Ubuntu lappy

Wow. I really liked ubuntu. It may not be for geeks(but a contrasting info later) but it is definitely for a desktop user. And more importantly it has the heritage of the ever powerful Debian. I would definitely call this as GNU/Linux ubuntu. It pretty nicely differentiates between proprietary and non-proprietary software. I loved that part when ubuntu pop up at the first startup saying, do you want to continue with this x properitory driver software be enabled. It would be a less common work for m$ windows user though.

And the gnome desktop with Advanced Display technology shines. The laptop battery indicator is a very nice hack. It looks cool and yet very simple. I would definitely recommend it to friends who eat, drink and live redhat / suse / debian for desktop.

I thought ubuntu might not suit building / hacking gnome applications. But i should say it was in ease for me. I just tried a relatively new java-gnome build. It initially threw some dependency heck. But thanks to apt-get. It was way too cool. I was able to resolve dependencies and install. Wow. What more to ask if you are a hacker. Anyway the complete gnome build would be interesting. But still this is pretty cool.

Liferay portals

Liferay Portal

Wow. What an experience working with a beast of a portal server. It’s around 85 MB in size and does lot of stuffs when it comes to managing portals. No nasty configuration steps and easily deployable with tomcat/jboss bundled. I am waiting to see more application servers integration support. It also supports pretty good extended environment to compile our applications adding portlets.

I must say open source community is now into a new and different channel of thought. And this one is pretty big. It’s a java portal but still it should be disturbing all the perl and python developers.

I must say web developing and content management are pretty big and frequent words used these days. I had the oppurtunity to work in liferay (and still continuing) and i learnt the core idea.

I believe it will serve as a pretty good enterprise platform for content management and applications. Since lightweight java services like Springs, Struts etc creating significant market, liferay is set to get mature with them. Even though i could not work much on configuring liferay i was able to get a feel of it. Especially the themes configuration are made so simple. And not to forget user and portlet permission management. It can be just done in ease.

Once place where one as a liferay administrator can get stuck is with the versions. And it’s generally not so administrator friendly when it comes to debugging errors (apart from those typical java application errors). He/she needs a pretty decent hands on experience and must be able to master the liferay specific portlet configurations.

The portlet based application development are getting fame slowly but i believe one day they would definitely gain more space with more better standards flowing.

Issues regarding liferay and setup are pretty interesting topics to read on. I would like to devote some time in future writing them here. Happy reading.

interesting ognl

Being JavaScript crazy, i have little excitement when it comes to JSP expressions other non AJAX data rendering. But recently, i managed to understand something called OGNL an Opensource fix for data handling through expressions. OGNL is pretty well utilized in Struts 2 framework as part of the Client segment. OGNL in Struts 2 basically provides a rich set of interfaces to access the call stack which is otherwise called as ActionContext. This makes the data/parameter handling simple and clean.

I believe OSS efforts like these have quite a good chance to find their space in web 2.0. And more importantly Object/data notation need more standardization in the world wide web. One can give a try of Struts 2.0 considering the simplicity and power of OGNL expressions. This OGNL adds to my recent favourites inline  JSON.

Javascript, the misunderstood saga

I have written reasonably good amount of JavaScript programs to call myself proficient in the language. But i always had a little doubt or uncertainty on how good i can use this beauty. Sometimes rather many times i have felt that i am not fully utilizing the powerful concepts of OO and Modeling in JavaScript. But time/quick to market takes more importance i felt. But that’s no excuse to appreciate this fantastic language that has contributed in many sphere of the evolving Internet age.

I seriously feel that the programming language and more importantly scripting languages like this one become more mature by how it is used by programmers around the world. The model evolves based on their understandings and feedback . As far as i have seen, people have concentrated more on the amazingly utility it gives more than the model that should be followed for better maintainability and cleanliness. This is a very important point considering the very nature of this scripting language. It can get too messy when the scope increases.

I may not be the right person to speak on it. The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language would be the right place for further reading and understanding.

Think twice before you plan to get a book on Javascript if you intend to learn deeper and proper concepts. Source for the right Javascript concepts are still a confusion and cluttered one inspite of it’s stupendous usage across the world.

Open Source as fire and water

I come across the word at least 100 times in a day. But when ever i hear the word, i tend to think weather the word is used in the right tense and meaning. It has been around for more than a decade. People who believe in free software are not for the term Open Source. Still they are right in a way. People talk very serious business choose tidy proprietary techniques. But days have changed given that technology requirements have more leverage in terms of choices and cost effectiveness. The java community has taken this word as a powerful sword to win business which i feel is pretty healthy. As far as i am concerned, i believe in healthy business ecosystem and how ever you can it, either as Open Source or open Standard or Open Thoughts etc.., At the end of the day what matters to me is the society and healthy ecosystem.

The world cannot live pure capitalistic (recent markets slide shows that quite well) not deep routed communism too. Both the concepts are quite solid. Agreed. They are pillars. But now there is not so much space left in this world to build pillars which doesn’t helps in easy movement of commodities.  So when we try to stand in between the two concepts, we are called people who don’t have fixed or concrete stand on anything but safety. But what happened to both these giant concepts in recent days. One proved quite revolutionary (nothing much more than that)and the other one brought in competition which has tendency to blow the society when at a saturation mark.

The third concept of socialism comes to rescue when both other parties comes to a halt and become speechless. It’s pretty simple and designed to cater more choices. Live and let live. Competition is good and healthy competition is the way to go. Strong acceptation survives long. Now to the point, do we accept that Open Source has taken some sort of socialistic figure? I would just like to leave this question un-answered for the readers. Little discomfort with the term is the thin line it’s made of.

There are many successful case studies. And this is a very important Era of not only technology development but also the business developments which ultimately generates money to feed the technicians. I feel Open Source caters to both the segments (quite well pinned together) with ease and efficiency.