Software Architecture, Software Engineering, Technology and Beyond
I have started blogging on my earlier blog at Blogger.
While I shall keep this blog for topics on software architecture, I shall keep on posting topics mostly related to software development in the other blog .
Recently I have posted an article on Office Development ; please let me know your views and comments.
I have recently installed the Socialvibe widget , to help out the cancer victims. It does not require any contribution from anyone’s part , all it needs is a mouse click .
Lets help in raising funds for cancer treatment , simply by clicking on the Social Vibe widget on the right .
Architecture Pattern – It expresses a fundamental structural organization or schema for software systems. It provides a set of predefined subsystems, specifies their responsibilities, and includes rules and guidelines for organizing the relationships between them.
Examples : Architectural framewoks like Zachman, ( ZIFA ) provide the user with a pattern for the designing the enterprise. The OpenGroup also discusses more on this.
This article details the various attributes of a system, and where does software architecture fit it.
Design Pattern – It provides a scheme for refining the subsystems or components of a software system, or the relationships between them. It describes a commonly recurring structure of communicating components that solves a general design problem within a particular context.
Examples : Adapter, Fascade, Singleton, Proxy to name a few.The book on Design Patterns by GOF, provides an exahustive list of design patterns. The Hillside site also has various patterns. With the dynamic change in software its becoming increasingly large to create new patterns, like the one Yahoo has. The TRIZ journal entry also correlates how to use design patterns along with software engineering.
Idiom – It is a low-level pattern specific to a programming language. An idiom describes how to implement particular aspects of components or the relationships between them using the features of the given language.
Example : Idioms generally relate to a particular programming language. Curiously Recurring Template Pattern is considered an idiom in C++.
Other interesting articles on Idioms can be found below:
a) Idioms and Patterns in Architectural Literature.
b) C++ Idioms – Coplien .
c) C++ Idioms .
d) More C++ Idioms .
Normally I have been posting using the WP web editor or Scribefire. Today I thought why not give Live Writer a try.
Let me see how this post comes out.
In my earlier post I had discussed how surface computing can revolutionize the retail industry. I had also illustrated the same with some examples. Both of the examples have turned out to be real , the Microsoft / Sheration tie up .
Recently I had contacted the Microsoft Surface computing desk for the SDK and found out that the SDK is not for international rollout. It is only available to PDC participants, and US / Canada residents. 😦
I am a Google fan, and I love GReader, GMaps, GMail, Gdocs, mobile Gmail. I dont remember the last time I was not using Google for search ; in fact that is the only toolbar I have in my browser 🙂 . That also let me going with Blogger for more than 3 years. Recently I have left blogger with a PR 3. Crazy that I deleted all the blogger posts after the import.
Then I read some posts that Cutline ( the theme I am using ) has been sold, theres no tool for importing WP posts in blogger ( Draft blogger has one, but one needs to specify a XML file ) ; looks like there should be RAID 0 for blogs too 🙂 These are all shivering; aren’t they.
Then I found out why people have moved to Blogger from WordPress. I have discussed some of them in my earlier post ; so thought I would post the one that really brought me to WordPress – SEO friendliness.
What most people miss out when comparing blogging platforms is the way search engine looks at the blogs. Now I am not a great web site analyst ; but after 3+ years into blogging I have learnt a fraction of it. Once I had typed a misspelt my post heading, and there was no way to change the post title URL in blogger. I had to make a repost of the entire post for the spelling change in the URL. In wordpress you just need to edit the permalink; and you are all done. There are more, incoming links , trackbacks, outgoing links, and many others add up to the PR. Blogger has backlinks but I never saw anything coming up within 3+ years, with WordPress less than 15 datys old for me there are some incoming links – now aint that awesome. There are third party tools available which does the needful , with WP its out of the box.
There are more in blogs other than posts.
My blog has been listed in the Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 Technical In Depth category.
I searched for “Sujay Ghosh” ( without the quotes ) and clicking on the link takes me to this blog.
I have been using Twitter for quite some time, and I find it pretty useful. Twitter is simple to use, has lot of clients, my favourite being Twhirl . I feel that if the mashup interface could have been made more friendly, it would help us a lot more. There are more mashup comparisons in my earlier blog.
A couple of weeks back , I chanced to get upon Plurk , it is similar to Twitter, but has a nice UI , the responses are threaded, but it has improved . But the UI is not that effective, so I use it seldom.
I was using FireEagle today , and came across Dipity. I created a account, and at first look it had a nice UI for the time line, and one could also add events. The better part was that one can Add Sources , like Twitter, FriendFeed, WordPress, Last.fm and all of them would show up in the UI . Thats a neat work, and the user does not need to get log into each service and get the updates.
The features provided are cool, but Twitter shall still rule, as Twitter has a large fan base, and has lots of clients . Another application Twistori shall probably combine both the features of Plurk and Dipity, lets see what they have to offer.
Related Articles
I have recently moved from my previous blog to this wordpress blog. I have not imported from my earlier blog, as I want it to stay as it is. It was my first blog, it helped me in letting me know that a blog is not about writing posts, lots of things go behind making a good blog. For someone like me, who never worked on html / javascript I learned a fraction of that too. 🙂 .. remember the post-footer and div things.
It is an excellent platform, endless ways for extensibility, and supported by most of the blog world. But there are some things missing which a professional blogger would look for. I guess WordPress peeps the post there.
Social networking has become more than a past time , if seen seriously it looks like it has still more challenges to cross, but barring the challenges it has brought in a lot of change , in the way we look today.
But, there is a drawback here, if you need to find a people from the place one is in, one has to search and find the friend. This has given to a new form of social networking – location based networking. Some like Mates is based on Relationship Engine / Relationship Space Navigator. Right now there are many such networks, my favourite being Skout , it is expanding its network by every day. Location based networking sites, allows the user to find out other users from the same location. Of course it also lets you search people from other locations. In Scout for example you have a microblog too , so its a combination of Twitter and a social networking tool.
Location based networking, looks to have tremendous potential effectively. In a recently concluded architecture conference, there was a small brainstorming session ; I am giving some excerpts below:-
Background
Jack and Anne are both in Hawaii, for their business trips. Jack is a venture capitalist, and Anne is in business development for her startup. They don’t know each other but staying in the same hotel. They both have their own plans during the upcoming Saturday. Unfortunately on Saturday morning , it starts to rain and their plans gets spoiled.
How can location based networking help
With a location based networking tool , both Jack and Anne can find each other with similar keywords,”staying at Hilton”. Now the relationship engine navigator searches the network and can find Jack , Anne and other people staying at Hilton. This is also possible through GPS , but I think Relationship Engine would be a better choice, as it used certain features available in GPS too.
Once Jack has found Anne, or other people they can request for a invite and get connected. So the dull weekend may turn out to be a business opportunity for Jack and Anne.
Random Thoughts on Computing 