Future in pocket

mobile lot

It’s very obvious that the world i going to see and use lot of mobile apps very soon. What we see now as a web is about to experience a major drift. All web protocols are going to be clubbed together and made to work on mix. I am sure HTTP is there to live long. The mobile application will have to be more web centric and be very specific for it’s purpose.

I am really impressed by SMS 2.0 which i use in my N72 for sending and receiving color messages and it has got a beautiful interface for reading news side by side. XHTML is another ground breaking solution to the structuring of displays in web browsers in mobile. I could see many articles being published on mobile market in recent years. One interesting thing is that there i no one right way to make applications because no one knows exactly what to do with it till date except few internet applications.

What does flex, flash, xhtml are to offer the user interface richness ?

Almost all software vendors are eying the market inclusing Microsost and SUN. Big players support and fund lot of startups too. Is this a right market for free software to make money for the service ? That looks like a very bright chance !! Already lot of free software solutions creeping up!!

software, lawsuit, and patentable

Software patents have always been a controversy and much worse they are not understood by most of the people. Even the lawyers are paid to decode them. The most obvious reason is the way in which they are developed, maintained and shipped unlike the other products like refrigerators, motors etc..

Any standard or protection law need not go to the extent of encouraging innovation. But atleast it should not curtail it. The nature of software being such a fluid idea, lacks clarity even to the person who developed it, the idea is nothing but asking for trouble. And as Stallman says, it;s just a pure math and that math could be formulated in many ways resulting in similar ideas. So, taking the ownership for the way of math doesn’t make much sense.

And the idea of cross licensing is another matter of concern. It behaves simply as a trade tool and nothing else. Obviously makes the world of software a pure business that doesn’t give room for innovation or new ideas. More seriously, It affects the small companies entering the market. If i have to publish a software idea, there is most likely a similar math already patented. If i am a big corporation then i am likely to be noticed by the cunning patent holder but even in that case i can fight it out with my lawyers. It becomes a story of lawyers and lawsuit.

Registered patents under US Patent could be read online. Just a Google search will take you there. It’s fun to read them and definitely the inverse when we understand that we are troubled by the same.

To Make, Ant and MSBuild

I am not sure if we can assume Ant as the replacement for Makefiles. But i feel they are good in their own ways. Makefiles are extensively used in opensource projects where in one can utilize the power of shell commands and rich set of options.

But the downside of Makefile is the availability of developers to write the build files and maintain. Even in my own experience i have seen many stumbling to resolve build issues. Esp. people who are not much into Unix. But still there are millions of code being compiled using Makefiles and it is definitely there to live long.

On Contrary there is a need for scripts which are easier to maintain/understand/cross-platform. And as always it is, xml is the answer. And build tools like Ant and MSBuild have acquired some reasonably good space share.

There are even cases where Ant to execute a MSBuild (after all just a native OS call considering the .NET framework installed) and MSBuild executing an Ant script.

All said, both the styles are there to remain long until we see a total drift in the way the projects and dependencies are handled. One best benchmark i would say for Makefile is the GNOME project. I guess it would have crossed 110 modules by the time now.

A must read article on Automake in FSM suggested by Ranga.

Session on HTTP

Today morning gave a session on http and it was quite a pleasant experience for me. Had good feedback from the people who attended.

I was clear in my understanding on HTTP methods (thanks to web and books) and the way request response were handled. Though i did not have time to give demo on packet sniffer, i could explain their idea of it’s existance. We did not have any computer in the hall and that made me write on the board. Write code snippets are little painful but i remember my english lecturer in school writing almost the whole book on the board and we just copying it in the note book to get corrected again.

Memories of ethereal and college days were flowing when i was explaining packet sniffers.

I have not tried writing any serious AJAX code till now though i have managed to work on it. Now i am quite motivated to write one for my own use.

HTTP tunnelling was quite interesting and i must try it some time. I have seen people using SMB (Samba rather) being tunneled into SSH. But never tried it.

 I compiled a short note which is little difficult to decode (even for me) and uploaded. The link is given below. I did reasonaby good formatting and took the printout with me for the session.

I think Ranga will remember me asking him a month back the some useful link on http basics. The one he gave me was simple and easy to understand. Here is the link.

Comma Seperated Values

In the middle of document format war’s, a breather for developers trying to export operational data (later to be used in spreadsheet

application).

If text/xml is still under way to be accepted, then lets switch over to plain text. CSV comes in handy at this point.

Incase we want to export / Render data in web, we are just java script distance away from it. There are beautiful regular expression

notes available in the web.

Recently i saw in a web based free personal accounts tool which exports data as CSV. I guess they would have thought over for a

long time to choose between various commercial formats. And finally settle over plain text.

Even though CVS are not opted when it comes to the styles element, still a useful option to survive the web.