Ashwini's Tech-Talk

Oracle buys ATG!

2010-11-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

Didn't expect this coming! Should wait see how Oracle is going to reshape ATG, though not until 2011 till the transition is completed.

Going Green!

2009-04-23T03:35:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot of buzz about encouraging and enlightening people about the difference they can make with small things to the world, especially on leaving the carbon foot print. But, have you observed we lag in doing the small things some of which hardly take a fraction of second.

My observations of very simple things that can make a difference are:

Taking printouts: I don’t know why we have to print so much of stuff when we have the amazing facilities on the computer for better reading! We are the one’s trying to move the world to a “paperless world” and the see the print usage of any IT organization. They put the computer revolution to shame! What are we teaching the world? To be a hypocrite?

Power usage: It is said that the monitors and the CPUs are the main consumers of the power on a workstation. Is it so difficult to switch off the monitor when we are going for a break and then switch it on when we come back? I can understand that switching the CPU off every evening may not be a good idea for us. But switching the monitor off, hardly takes a second! Just do a parade of the office, in the evening, and you will see most of the monitors with a message “Please switch off the monitor when not in use”!

If we can’t do such simple things, (obviously, because we don’t understand their importance), how capable are we to understand the big difference we can make to the Go-Green campaign?

Agile and Performance

2009-04-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

Most of the people executing projects using Agile process consider that the requirements can be changed and incorporated anytime till the last day of release to Production/Live systems. It is very difficult to drive that Agile has a process and certain parameters are to be base-lined and fixed.

With such an interpretation of the process, the project suffers. There is no sufficient time for Design and Architecture, the implementation and for testing. The problems start surfacing when the project is released to higher environments specially commissioned live.

Teams - Development or Testing would have received very less time to do their activities and are hurried up. Result? Hardly, to anyone’s surprise, the deliverables are of poor quality and everything aftermath is a show stopper production issue.

Once the application becomes a little stable (i.e., when the showstoppers are reduced), the users will realise how slow the system is. It flows down the hierarchy and comes to the development team as though they have to cut their heads-off for blunders committed.

When the root cause analysis for the performance is done, it is the fairly obvious reasons that come out as findings. A few reasons are like:
The Architecture and Design processes are mostly ignored. Of course, tactical solutions are meant for that reason!
Development team was rushed through with no time to use common components or to check if something has been re-written nth time
No time for code reviews and even if someone dares to do it, there’s no time to fix it
The environments are not tuned and configured according to production standards. When were given the time to do it, at the first place?

I understand that we are in a short cut world. We want everything at fingertips. But it doesn’t mean that projects also will be executed at that pace, whatever new process applied. Agile is great, but only when used properly. And for that matter, it applies on any process.

Improving the performance of the pages

2009-01-29T02:56:00.000-08:00

Contains some standard and non-standard practices. A good article - Speed up your Web pages.
I will post more on Google Gears, soon.

ATG Blog

2008-09-01T02:33:00.001-07:00

Here you go:
http://www.atgsolutionsstrategy.com/

worth a visit if you follow ATG.

What more could I say?

2007-06-22T00:15:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from the BEA Enterprise 360, A Business perspective

SOA: only the beginning
In an attempt to gain vital business agility, many organizations are turning to Service-Oriented Architecture.

In an SOA, complex business applications are componentized into discrete business services. These services run on an internal or external network, where they can be easily shared and reused across different silos and easily combined to create a new breed of business processes and composite applications. The potential for far greater business agility and alignment is enormous, as is the potential for savings and return on investment.

The initial success enjoyed by some early SOA adopters demonstrates the very real potential.That potential, however, cannot be realized by simply building and deploying reusable services. A successful SOA, one capable of quickly achieving and sustaining alignment, agility, and savings, requires an SOA foundation that promotes and supports air-tight collaboration between business and IT. That foundation must combine SOA with Business Process Management (BPM) and the collaborative capabilities of Web 2.0. The powerful chemistry of that combination can transcend business agility to deliver true business velocity.

SOA - Implementation

2007-06-21T23:32:00.001-07:00

SOA is a concept which preaches reusability, loosely coupling the software services with proper protocol for data exchange. Becaues most of the time SOA is implemented using web services, it's always interpreted as SOA = Web services and vice versa. This is not true.

SOA is just a concept. This concept can be implemented using Web Services or age old RMI or something new that might come up in future. Currently, web services provide proper protocol/rules to communicate with a diverse set of systems, which makes it most desired for SOA implementation.

JSR 227 is coming up with a service oriented interface (SOI) for data binding and data access functionalities. According to JSR 227, whatever the underlying systems(EJB, DB or mainframes), the interfaces and the data will remain same.

Looking forward for it? Yes, me too.

ATG eCommerce Suite named #1

2007-06-21T01:53:00.000-07:00

Little old, but a good thing to know. Forrester researchers ranked ATG eCommerce site as #1 against the competitors like IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft!

Thats news. Now, we need to wait and watch, how the ATG Marketing gears up after this pleasant surprise.

SaaS and Web 2.0 and SOA

2007-06-21T01:36:00.000-07:00

SaaS is not an overnight concept like any other concept/architecture pattern you see in IT. All these old concepts, change like "old wine in new bottle". With the Web2.0 taking everything into it's sphere, SaaS is one that's going to benefit from it.

With Web 2.0, the users can directly use the portals/applications that are integrated or provisioned using SOA and with Web 2.0 functionalities.

SOA versus OO

2007-06-19T23:57:00.001-07:00

Object Oriented programming believes that the data and behavior be coupled. It does profess a kind of, tight coupling though it has loose coupling features like inheritence.

The coupling in OO is with respect to a specific functionality, which most often requires tight coupling.

SOA, on the other hand is a concept to get the best service(s) working for a cause. The SOA, puts the protocol for integration and data exchange to make service usage easier. It allows the individual software services to be tight coupled or loose coupled. SOA would, rather decide the integration platform with a loosely coupled protocol and a proper data exchange model(currently achieved through web services). Read the SOA definition in my previous post here.

SOA basics and Event Manager

2007-06-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

Nothing new, SOA, the loosely coupled architecture is the talk of the town. How I relate to SOA is that it's like an Event Manager.

What does an event manager do? He/She coordinates with all the vendors (service providers) to use(consume) the services for a great/happening show. The event manager needs to ensure that the vendors are providing the best quality of service and proper information for exchange.

SOA lets the experts handle their piece(service) with finessee and just gives a protocol, at the end, for integration and data exchange. SOA would not bother how the implementation of a service is done by the vendor. It just is worried about the quality of the service provided for the money paid.

SOA and SAAS together can take the market into a different world altogether.

Now Information as Service!

2007-06-14T22:26:00.000-07:00

More than product development/Research and Development, we are interested in Services. Services is the buzz word today and will keep continuing for some more time at least. Latest is Information as Service!

It's a good idea to do this, as most of the companies have too much information to be processed. Why not this data, hardly used, put into action? It can be put to use using SOA to create a data service. Brad Wright of BEA Aqua Logic Data Services Platform, talks about it here!

SaaS - Moving up

2007-06-13T22:39:00.000-07:00

Software as a Service is picking up fast. It's good that people will have to spend less on the licenses of the expensive software. Google Spreadsheet, Google Word etc will help a lot in improving the SaS market. Imagine with few licenses of Spreadsheet and Word, millions of people can save the cost for using these products!

It's impressive for the layman to use the software and pay it only when used. Many new ideas of business on SaaS are being floated by the emerging companies. That's a good development.

Views on Open Source

2007-05-16T22:11:00.000-07:00

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

Spring, Hibernate - Is it really light?

2007-05-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

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?

Page Load Time - Usability Perspective!

2007-05-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

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]."

Agile offshoring!

2007-05-15T02:21:00.000-07:00

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

ATG Portal - Copying Portlets

2007-05-13T20:54:00.000-07:00

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?

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

2007-05-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

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?

New to Architecture? Read this

2007-05-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

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!

Performance Improvement Tips on clustered Weblogic

2007-05-11T02:56:00.000-07:00

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.

Changing jsessionId to custom session id in BEA Weblogic portal

2007-05-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

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!

ATG Personalization with Siteminder on BEA Weblogic

2007-05-01T00:44:00.000-07:00

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.

IBM Portlet Factory - Back in Action!

2007-05-01T00:40:00.000-07:00

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!

Interportlet Communication

2007-04-27T02:19:00.000-07:00

I came across multiple situations where the client was more interested in providing Interportlet communication. A portal which provides an overview of the data and then on click provides the full information.

Interportlet communication though looks more user friendly has many problems with it:
1. Slow as
- it has to communicate with the back office to get the information
- the page has to hit many back offices based on the no. of portlets displayed
2. Complex to maintain as the configuration(Edit) of the summary portlets does not remain same
3. Storage of the preferences selected on these summary portlets cannot be stored in one table unless they have similar configurations.

ATG Portal Layout

2007-04-27T02:16:00.000-07:00

ATG Portal is pretty simple in defining the layouts. You can choose the layout from the existing one's or create a new one. The layouts are defined with a grid like structure. For example 80-20 layout means: A layout of 2 columns, one that occupies 80% of the space and the other that occupies only 20% of the space.

The templates jsps provided by ATG can be used to develop new Layouts.

Dependency Injection and ATG

2007-04-27T02:12:00.000-07:00

Dependency Injection concept has been defined by ATG much earlier than this pattern came into the seen. ATG has a much clear and simple approach to implement the Dependency Injection.

Steps:
1. Create an ATG component
2. Include this component in another component wherever this component is needed.

So simple! Go ahead and use it!

ATG Repositories and Hibernate

2006-12-26T11:03:00.000-08:00

I recently got a chance to understand Hibernate, a little late according to the market! I have been a huge fan of ATG repositories and to my surprise turned out to be a reuse of ATG repositories.

The hibernate_mapping.xml has taken directly from the repository.xml and the hibernate APIs the reuse of Repository APIs!

ATG still leads!

ATG Relationship Management

2006-09-11T02:28:00.000-07:00

At the core of ATG is the ATG Relationship Management Platform, which includes:

•The Dynamo Application Framework, a robust infrastructure in which to develop dynamic web applications that integrates with either the Dynamo Application Server or a third party application server, such as BEA WebLogic or IBM WebSphere.
•Scenario Personalization, which allows you to target your application to your individual users' needs
•The Data Anywhere Architecture, which provides a unified layer for accessing data from a relational database, LDAP directory or file system hierarchy.
ATG also provides additional optional modules
•The Portal module, which provides a framework for easily setting up a portal for customers, partners or employees
•The Commerce module, which allows you to sell products online to retail or business customers.

Additionally, with ATG you can get several auxiliary modules: Search, Publishing and Analytics
The ATG Integration Framework enables seamless integration with a variety of third party products and systems, such as SAP, Siebel, Documentum, Interwoven and Tibco.

ATG framework in a nutshell

2006-08-31T21:31:00.000-07:00

DPS is a smart prodcut, which leveraged the DAS and now can be integrated with other application servers as well. DPS was kind of the first JAVA personalization server in the market which really helped ATG move further. DPS's strength is its business engine architecture and simple to generate a business rules if you know how to use the DCC tool.

ATG Dynamo was considered to be one of the best application servers in the market especially among java developer communities. But later it was becoming too much for ATG and hence gave it up.

ATG's concept of "configuration layers" is not much seen outside and is a kind of boon. It means that you have a CONFIGPATH, and if there are two identically-named .properties files then any property definitions that occur later in the CONFIGPATH take precedence. This is very good for seggregating the different environment configuration .

ATG can do the same thing with XML files. Most of the "different" profile XML files are merged to get one combined Xml file during startup.

ATG is currently supporting J2EE applications and has many integration points with others. I remember that when they came with ATG 6 version they called it as Relationship Management Platform which provided most of the initial integrations with Siebel etc.

The ATG collection framework offers an event handling communication approach. Again this is simple to work with and powerful. Extending this framework to make your own dynamically configured listeners, senders and filters adds another poweful approach.

The Repository framework is something very special to ATG. It's incredibly deep and complex.

What do you say?

ATG Dynamo Solutions

2006-08-30T23:56:00.000-07:00

ATG still fascinates many people. Though it has lot of proprietary coding, it eases many of the development work especially for sales & marketing and CRM type of applications. Despite less technical resources available on this, why do big companies go for ATG? Because of the ROI it generates.

ATG did a good thing by giving up Dynamo and concentrating on its core features like Personalization, and Scenarios. Though there were initial hiccups of integrating ATG with Websphere 5.1 (initially) now it synchronizes well.

Long way to go ATG!