Author Archives: Ajitesh Kumar
9 Online Developer Academies for Regular & Consistent Learning
The article presents a comprehensive list of online developer academies that provide FREE courses (90% of cases) on different topics related with web and mobile technologies that may prove to be very useful for developers at large. If I missed on making a mention of one or more other interesting portals, please shout out loud and I shall include them in the list below. Lets quickly look at what are the benefits of using one or more of these portals for learning & practicing (in some cases such as codecademy.com) software development topics: On-demand learning to learn at our own pace Structured learning New topics introduced at regular intervals Learning …
Why Facebook’s Hack May Fail to Fly With PHP Developers?
Well, for those innocent souls, I must make it clear that the title of this article has no intentions to point out that Facebook is hacked or so? This is actually about the new programming language, HACK, that Facebook officially launched few days back. Overview of Hack Language Before I go on to write further, I must thank the Facebook engineering team to have rightfully identified some of the short-comings of PHP programming language and tried to present solutions to them using Hack programming language. However, while I was going through the changes that they made by adding new features to PHP and made it as Hack language, I wondered whether …
Why & When Use Java 8 Compact Profiles?
The article presents a perspective on different aspects of compact profiles in Java 8 including relevance of this feature in the first place and, when would you want to use it. As I am also getting up to speed with compact profiles, I do understand that there could be further detail to it that I might have missed and thus, would appreciate if you could share your perspectives as well. What is Compact Profile? As defined on Oracle compact profile overview page, compact profile enable reduced memory footprint for applications that do not require the entire Java platform. In Java 8 release, compact profiles provide three different groupings of libraries …
Java 8 to Face Challenges with Enterprise-wide Adoption
The article represents some of the challenges that an enterprise might face in relation to the adoption of Java 8 across different line of businesses (LOBs). Buy-in from Business & Technology Stakeholders Unlike previous Java releases, Java 8 release has come up with some unique features which are there to sort out some of the existing technical challenges (such as Lambda expressions, Collector APIs for map-reduce transformations, Nashorn engine etc) and, challenges in relation to making Java friendly to different devices and modular (compact profiles) in coming future. The primary issue that business and technology stakeholders are going to face is to find out and get convinced with business and technology relevance …
5 Free Web Design Courses from Microsoft Virtual Academy
The article represents 5 free courses from Microsoft Virtual Academy which could be of interest to a rookie/fresher web developer who would like to learn the concepts around HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. There is also one course related with SEO which would help web developers to apply right techniques with HTML/CSS to optimize the page for search engine optimization (SEO). Following is the list of 5 free courses. All you need is to signup and add these courses to learning program and get started. Enjoy the learning. HTML5 & CSS3 Fundamentals: Development for Absolute Beginners http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/html5-css3-fundamentals-development-for-absolute-beginners HTML5 App Development Fundamentals http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/html5-app-development-fundamentals Developing in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Jump Start …
Java Developers Readiness to Get Started with Java 8 Release
The article represents different set of information that Java developers (working on 5, 6, 7 versions) may need to learn prior to getting started and make best use of Java 8 features. In case, you feel there are other topics that developers need to look beforehand, please suggest. Following are different concepts which Java developers working with earlier versions of Java need to understand very clearly in order to get started comfortably with Java 8 features. Functional programming concepts Learning functional programming concepts would help you learn Java 8 flagship feature such as Lambda expressions. In short, Lambda expressions helps you treat functionality (represented as code) as data which you …
How to Convert Your Existing TV to a Smart TV in $35
The article represents what would it take to convert your existing TV to a smart TV that shows you TV programs and also helps your checkout your favorite online videos from youtube.com. In India, the chromecast device is sold in Amazon.in online store for Rs. 3250 on this day. What is Smart TV? As explained on Wikipedia, A smart TV, sometimes referred to as connected TV or hybrid TV, (not to be confused with IPTV, Internet TV, or with Web TV), describes a trend of integration of the Internet and Web 2.0 features into television sets and set-top boxes, as well as the technological convergence between computers and television sets and set-top boxes. Read it further here. Simply speaking, Smart TV would have some of the …
3 Simple Steps to Decompile Android Mobile Apps (APK)
The article represents 3 simple steps to decompile an Android mobile app. Following are different tools that will be needed to decompile the android downloadable apk file to Java files: Dex2Jar: The tools reads .dex files and convert the same to smali files. JD-GUI: A standalone graphical utility that displays Java source codes of *.class files Following are set of things I did to decompile android mobile application (apk files). Download the android version of mobile application. The android version comes with apk extension. Execute following command with dex2jar application to extract mobile apps files with apk extension in form of *smali files: d2j-dex2jar.bat <appname>.apk Execute following command with JD-GUI application: jd-gui.exe …
Developing Apps for Wearable Devices (Glass/Watches)
The article represents different aspects of developing apps for wearable devices including some of the UI/programming best practices. Given the fact that wearable devices has become talk of the town including recent announcement by Google in relation with Android wear project, it would be interesting to understand some of the following in order to innovate apps for wearable devices: What are different kinds of wearable devices? What are different categories of apps that may fit the wearable devices? What are the UI best practices to develop apps for wearable devices? What does it take from programming perspectives? Different kinds of wearable devices? Following are some of the different kinds of wearable …
OAuth Explained with Google OAuth 2.0 Playground
The article represents concepts around OAuth based authentication with help of Google OAuth 2.0 Playground, Thanks to Google! Google OAuth 2.0 playground could be accessed at https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/ . It may be recommended to check the article on OAuth Authentication in order to understand the OAuth with the help of OAuth playground in a much better fashion. Google OAuth 2.0 Playground is a Google application put out there on the web for users to achieve some of the following objectives: Work with various different Google APIs and study/understand API feed data in form of request/response (JSON response). Understand OAuth based authentication and underlying technology consisting of concepts such as authorization code, authorization, request/refresh tokens etc. In …
What is OAuth-based Authentication?
Although there are several articles on the internet on OAuth including the pages on http://www.oauth.net , I was unable to understand the concept behind OAuth by going through any one of those pages and instead kept wandering to several pages. Maybe, because I was impatient soul and wanted to land onto one page which could help me understand it all at just one page without me to wander another set of pages including image searches in Google for keyword “oauth” or “oauth authentication”. The only pages which matched my appetite is http://hueniverse.com/oauth/ . However, one has to patiently go through all of these pages to understand OAuth. This is quite …
List of Developers Sites from Top 5 Social Networking Websites
The article represents information on developers sites/blogs from top 5 social networking websites. https://developers.google.com/ Blog: There are different blogs maintained for different google products. However, one could checkout http://googledevelopers.blogspot.in/ for latest overall updates. The developer site acts more like a portal wherein the visitor gets access to some of the following: News feed from different Google developers blogs/pages related with different Google products APIs & technologies Developers tools such as API console, OAuth playground (interesting), project hosting (http://code.google.com) etc Various different developer programs Links to important Google products Feeds from https://developers.google.com/live/ . This one is pretty interesting as it shows the live streaming event happening on different google products or information around upcoming events. My personal …
Google Maps Embed API to Benefit Local Search Engines & Others
The article explores newly launched Google Maps Embed API and talks about the benefit to end users and, some of the business benefits to local search engines. Few days back, Google launched its new Google Maps Embed API using which any business could easily embed google maps in relation with their locations with simple & easy embeddable HTML snippets. Following is how the HTML snippets look like: <iframe width=”600″ height=”450″ frameborder=”0″ style=”border:0″ src=”https://www.google.com/maps/embed/v1/place?key={API_KEY} &q=Space+Needle,Seattle+WA”> </iframe> Lets look at the API parameters (in bold) above: place: Actually, “place” is used for the parameter {mode}. Other values for {mode} could be directions, search, and view. Read for details on different types for mode on …
10 Training Topics to Transform Rookie Developers to Good Developers
The article represents different topics on which training could be given to the rookie developers to orient them appropriately and help them become highly effective developers by writing code of great quality, doing good communication, helping fellow developers etc. If you are one who is involved in planning training programs or you are one of the rookie developers, you may want to check out following topics and do the needful. Please feel free to share your thoughts/suggestions for any other topics that could be useful. Following is a list of 10 training topics that could be covered in 25-30 hours, and that could help developers imbibe some of the characteristics …
Tools & Frameworks that were used to Build Instagram (Android)
The article represents different tools and framework that were found to be used in the android version of Instagram mobile app. Please give a shout if you disagree with one or more entries listed below. Tools & Frameworks Following represents a list of tools & frameworks, mostly, open-source that have been used to build android version of Instagram app: OAuth-Signpost (Authentication) Oauth signpost library is used to handle oAuth communication. Signpost is the easy and intuitive solution for signing HTTP messages on the Java platform such as Android in conformance with the OAuth Core 1.0a standard. Signpost exposes a minimalistic API designed for two purposes: Signing HTTP messages and requesting tokens from an OAuth service provider. The article on this page explains on …
Javascript Libraries to use for Faster Webpage Loading
The article explores the web page loading issues in relation with loading of static resources such as Javascript/CSS files and goes on to suggest Javascript libraries that could be used to enable conditional loading of JS resources thereby achieving faster webpage loading. Following are some of the common use case scenarios that, if taken care, would enhance faster web page loading: Conditional loading of Javascript files in various different pages: Many of the I-could-also-do-front-end-programming adopt the approach of putting all the resources such as Javascript & CSS files in one common file and include the file in different web pages. Some of these common JS files include jquery & other …
I found it very helpful. However the differences are not too understandable for me