Author Archives: Ajitesh Kumar
Reasons Why You Need Log Management Tools like SPLUNK
The article lists down reasons why one would want to use tools such as Splunk which primarily analyses logs (server, application etc) and create reports/events to be processed by different stakeholders. Log Management Tools – High Level Architecture Log management tools primarily aggregate logs from different servers including application, database, messaging servers etc and send the same to a centralized server which then analyzes and index the logs in the database. The end user can then log onto the console of these tools and analyze the reports created on top of these logs. Following diagram represents a very high level architecture along with end users classification: Following are some of …
Developers Playgrounds to Play & Learn
The article lists down the details around different programming playgrounds that could be used by developers to learn while playing with different technologies (programming languages & APIs). What are Developers Playground? Developers playground are online applications that facilitates enhanced learning of different programming languages/API by providing developers with the IDEs like development platforms where different programs could be written and executed side-by-side and results could be studied/examined. Following is the broad classification of such playgrounds. Programming Playground In playgrounds related with programming languages, developers could learn languages while doing the coding and see the output side-by-side. Following are some of the programming playgrounds: Codecademy.com (It also presents playground for APIs …
Artificial Intelligence – Where to Put Your Time & Money
As I looked around some of the artificial intelligence (AI) related acquisitions in last few years, I got convinced, at least, on the fact that majority of large companies such as Google, Facebook, IBM are seeing various different artificial intelligence topics to play a key role in impacting end users’ life (and hence, developers) in the future. With that as the background, it gave me good enough reasons to start doing research in relation with following: As students, what topics of artificial intelligence should they take up as one of their computer science courses while selecting under-graduate & post graduate courses? As developers/programmers, what topics of artificial intelligence should they …
Java Interview Questions (Part 1) – Rookies Series
The article (first in the series) aims to present some tricky interview Java questions that could help you score high in your next Java interviews: Programming fundamentals Question: What is difference between object-oriented programming and functional programming? Answer: Following pages present good perspective on the differences: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6720348/difference-between-oop-and-functional-programming-scheme http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OoVsFunctional Java Objects Question: What is difference between comparing two objects using equals method and “==” operator? Answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5848370/equals-and-operator-in-java Question: What is the significance of equals and hash method in Object class? Answer: http://www.javaworld.com/article/2074996/hashcode-and-equals-method-in-java-object—a-pragmatic-concept.html Collections Question: What is difference between LinkedList and ArrayList? When would you want to use one and not the other? Answer: http://javarevisited.blogspot.in/2012/02/difference-between-linkedlist-vs.html Question: How come you …
Can Artificial Intelligence be the Next Big Bet for Developers?
The article presents an analysis on what’s trending in the world of artificial intelligence thereby providing food for thought for the developers if they would want to bet on engineering field such as artificial intelligence and develop their expertise around that. What is Artificial Intelligence? Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software, and the branch of computer science that develops machines and software with human-like intelligence. Read further on the Wikipedia page. In this article, we shall primarily focus upon the software that could have human-like intelligence. Following are some of the characteristics of AI-based software: Maintain ontology of knowledge representing concepts and their relationships. Should have …
What’s Needed to Get Your Code Quality Match ISO Standard 25010
The article relates software quality characteristics defined by ISO 25010 standard (SQUARE) with code quality and, recommends on what could be done by the developers to write the code matching the ISO quality standards. SQUARE stands for Software QUAlity Requirements and Evaluation (SQUARE). Please feel free to comment and add further points in any of the sections pertaining to quality characteristics listed later below. As per ISO 25010 (SQUARE) standards, Software quality can be defined, managed and measured in terms of following two broad categories: Quality in Use: Relates to the outcome of human interaction with the software Product Quality: Relates to the static & dynamic properties of the software …
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 …
I found it very helpful. However the differences are not too understandable for me