My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

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.