Tag Archives: review

The messaging wars are at its peak!

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WhatsApp deviated from their no-advt policy just at the start of this month. That triggered everyone to start searching for alternatives to WhatsApp’s addiction!

Here is what I could find (and wanted to try) since then:

1/ Amity : They claim themselves to be the Interactive Messaging app, and they hail from Australia. Seems very exciting!

Here is an introductory video too:

https://youtu.be/ngBrlY2g0IM

2/Allo : This is the recently launched chatbot from Google! I think this will win the race hands-down! Their AI is very slick and you maybe even (if I say so) more human than Siri! (what am I saying?)

Although there are other non-Zuckerberg players like: Telegram,Viber,Hike,WeChat,Skype But now the segmentation has started to take its evil form in! With WhatsApp you never needed to think if the other person might or might not have the software!Kudoz to them for launching the app for Symbian S60 platform!! But ever since FB took over, just as with the deviation from no-advt policy, who knows what level of invasion might creep in! :-/ Hence my motivation to stay away from any Zuck platform!

Coming to my current phone: Jolla: Sadly only whatsapp (dislike now) and telegram seem to work via ported android apps on Sailfish OS. I wanted to try out amity app and allo on Jolla but there’s a bit of an exercise involved over there to get things working!

Further, here @RL, we had  thought of creating a messaging app ourselves couple of years ago! We thought of calling it ‘Z.(shout out to deamypixel@RL) It was build around the premise of adding a ‘Z to every greeting.

say: good morning, ‘Z says: good morningz

say hi, ‘Z says: hiz!

say bye, ‘Z says: byez!

Maybe when the right opportunity comes we will give a shot at churning this one out! Any collaborators?

Until then the search for the the whatsapp alternative is still on!

The social media thing!

Recently at work, I was given the task of implementing social engagement buttons for the likes of Google +1, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

And the successful implementaion was in two phases.

The first phase: Installing/Configuring the scripts for inclusion and second was testing them out!

Here comes the comparison of their usage:

Ease of finding share buttons.

Here LinkedIN fared last(it took me some time to reach the actual page)), while facebook came second last(it was simply not intuitive to see what changes were getting affected) and google just beat twitter for better placement of the generated script.

Basis: Easy finding + Instant display of customization + Zero extra effort.

Size of included JS

Here FB was last with 100+KB of script, while other three were quite okay, seemingly under 29KB all three combined.

Basis: Don’t know why FB is pushing so much client side javascripts?

Ease of understanding the tag’s

Here the clear winner is twitter, as they simple do a script include and use an anchor tag! It can not get simpler than this. Google came second by making it complex by adding their own custom tag. FB was ugly, while LinkedIN was pathetic, as there was not handle that I could find in their code!

Basis:I am a non-UI guy, so and anchor tag + js include sounds like I am at home!

Alignment on the UI

Twitter and Google fared quite well here, as placing them in a span/div tag, did not distort their buttons, whle FB and LinkedIN folks seems to have done a sloppy job here. Try putting a div around them and you might see their button’s vanishing at times!

Basis:I should be given complete freedom to place the button’s where I like’em.

Getting them to work!

All 4 of these scored 0 on this front. I wasted one whole day trying to figure-out the reason for these tag’s not working on localhost. Surprisingly they require a live public url for them to work fine!

Very dis-appointing!

Basis:I suppose I should be able to test on local how these buttons look for testing!

After getting them to work!

Al most all of these have a bug that if I delete the publicly promoted link/url/etc, the count does not seem to come down accordingly.Strange, but true.

No – Thank You!

For incorporating all of them I had to create a new id and register. I am glad I did it that ways, because LinkedIN was all over me pouring all their corporate tie-ups link/spam/trash all to me and making me a subscriber by default. Also reading the fine print LinkedIN seems like they are selling all infromations to 3rd party affiliates without a clear consent!

Going through FB and twitter settings was also a pain, did not go through details on +1!

Basis: No thanks for the spam!

The inclusion codes for each of these are available on these sites:

1/Google +1 2/Twitter  3/Facebook 4/LinkedIN

Well after checking out the code on a live public url, I suppose the feature would easily come out, but this was an interesting learning experience about how do folks at big public organizations code!

Twitter seems to be leading in this front by keeping it really simple!

~rohit.

Introductory AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming)

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I wrote this piece as part of my work….

Aspect Oriented Programming is one of the programming paradigms where secondary or supporting functions are separated from the main business logic. The major objective is to increase the modularity by separating the secondary functionalities as crosscutting concerns. The main driving force behind the AOP was Gregor Kiczales, who worked on AOP at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and developed AspectJ which is one of the most popular AOP packages available today.
Basic Concepts
The basic concepts involved in Aspect Oriented Programming are:
1) Cross Cutting Concern: This refers to the secondary functionality which needs to be separated from the main business logic. For example, logging needs to be performed by classes in our data access layer and also by classes within our UI layer. Even though the major functionality of classes in UI and data access layer is separate but the secondary concern (i.e. logging) is common to both. So, in this case logging functionality forms a cross-cutting concern (term cross-cutting is used as the functionality needs to be implemented in such a way that it cuts across the main functionality).
2) Advice: The additional code that needs to be implemented whenever a cross cutting concern is involved. For example, this can be the logging code which needs to be implemented.
3) Pointcut: The point of execution in the application where cross cutting concern needs to be applied. For example, pointcut is reached when we need to log information before entering a method and we need to log information after exiting out of method.
4) Aspect: Aspect is simply a combination of the pointcut and advice. So, if we continue with our logging example, then logging aspect involves the advice (logging code to be implemented) and pointcut (point where we need to execute our advice).
Support for AOP
AOP is supported by variety of frameworks, platforms and languages. As of now, nearly every major J2EE platform (JBOSS, Spring, Weblogic, Websphere) is supporting AOP. AspectJ and AspectWerkz are two most popular packages available for AOP for use with Java. Moving apart from Java/J2EE world, AOP is also supported by .NET framework (both C# and VB.NET), C, C++, Perl, Python etc.
Implementation
AOP can be implemented via a process called weaving, which involves the use of an aspect weaver reading the aspect oriented code and weaving it (or simply put as generating) appropriate object-oriented code with all the aspects integrated. The weaving methodology is language independent and the only factors which govern the choice of weaving are 1) implementation and 2) ease of deployment. Weaving process can be done in two ways:
1) Source-level weaving: Source level weaving can be implemented using preprocessors having access to modify source code files. For example, in case of Java programming language, source level weaving can be performed via bytecode weavers which can work directly on compiled .class files. Bytecode weavers can work during codebuild, or during class loading. However, this approach causes problems as some of the third party decompilers or debuggers are unable to process the woven code as they understand the code generated by Java compiler rather than the one generated by the aspect weaver. AspectJ uses source-level weaving to generated aspect oriented code.
2) Deploy-time weaving: In order to avoid the problem associated with source-level weaving, deploy-time weaving use post processing whereby instead of modifying the existing code, we subclass existing classes and any modification is carried out via method overriding. The existing code thus remains untouched. This approach is commonly implemented in Java EE application servers, such as Websphere by IBM.
Problems with AOP
The use of AOP involves proper understanding of crosscutting concerns which sometimes can be a difficult task involving clear knowledge of static as well as dynamic flow of a program. If a developer commits any logical error while implementing crosscutting, the effect may be widespread. Also, if joinpoints are modified again it might lead to breakdown across the application.

Spring Integration: Basic Fundamentals

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Looking into spring integration for quite a while now.

Spring Integration is a project of SpringSource(duh). The major aim of Spring Integration is to apply the Spring’s core programming model (IoC et.al) into the messaging domain.

The main components of Spring Integration are:

1) Message: It is a generic wrapper for any Java object combined with the metadata to be used by the framework to handle that object. The message is further consisting of header and payload. Payload can be of any type(basically a Java object) and header is for holding the information required for the message to be processed.

2) Message Channel: Message Channel forms the mode of communication between the message producer and consumer. It decouples the message production logic from the message consuming logic. The key point to be noted is that the message channel supports both Point-to-Point and Publish-Subscribe models (for the uninitiated, Point-to-Point model basically means a message has only one consumer processing it even though other consumers might also exist for the same message and Publish-subscribe model basically means a message has multiple consumers processing it simultaneously. To summarize, Point-to-point is unicasting the message whereas Publish-subscribe is broadcasting it). Another important point to be noted here is that while these two models describe how many consumers would ultimately process the message, Spring Integration also allows you whether to have message channel to buffer messages or not. This is important in the scenarios where it might be prudent not to overload the consumer with the messages.

3) Message Endpoint: Message endpoint connects the message and the application code in a non invasive manner. In other words, application code and message need not know the implementation details of each other.

Instant Noodle aka Instant Google!

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As most of us have come to peace with the latest ripple(sorry wave ain’t news anymore) on the world wide web caused by no other than google, it is time to analyse the new offering!

What is it?
An approach that takes away the mice and directly displays search results as alphabets are typed.

Any similar things exists before?
Absolutely Yes. Any regular KDE user knows what happens when Alt-F2 is pressed.

Is it any worth?
Yup! It was fun using it for two days. But don’t know how long it lasts.The good thing is that the mice has been pushed away one step more.

Any Gotcha’s?
As with any ajax application, browser button behaviour is unpredictable.You might not see actually things on the screen, but your request has everything.
Also earlier, for a search text only a single hit was required to the google servers, now every alphabet invokes a new hit.Get ready to leak unnecessary bandwith data.
Google really has some strong servers to take the toll of every search query to around 5-7 times!

The official post is here.