The Google wave was announced a few weeks ago. It had the most exciting features with a killer interface. We were told that there were three components: The Protocol The Product The Platform The product and the platform were conceived with extensibility in mind. I am not going to delve into these since there are [...]

It is amazing that within a few hours of my talking about the unwieldiness of big companies, there was an announcement made followed by widespread market reaction, which served to illustrate one of the points I was making in that post. I am alluding to the Yahoo! – Microsoft merger and the reactions that it [...]

As I take a saunter in the technology landscape, I get to look at the inner workings of many software juggernauts – gigantic companies with multiple products and support for a myriad lines of business. I find them all exhibiting similar traits as they transition from a small company with a focussed line of business [...]

In the beginning was the Class. The class had fields (or instance variables or members ) and methods (or messages or member functions) . The programmer created the class and said “I created thy from nothing. Thou shalt exist and breedeth instances of thyself which would be objects”. And the class was happy and the [...]

In almost every application, there exists some kind of ability to execute a search for information. In fact, an application without a search screen is probably too trivial to even be justifiably called as an application. A search screen allows the user to look for “some stuff” by entering some criteria for searching. A new [...]

The other day I had installed Spam Karma for word press which is a nifty little plugin that catches unwanted spam. It catches all spam and produces a report to me by email. But an alarming signal is that I seem to be spammed less and less. This indicates that my frequency of update of [...]

Mocking – Introduction Objects are first rate citizens in the Java society. Like a typical society the Java world has different flavors of objects each performing its own function. The Single Responsibility principle (SRP) states that objects should perform one single responsibility to ensure maximum re-use. This principle, however sociologically sound poses huge testing challenges. [...]

Recently, I have been very involved in hiring for and growing our Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG). Thus far, I have either distanced myself or paid scant attention to this part of software development. But my involvement in this initiative has made me to rethink through this and consider it in a new light. As [...]

I used to work with banks and financial companies chiefly. In these institutions, it was natural to have two different streams viz. the software stream and the core business stream – be it banking, brokerage or whatever else. Of course besides these two there are other streams such as infrastructure, administration,HR etc. The structure is [...]

AOP has graduated for quite sometime now from the esoteric reaches of design to become a mainstream pattern. Hence it sounds almost superfluous to describe AOP in an explicit article since there have been multiple attempts to document it already. But I believe that in talking about AOP, I get to talk about good architecture [...]