My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

Yeah, I switched jobs again

I’ve now joined Eclipse’s Platform UI team thru IBM. Its interesting to see that writing blog helped me to land a job. No definitely not this personal blog, but its my other blog Eclipse Tips. This move basically changes a few things. Like now my official laptop is not a MacBookPro, but a Lenova ThinkPad loaded with Windows ** Sigh **. One thing that didn’t change is my location. I will still be staying in Coimbatore, working remotely and visiting Bangalore in regular intervals.

Its been a one hectic week @ IBM with all the paper work, inductions, team lunch in Nandana Palace and an team outing in Golden Palm resort Now that I have some time, I wrote an initial draft of what it feels to be in the Big Blue. Then I looked into each bullet point in every page of the Black Book of "Business Guidelines" and edited the portions which I’m not supposed to reveal. Here is the edited one:

I’m joining IBM as XXXXXX XXXXX and will be seated in the XXXXX XXXXX building in XXXXXX city. Believe it or not, I’m in Band XX and getting an annual income of Rs XXX.XX Crores. There are many things that are good about IBM. For instance the XXXXXX XXXXX software that is used internally for XXXX XXXX XXXX and XXXX. Now how many companies really do that? Companies with this massive size usually won’t XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX, but IBM choose to do it. In case you are not surprised, IBM also XXXXXXX XXX XXXXX XXXX with XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXX, so that XXXX XXX XXXX happens. If you ask me one thing I don’t like about IBM, it would be: XXXX XXXX XXXX the XXX XXX when XXXX XXXX. Hope you agree with me completely.

Yeah, and the usual disclosure. Any opinion expressed here, in any other blogs, forums, websites, "Letters to the Editor" column in "The Hindu" daily, weekly magazine’s sudoku column, my daughter’s drawing book and scribbling on the toilet papers, are not necessary my employers opinion, but all my own.

written by Prakash

Happened to Gimp a Wall-E poster for Ganymede poster contest. Its been voted for the fourth position. Happy

http://www.eclipse.org/ganymede/postercontest.php

You can find the original poster here.

written by Prakash G.R.

Last night we went live with BaZaa beta. Download it here.

You can list items and find items, and BaZaa provides you the matches. Best of all this is that none of your queries/listings are saved in the server and that makes it very scalable. The speed and efficiency will good when there are more users and items listed. I’m not going to explain the technlogy (BTW, its patented) but just the UI, which I wrote. Here are some screenshots (Click to enlarge):

Seen all the screen shots? Now you get a picture of how to list/find right? Now close your eyes and think how many places you have the labels like “Query: [text box]“, “Price: [text box]” ? Can’t think of any? Well, there are only few places where we have labels. The UI was designed from the ground up in a way that the users will not have the web-based-form-filling feeling. When one of the demos a partner prospect from Zurich said, “for the first time I’m seeing a UI that I can use immediately without asking anyone how to use”. Oh! yeah, if you were wondering, we are neither shipping any documentation for how to use it nor having a web page for that. Keep experimenting the UI and try out yourself

Believe it or not, all the UI components are OS native components, but coded in Java! 2 months back, when I was given a demo of this for the first time, the UI was in Swing and looked pathetic. I was asked whether it can be improved. That night in the hotel I wrote the mock up as an RCP application and when I showed it to my CEO the next day, he was impressed. It was obvious that SWT & RCP is the best choice for BaZaa over Swing. Ever since that day, I worked on few hours every day for building and testing the UI and finally we are live!

As of now, we are running the servers only in US. We have purchased servers & bandwidths in other countries, soon you should see local version. Try it now and send your comments/suggestions either to me or click the feedback link in the BaZaa website.

written by Prakash G.R. \\ tags: BaZaa

[Cross post from my Eclipse blog]

Eclipse Demo Camp is coming to Bangalore on 10th Dec. Looking at other Demo Camps, Bangalore might be the one with highest number of registration (around 50) - and its still growing. In case you wish to attend, do register here.

Yup, I’m working on a presentation on GEF. Meet you all there.

written by Prakash G.R.

A nice way to improve productivity is to open up a long progress bar for every other operation the user will perform and display productivity hints below that progress bar.

Courtesy: IntelliJ IDEA.

PS: I’ve been using Eclipse as my primary IDE for the past few years and I wonder why Eclipse lacks this feature

written by Prakash G.R.

Did you notice that the Google Reader now offers offline mode? It can download and save your files so that you can read them even when you are not connected to the internet. It is powered by Google Gears. I tried to create an application by going thru the steps in the Developer Guide Tutorial. It was not that easy to follow it. It could have be a bit more simpler. If you are looking for a simpler version, its available here.

written by Prakash G.R.

I’ll be there at EFI India 2007. Its a 3-in-1 conference, so there will be three parallel sessions. There is no suggested tracks and the seats in every session is limited (and so is the parking space. Only for 80 cars and 150 bikes!). So if a session is full, then we have to attend the other. The sessions I plan to attend:

May 28:

Fundamentals of Eclipse Plug-in and RCP Development

May 29:

An Introduction to the embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP)
Architecture of Java Persistence Implementations
Best Practices for Developing Interoperable Web Service Applications
SDLC for SOA - Where are the Models?
Polyglot Programming

May 30:

10 Ways to Improve Your Code
Simplifying Enterprise Applications with Spring 2.0
Web-Service Transactions with WS-Transaction
Building an Ajax Java Web Application Using the Dojo Toolkit
Web-Service Specifications – An Orientation Guide
SOA: The Future of Distributed Computing?

May 31:

IBM’s WAS Community Edition Initiative with Eclipse
Leveraging SOA and ESB for an Enterprise Architecture
Building an Ajax Java Web Application Using the Google Web Toolkit
Introduction to the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF)
Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

In case you are planning to attend, drop me a line. We’ll meet.

written by Prakash G.R.

I’ve whole lot of plugins (Mylar, WTP, Subclipse…) installed in my Eclipse. Sometimes, I will have OutOfMemory Error and the workbench will close after showing an “Internal Error” message box. Today the “Internal Error” message box had an interesting error message. Here is the screen shot:

written by Prakash G.R.