Lately I have started to love to think about user interface, specially web user interface. I’m not sure where I caught the bug from or how it began, but it has kept me thinking a lot lately of how to design webui.

There are lot of design sites and consultants and some of them you can find on nettuts.com or on W3CSites.com but these are again one page design and my head is filled with more of design issues we face in business software, especially communication software ( microsoft exchange sucsk ) and in particular e-commerce.

Here’s the layout I came up with, and this very basic and will be progressively enhanced later on.

There are some issues i know, like the footer still looks ugly and clueless.

By the way this is just a layout design and has no content design added as of yet, but it would be interesting to read comments and get feedback on this. Please feel free to do so.

I will publishing more enhancements later on.

It’s official and it’s out Oracle will buy Sun for 7.4 Billion dollars.

My hands are trembling as I write this, as I’m unable to comprehend the outcome of
this single biggest and significant deal in the history of software and hardware.

I’m really concerned about the openness of Java and Solaris, that we have enjoyed so
far and the opportunities that Java has created everywhere in the world.

Let’s hope and pray things remain as it is.

Problem 5 was easy, but was taking a long time in Python. So I tried it in Java, it took around 8 min to get the answer.

Here’s the code.

public class Problem5 {

public static void main(String[] args) {
Problem5 prob = new Problem4();
double number = 1.0;
while ( !prob.isDivisible(number)){
number += 1;

}

System.out.println( “————-” + number );

}

public boolean isDivisible( double number ){
boolean div = true;

for( int i =1; i <= 20 ; i ++) {
if (number % i != 0){
div = false;
}
}

return div;

}
}

In Computer world, You will always read one language being compared to another… One web framework compared to another… one javascript framework… widget system being compared to another, and frankly I was ( am, still to some extent )addicted to such post, blogs, wikis etc.

But the real challenge is to identify a problem that you want to solve. Tools have kept changing and will change in the future. ( remember stone age tools and now modern tools ). Tools are made after somebody encountered a problem and tried to solve it. There are problem all around us, all you need is an eye for it and aptitude to solve one.

I bet if you are not solving somebody else’s problem than that’s a problem. Otherwise you will not be in a job for a long time. You work somewhere and get paid because there is a problem and you are in their eyes qualified and competent to solve that. And there is benefit coming to somebody by you solving their problem.

Back to PLA. You want to write something like a number fairly quickly.. you won’t power on a computer, start a spreadsheet and not down the number. You don’t even need a computer to do that. The problem of writing something quickly and conveniently can be done by using pen or pencil. But what if you write too many numbers down…like some phone number or sales order or some document number, and you need to quickly find out what the name of person against that number. For this problem you would require a computing device. What could be the best, efficient and easiest way to do this- i would leave that you.

Point is there are problems and there are solutions and there are tools. But the most important is to identify and solve the problem in best way giving maximum benefit using minimum tool.

Be language agnostic, framework, OS agnostic and look at the problem than at tools. Remember tools will change and you need to figure out how to use but more importantly where to use them.

There was an outage at London stock Exchange that went for more than 7 Hrs. And believe me that’s serious because it’s a STOCK EXCHANGE. Couple of months ago you would have noticed the Microsoft “Get the facts” campaign. There, in one of those they claimed “London Stock Exchange chooses windows over Linux for reliability”. 

I don’t claim Linux is superb for reliability, but it lets it’s server do the talking rather than it’s marketing.

Windows is “Lipstick on the PIG”.

I heard a weird form of punishment. It’s that if you don’t meet your targets, you get Microsoft Windows Vista as punishment. I haven’t worked on Vista, but I’ve heard how it crashes and people loose their work and their patience and their mind. In my office people are desperate to downgrade their shiny new vista with XP. I think in the end windows was always “Lipstick on a pig”, but after all windows was always a pig.

download it from here

Here it’s running on my desktop.

Today morning i read an incredible news … News about Google Chrome – an open source browser based on Mozilla Firefox and WebKit. It’s got tonnes of improvements specially in the areas of speed, security and memory. It’s got a virtual machine V8. I haven’t tried it out yet ( can’t wait though ), I just read their comic strip on their official blog, but for me the thought looming on my head are the implications of this. Microsoft unfortunately couldn’t take much advantage of it’s IE browser, now it seems to loose out completely in browser war. Here is what i think are the implications of this new browser.

1> Microsoft finally admits that it’s a looser. It just can win the web/browser war anymore and slowly the market share  of IE drop from 70-75% t0 30-35%.

2> As the major browser are the open source, standard based browser, there is an explosion of functionality and capability long promised, but held back in these browsers primarily due to IE dominance. The browser becomes the “application’s platform” rather than just document( Web 2.0 ).

3> I see Opera joining Firefox, and working on firefox base and putting the good stuff of opera in firefox.

4> I see Apple leading WebKit in a different direction.

5> With Google Gears, the browser starts becoming peer to peer or decentralized pockets of computing.

Imagine small parts of application server spread out into the browser of it’s users.

5> I see browser war emerging again from it’s ashes. Microsoft – Mozilla – Opera – Apple – Google – Yahoo all fight to control the browser space, though everybody working on the common goal of standardizing the web ( except you know who ).

6> I see Web Application Science as a major in Universities and colleges.

7> I see semantic web.

What do you see ?

You would have already come across something called GWT ( Google Web Toolkit ). Basically it compiles your Java code to JavaScript and HTML. Very interesting as it takes care of all the nuisances of the browser incompatibility ( specially IE ) and hand coded HTML.

But what came across my mind is that why can’t we have a compiler that compiles Java to one the ugliest ( second to perl ) langauges. Yup I’m talking about PHP.

PHP has huge market share becuase it’s quick and dirty. All you want is set up is a simple page, obviously your preferred language of choice will PHP. No question about that and yes it’s very handy. But again don’t expect it to go beyond that quick and dirty job of yours. There are several pros and cons and this blog isn’t about that.

What I’m trying to say is for Java developers who love the language, platform and tools can we have something that basically alleviates them from writing PHP.

KIRA is one of the compiler that is trying to solve this problem. But little is known at this point of time.

It’s not a Java to PHP compiler, but it compiles a functional langauge to PHP. It’s built using ANTLR which is again a compilers compiler built in Java.

Wouldn’t it be fun to have a library together with GWT that compiles Java to JS, HTML and PHP in one go. Just deploy that anywhere on Apache ( running mod_php )and there you go…a fully functional application all written in Java that runs in PHP platform.

I really love python. But I don’t really know why. I come mostly from Java background and I wanted to use something in python so that i could quickly prototype my application which then i would have ported to Java.

I came across several post saying nice things about django framework in python and i decided to give it a spin.

After doing some basic crud application, i felt disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, i’m not biased towards Java. It’s just that I wanted to build applications for the enterprise and clearly saw that django was too trivial for such kind of task.

django is really for the Publishing world. Ya , it can churn out database driven application pretty easily and I liked it’s templating engine, but there was no clear level of separation and productivity which I was looking for.

In django the urls.py file is basically the controller, in the sense it decides which url request will go to which views. The views will have all the business logic ( it’s bit confusing in django ). The views after doing some business logic can send the data back to the template along with context data with it, which is automatically populated in the template.

so the flow is kind of

url request -> urls.py -> views -> template

and ya the good feature is you can direclty use ORM in case of django.

After having worked in Spring and Struts framework, I don’t think django framework can be that maintainable as far as enterprise software is concerned.

If anybody of you know or are doing some enterprise stuff in django, apart from CMS, Blogs or wiki than please let me know.

As i said, I really do like python.