“Be careful of …

“Be careful of what you ask, because you may get it”

If I get a chance to relive my life that’s one thing I want my younger self to imbibe deep in  subconscious mind.

The problem is Butterfly effect , its hard to imagine all probable scenarios where you might be worse off when you actually thinking about a specific problem.

Its not really great time to be a central banker neither its for  a common man who puts faith in these masters of universe to do what’s right ……for the mankind !!

I don’t much about economics to say whether Pual krugman idea’s are stupid or not but when Mark Carney  (slated for BOE job) talks about nominal  GDP or BOJ trying desperately to have some inflation – I know  something is not right.

Can we do anything about it ?  Don’t think , so eat , code and be light on debt !!

Come On America ! – Do the right thing, Choose Ron Paul !!

I don’t really write about anything which is non technical but this is something which I feel we should raise our voice  –  Its not that Capitalism has failed ! , its the Socialism (In western world)disguised as Capitalism  which is failing .

I live in India and actually quite sad about the kind of politician we have .

Over the years hearing Ron Paul on Federal Reserve , Gold other economic issues used to give comfort feeling that developed countries ,Do have politicians who understands current issues and are ready to fight for better tomorrow  .

Made me  hopeful  that as India would progress we would also have politician like Ron Paul.

After  Iowa caucus , Ron paul is now considered more and more mainstream candidate who is in race to make a difference to current economic system which is already moribund.

Come on America ! people across the world are looking at you.

Intelij Idea : One more Casulty of Open Source

You might be already aware of the fact that JetBrains have released core Intelij framework as free and OpenSource.

Although am happy with Eclipse and contrary to many people who blasts Eclipse for flaky behaviour , Eclipse have worked very nicely for me .I am quite happy with eclipse (especially with Galileo) and huge plugins for almost everything .

Still I decided to try Intelij and see what’s all are in for offer , also to see what’s new have come in since 3 yrs (last I used Idea ).

Recently I have to come up with a small desktop GUI to demonstrate an idea and thought best possible way is to use NetBeans for Swing GUI builder capabilities . Even saying that NetBeans is a good IDE is kind of understatement.

So now we have 3 very good IDE’s in java world and all three are Open Source ! This only augurs well for Java related technologies,as sometimes not the technology but the support tools around it make the last mile difference between its adoption and rejection.

So high five for Open-Source and its has kind of proved that selling commercial products in era of Open-Source would be really tough and challenging , Even if you have a superior product.

Type Safety in Api’s

As of now am working on a fairly big  project which intended to have impact on entire bank level architecture and should be in use for more than 10 yrs .We didn’t got number 10 yrs from any mathematical calculation but it was a way to convey the message, that return on this sort of project typically comes after 5-6 yrs.

So after knowing very well that their will be many systems using your System and for  fairly long lifesapn , How do you design you Api’s ?

This particular  system is supposed to be a Cluster on Distributed Grid and will give option to other Systems to get data from Cache rather than hitting RDBMS and going forward the plan is that all System just work on top of this grid and so for them no Db calls !!

Now this systems will have fairly big outward facing Api’s and question in our mind was how to design these sort of Api’s. One important aspect of this design analysis is

What level of type safety we should have ?

Although with introduction of Ruby etc in mainstream programming , java static type saftey is preety much under attack.But my experience suggest that if you have a project on which more than 10 people will code than this is really a very important aspect to see while choosing a language . And this can be seen in Java’s success in big server side projects.

Now coming back to the point , how important is Type Safety in you Api’s which are exposed to outside world(other than your team) ?

Well answer from my side is very much , don’t give user a chance to call your Api’s with Generic Arguments.So while designing you Api’s try to be as as type safe as possible .

• Don’t take generic String as argument’s for everything and then do conversion’s .
• It really difficult to find a usecase where a method takes a argument as Object or return’s a Object.
• If you have such methods then examine them closely or this may be perfect case to show your Generics knowledge.

While pondering over this i came across this article and really enjoyed reading it ,as it reinforces the concept that your api’s should be type safe and this should happen at compile time.

Also its a good news that Criteria queries will be part of JPA 2.0 which i think was most missed feature in JPA especially when you have hibernate as persistence provider.

Evolvoblity in Software System …

Right now working on this and its kind of really interesting problem

So what’s the problem we want to solve :

• Say We have a central Server/Cluster/DataStore.
• Many Clients accessing this Central thing.

Let’s take a specific case for better understanding.

You want to have a trading platform : It will consist of

• Trade booking applications : We can have mutiple apps say for Equity/Derivatives/FX etc.
• Central Data store : Resonsible for data storage and single source of data for other applications
• Middle office Systems like Confirmation Systems ,Settlements Systems etc.
• Back Office Systems.

And in out System we have a class defination of Trade : a,b,c as attributes.

Currently everybody has this Class defination and they are able to Read/Write happily.

But what if  a Client want’s to add a new field( d )to this Trade class and want to use that ?

Do all the other Clients/Central thing needs to be Upgraded as well ? For practical purposes this may not be desirable.

So then how do you design your System where a Single client upgrades to new version and its using new fields but other clients are still running on older version , its just that they don’t see the d field but can work with a,b,c .

It turned out that this is not so difficult to achieve!

The real problem is if a Client adds a New SubClass (new trade type,having extra field d ) and still other clients can read this ,same as before ,able to work on as Trade class (on  field a,b,c without knowledge of d).

How Agile turns into Fragile

I really like Agile  methodologies  especially because of its focus on  iterative development which encourages frequent inspection and adaptation.

But i would have been very happy if this was incorporated in normal working practises rather than giving a new fancy name.Now it gives a license to Managers to change requirement at any point in time and if you get back to them ,they will teach you about Agile way of doing work.

So how people have changed Agile to Fragile.

• Requirement evolves  (To)  Reguirements can change anytime and to anything.
• Document what is necessary (To) E-mail’s are good enough documents.

Book Review of “Java Power Tools”

I am currently reading Java Power Tools , came across this book on John Ferguson Smart blog.I quite regularly read his blog as he generally writes about current java landscape and good overview of problems faced in current set up say release management,branching strategy ,continuous integration etc.

So on weekend just went out and got a copy of it from nearest Book store ‘Landmark’ in gurgaon.

After going through the index i noticed that we were using mostly all the technologies in various projects barring

a) Continuum,LuntBuild : I am happy with Hudson and no itention of switching to another CI server.

b)Openfire : Haven’t heard of it ,will try to dig deeper into it.

c)JunitPerf ,Jmeter ,Jupiter etc:We are using something else but would like to know more about them especially JunitPerf and Jmeter.

After going through couple of Chapter i noticed that this book is written in very simple and clearly demonstrated the rational behind using these technologies .May be its due to the fact that  i was already familiar with most of the technologies mentioned in the book .

In all i would recommend this book to java developer for a reference book for what’s all tools available for their arsenal.

Few things standout for me :

a) TestNG :

Author pointed this as Next-generation Testing and in my view this is very apt definition for TestNG.Junit has not kept pace with growing demands in testing space and Junit4 is also bit of disappointment.It still lacks on many features and i think way behind TestNg.

One thing i find missing in TestNg chapter is migration strategy and examples for Migrating to TestNG from Junit.But otherwise other aspects of testng were well explained like Test LifeCyclye,managing dependencies in test cases,parallel testing etc.

b) Continuous Integration :

This book cover this topic quite well and give a good overview of various tools available for this like hudson,cruise-control,continuum etc so well covered topic.

c) Profiling and Monitoring using Sun JDK tools:

Its really good to see that this book pointed out some very handy tools available to developer right under their nose ex: Jconsole is really good tool for thick client application monitoring.

I still don’t know why the tools which come bundled with JDK are not so popular inspite of such a  great use.

What this book missed :

a) Aspects :

Aspects is a mainstream concept now and could have been incorporated in this book.AspectJ have now really matured and now comes with good support in IDE like eclipse and Idea.

b) Design analysis tools :

Some insight about determining health of your current project.Some tools which can be discussed are CAP ,JDepend .

c) UML and Reverse Engineering tools :

I think this is also a topic worth considering in this book .Their are some good offerings from IBM which integrated well with Eclipse (although paid).

eUML2 from Soyatech is another good tool for UML and comes with very good eclipse plugin .

In all its a good book for getting a feel of Java landscape.

Homegrown Persistence Framework

I now moved to new team in my company and task is to set a team in India which  works with london based team on round the clock model.

In process of this migration we inherited existing java code. Functionally this code is in production and is performing quite well.And this project started as small and then grown into a important big project.

Couple of points worth mentioning about this code.

• Extensive use of Static  : Or Over use of static .Writing Unit tests is big nightmare and now i can fully appreciate how dependency injection is so useful in writing Unit testing.
• Extensive use of nested classes : Not sure exact need for this kind of architecture.
• Home Grown Persistence framework.

After working with Hibernate and JDBC ,this is first time i am working a piece of code which can be dubbed as Home grown Persistence framework.Its really nice from personnel prespective after reading all sorts of problem self written Persistence framework could pose.

So am looking forward to get as much prespective on any design approach and  what prompted to be that way.

Also to compare that with hibernate .

Manage your Eclipse Plugin Dependencies

For a Java developer who primarliy uses Eclipse as IDE,managing all the dependecies can be nightmare.It took me quite a while to get euml2 plugin installed and working.

More often downloading a new plugin can leave your eclipse installation in inconsistent state and you are now worse than when you started.

I try new plugins just to get feel of what’s on table from eclipseplugincentral,but am always worried about the dependencies i need to sort between eclipse versions and then plugin’s version.

And then i came across Yoxos ,it just what every eclipse user needs.You select the plugins and it sorts out the dependencies for you.And you get a customised eclipse installtion for you.Really sleak….

It’s really worth giving a try…

http://eclipsesource.com/en/yoxos/yoxos-ondemand/

Note: Would be a good idea to start building from base Java IDE

Learning the Art of Databases.

Relational databases are their for long time and going forward nothing seems to change that trend.

Object oriented database are now history and it seems that the idea was great but execution wasn’t. So we are pretty much goona live our life with RDBMS.

I was working in Computer graphics and we used to have 3D file formats like DWG ,DXN ,IGES etc and for couple of years i had absolutely no contact with databases.But as i am again working in JEE world and in this world DB’s are backbone of any application.

So how to be with current with this aspect of your programming world , well I’ll suggest http://www.databasecolumn.com/

And if you just want to hone up your Db skill’s than you can try these

• http://sqlzoo.net/1.htm
• http://www.java2s.com/Tutorial/Oracle/0480__PL-SQL-Programming/Catalog0480__PL-SQL-Programming.htm
• http://www.oracle.com/pls/db10g/portal.portal_demo3?selected=5
• http://www.db.cs.ucdavis.edu/teaching/sqltutorial/