM Portal Server and BEA Weblogic's Portal server have moved ahead a lot making usage of Portal very easy.

Though the features provided by ATG Portal still are of high quality, I find the usage a little difficult. We had a requirement of copying the ATG portlets which is not supported by ATG. There's a workaround though - create multiple instances of the portlet.


Will ATG look at making it more simpler?

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Portal Dashboard - What's the ideal number of portlets?

What is the ideal no. of portlets to be displayed on the dashboard? I think it should not be more than eight. That's my opinion.

I have seen a few customers making the dashboard heavy with as many as 12 portlets. With all the configurations required to process the synthetic portlets, it becomes a bottleneck for the performance of the site.

Also, the user will be stuffed with too many information on one screen making it least presentable. Chances are there that the user might miss a portlet!

What do you think it should be? Any comments?

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New to Architecture? Read this

This post on IBM's site is very good. You can get a good insight into what all has to be kept in mind to start with architecture of a system. Read the New to Architecture article on IBM's site.

Happy reading!

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Friday, May 11, 2007

Performance Improvement Tips on clustered Weblogic

To make sure that the performance of the ATG application or any application, for that matter, on BEA Weblogic's clustered environment, the following have to be done:

1. Every object stored in the session should be serializable and
2. Use session.setAttribute() to force the replication between the servers.

More can be read at BEA's site.

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Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Changing jsessionId to custom session id in BEA Weblogic portal

It's a good design to change the session id name in the portal to a specific name. It helps to identify the session of the portal and differentiate it from the other back office applications that are integrated.

How to change this in BEA weblogic?
1. Overwrite the weblogic.xml and rename the jsessionId to the custom name you want to give.

Simple to do with lot of benefits! Next time you see jsession id, you know what and where it has to be changed!

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ATG Personalization with Siteminder on BEA Weblogic

Came across a situation where we were looking for ATG with Siteminder. The problem was that the personalization repository used was not in the control of ATG. We did find a work around. Prepared a J2EE application that would reside on BEA Weblogic. And integrated this with siteminder at one side and ATG at the other end. With this we could achieve the single sign on facility that was much needed for our client.

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IBM Portlet Factory - Back in Action!

IBM Portlet factory, renamed after acquiring Bowstreet, is back in action and making news! With the customizable code available at your disposal it is more easy to create a simple portal quickly.

What IBM Portlet factory provides is the power of customizing this portal quickly to create one more based on some rules. Maintenance of the portal source is one avoiding and reducing a lot of testing time.

With improved features and IBM tag, Portlet factory is sure to make some news for sometime at the least!

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