Henry Jacob

Think Tablet First

As per Deloitte predictions, more than 50 percentage of all 'computing devices' sold this year will be non-PC (smartphones, tablets, etc.) and 25 percentage of all tablets this year will be purchased by enterprise customers. 

While iPad ruling the premium segment, a large number of manufactures are expected to release mid-range and entry-level Android tablets in coming months. If this trend continues then soon Tablets will be the primary way the users will consume web and enterprise services. 

This presentation looks at various possibilities of reinventing web/enterprise applications, pros and cons of various tablet platforms (iOS, Android, QNX, webOS, etc.)  and tools/frameworks to build cross platform applications.

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Think Tablet First from Henry Jacob on Vimeo.

PDF download available from SlideShare

World Usability Day 2010

My presentation for World Usability Day 2010 is available in Slideshare. It is a global event, celebrated across world on second Thursday of November. This year's theme is 'designs, products and services that improve and facilitate communication. We taken this opportunity to promote usability and this year's theme through this presentation.

World Usability Day 2010

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Technology Trends 2010

List of technologies that can influence the enterprise software development in 2010.

Technology Trends 2010

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Attack of the Clouds: How cloud computing changes everything

Cloud computing has already made a huge impact on how we manage servers and infrastructure; you might be already using some of the cloud services directly or indirectly. For example Twitter and Slideshare uses Amazon S3 to store presentations and images.

So far my experience with cloud computing is great, for example Heroku, a zero maintenance hosting platform for Ruby on Rails applications, which itself uses Amazon EC2.

From a business point of view, cloud computing provides a huge opportunity in terms of cost, maintenance and time to market.

"Attack of the Clouds: How cloud computing changes everything" is my recent presentation prepared for an internal briefing, I tried to cover 'why and what is cloud computing', 'types of cloud services', 'popular cloud computing providers' and a demo with Heroku.com.

Attack Of The Clouds

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Groovy Grails Hallelujah

Groovy and Grails are changing the way we develop software projects. though I personally prefer and use Ruby and Rails for all my personal projects, grails has an edge for developing enterprise applications.

• First, it is part of Java Platform, runs on Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
• Uses the same infrastructure as Java, can run on Jboss, Tomcat, Weblogic, Websphere,etc
• Enable Rapid application development, develop java applications in weeks instead of months
• Closely integrate with Java, existing Java libraries can be reused and extended
• Full stack application framework, all the standard java frameworks (spring, hibernate, junit) are nicely integrated
• Provides quick start for creating project and development environment (generates basic project structure and build scripts), you can create projects structure in less than a minute.
• Move the focus from technologies and frameworks to functionality, provides developer friendly Domain Specific Language (DSL) for wrapping complex java configurations such Hibernate Mapping.
• Follow and encourage DRY(Don't Repeat Yourself) approach, plenty of plugins to include common functionality such security, authorization, search, etc.
• Cloud friendly - using light weight architecture enable Grails applications to be hosted on Cloud Computing environments, with little effort.
• Agile development - fully loaded with tools and techniques required for agile development (Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development and Continuous Integration, etc)

 If you are not using groovy and grails yet then you are wasting your developers time as well as your client money.

Reinventing Offshore: We need poets, not just literate

One of the most discussed subject in offshore development, is bad code quality. various factors contribute to this problem, you can easily blame the developers. But the fundamental problem is with the way we groom individuals in an organization.

We used to have syntactical problems, today, these can be solved by automated code review tools like CheckStyle, FindBugs, FxCop, StyleCop, etc.

But does this enough? 

there is a huge difference between a quality code and syntactically correct code. A quality code is much bigger than syntactically correct code,

it is like a poetry.

right use of words, correctly structured, in a shortest form, without affecting the language grammar, conveys the message and make you feel great.

Most of the developers come out of college as literate, they know read and write java, or any language. we can't expect quality code from them, unless we groom and expose them to quality code in a systematic way.

Craftsmanship: The Meaning of Life

'Craftsmanship: The Meaning of Life' is selected as one of the Top Presentation in Slideshare.net

Craftsmanship: The Meaning of Life

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Qualities of Craftsmanship

Regardless of whatever you do, Craftsmanship is the key for a successful professional life. A good craftsman always possesses the following key qualities.

The end of Java as we know it

After working with Java for more than 10 years, its hard to say goodbye, but everything that has a beginning has an end. I feel, Java become too much of overhead for any new software development projects whether it is enterprise projects or niche product development.

Too many standards, and too many implementations, make even a small project very complex.

Standards are great, but the main focus for these standards become vendor independence rather than simplicity and practicality. for this very reason, frameworks like Spring and Hibernate have overthrown standards like EJB.

last few years, new frameworks like Rails, not only changed the we develop applications, also brought new perspective on developing framework itself. with dynamic capabilities and user friendly DSL (Domain specific languange) approach, put these frameworks far ahead of java in terms of development speed and simplicity.

Today, time has come for us to move beyond Java and embrace some the better and simpler alternatives like ruby on rails for web development, Adobe Flex for rich internet applications, Adobe AIR for cross platform desktop applications, Groovy and Grails for web development with java integration. Erlang for concurrent applications.

in spite of all the complexity, the best thing happened to java is, that it has evolved beyond java and become a platform of languages, today it supports all leading languages including ruby(jruby), python (jpython), groovy, etc.  this means you can use new languages and frameworks like groovy, and grails on java platform, while utilizing the existing java components.

A Change is on the Horizon

One of the noticeable differences between a great programmer and bad programmer is their interest in learning new languages.

Learning a new programming paradigm helps to stretch your mind and makes you a better programmer overall, even if you never directly apply any of the new techniques. Notice I’m talking about paradigms here, not languages. Learning C++ if you know Java may make you a lightly better programmer over all, but going from Procedural programming to OOP for example, can be a mind-bending experience. – Arsalan Zaidi

When a new programming paradigm is accepted, the entire landscape of computing changes. The very reason why Java dominated our industry in the last 10 years is because of the adaptation of Object Oriented Programming (OOP)

Now the trend is moving from OOP to what we call Dynamic/Meta Programming. The languages like Ruby, Groovy and Python belong to this category. They are already making a big impact on enterprise software development.

There is another trend is moving towards Functional Programming. This includes languages like Scala, Erlang and Haskell. They are interesting but suitable for writing scientific applications.

Start learning at least one or two languages from the above list. Even if you are not going to use them in near future, at least, it will help you to become a better programmer.

If you have any problem in selecting a new language, then few more to choose from