Something is in Air

If some on follow computers actually (nowadays its other way computers follow us) must heard about cloud. And the computer guys always copy the terms from real world to use. Like Inheritance, Cloud , Mouse etc ... sometime the original meaning of these words must be thinking to sue for copyright violation.
Well copying and stealing is never a problem in this industry. It is always appreciated.
"Cloud" is such a term today no one can afford to miss it. Companies, Developers and Customers  everybody like to have it.
Well lets understand what does Cloud means and how it make sense. To start we can say your computer is connected to another computer. Then networking is there from more than last 20 years. Each year its becoming more powerful. Computer can connect with each other they can send data and receive from another computer. The next thing was application which run on network by using resource of multiple computer. Web applications are fall in this category. They run in server and user can work with it remotely.
The service providers are hosting the service in server and can cater to multiple user, that brings down end user cost of using service. The application is customized as per users preference. This is something called application on cloud. Actually it is nothing but same web application. And it is customized as per user or groups of user.
Another thing is Computer infrastructure or platform on cloud. Its like you will able to use remote server, database or application server. Amazon, Oracle and Google provide these kind of service. Here the application developers can use these platform to develop, test and host. And its easy to scale as per usage. So its a very cost effective way of using resource. Still there are some concerns with data security, organisations are comfortable to store there important data in remote data center.
And another third category of cloud services are kind of hybrid between platform and application, Salesforce, Oracle public cloud and Apple's iCloud are such example. These gives developers platform to write application on cloud.
Certainly for medium/small scale industries can use cloud services for their IT needs. It enable to have good IT system in lower price.

Annotation in Java, the last moment of information

In any football match you will find the coach jumping, screaming telling something to the players. Its not only in football even in Cricket and other sports the coach will try to give some more information to the players on field.Though there was a detail game plan which involve coach, captain and all players much before the match. They know what to do everything is planned, still the coach has to say "one more thing" while the game is in progress.
Same case with us developer, we used to think and  design our codes then write. Still we want to add some more thing while compiling or execution time. I always wish I can say the compiler hey just suppress the warning go ahead compile it, while execution of program we have always want to say something to it about the environment. Well in Java we got some thing called Annotation which serve this purpose.
Annotation can be used to give additional information about a class,method or member to compiler or JVM.
Lets look at some example.
I want to write a class which represent an table in database. We say this kind of of object as Entity object.

@Entity @Table (name = "tbl_employee") 
public class Employee{
   @Id private Long employeeId;
   ...
   private Address address;
   @Clob public Address getAddress() { return address; }
   public void setAddress() { this.address = address; }
}

Here we say Employee is an entity class. It mapped to tbl_employee in database, employeeId is a primary key and getAddress return Clob.
These information is very essential for a ORM framework like JPA or Hibernate.

we use annotation to tune compiler also.

@SuppressWarnings(value = "unchecked")
void myMethod() { }

We use similarly for for run-time to give more information to JVM. Like everything Java has some inbuilt annotation and user defined also. How to define a custom annotation and where it make sense is another topic. I will write it separately. Mean while you can look for more information here.

Which language do you speak ?? "Vlingo" !!

Hi to one and All,

After Friday comes Saturday. Surely you people remember "Friday", ain't it ?? (Nope,nope,nope I am not talking about the famous "Friday" from Daniel Defoe master piece "Robinson Crusoe"..rather this one http://java-pallab.blogspot.com/2011/10/lets-talk-about-friday.html). Well, till now I haven't got an invitation for this, but still the wait is on.


Meanwhile, moving on, it took me a while to get used to IRIS (tiny sister of SIRI, but no way nearer to it). I was looking for something in Android, which is more advanced  and could do at least the basic stuff that SIRI can do, sending text, calling people through voice, do some basic search. Although IRIS has improved a lot from its initial stages, it didn't satisfy my taste as a new android smart phone user. I just couldn't resist the idea of interacting with my phone verbally in a language I know. And soon enough my inquisition led me to my old Guru, who can answer virtually everything; Google. And one day after coming back from office, i started searching in Android market. I didn't have to wait for long. In next 5 mins I just discovered "Vlingo". And you know what my first thoughts were, Is it free Or a paid app. 


To my utter relief, I found it to be free and the next thing I could remember was calling out one of my friends name at the top of my voice, so that my phone can listen to me and make a call to him. And to my amazement, it somehow understood my Indian ascent and called up my friend. And after that I posted a comment on Facebook, I opened twitter, I messaged to two of my friends and even found out the nearest ATM machine around my place in a 6 mins of frenzied usage of "Vlingo". And to my satisfaction everything worked.


This was much better than IRIS and there are a lot of options, more than what I expected. I was happy because, first thing, it understood what I said ( You can very well infer that from the title). And second thing, it has a wonderful GUI, I somehow liked the color and look and feel and third thing it has an iVersion i.e. you have an app for iPhone also unlike SIRI. For more information you can have a look at the video http://www.howcast.com/videos/258569-How-To-Do-Things-Faster-With-Your-Mobile-Phone-Using-Vlingo.


I would be exploring it more to check out its some more interesting features...Till then 


This is Bishnu.....Signing Off..