transformative paradigms

I’m planning to write a series of posts under “Tech Tip”. The purpose of these posts are to share ideas/tips around how companies can leverage technology approaches in their solutions to gain competitive advantage. I also intend to provide technology implementation details as applicable.

One of the major goals for a startup is to motivate users to sign up for their service and eventually to sustain the user base. There are a bunch of startups coming up everyday and from an user its quite overwhelming for them to remember credentials for all of them. As Joshua Porter puts it in his Usage Lifecycle, the challenge here is to Sign-up an unaware/interested user. Even early adopters who might be interested in trying your service may not be motivated. But we can solve this problem by leveraging authentication technology possibilities.

It is very likely that your interested user will have one of Hotmail/Yahoo/Facebook/Google/OpenID account.

By providing your users to authenticate using these services will definitely increase the probability of an enthusiastic user to sign up. These services have libraries and documentation in their respective developer web site.

Clickpass

Clickpass is a startup providing single sign-on service that requires no effort from the end-user but provides the convenience for your site to authenticate using Google, Facebook, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. They provide extensive developer documentation and can be found here. TechCrunch also has coverage about this service. However there are also views like these that you need to be aware of before making your decision.

OAuth

OAuth is an open initiative for an open protocol to allow secure third-party website authentication . Its starting to gain traction and worth keeping an eye on their blog.

Resources

Live ID Web Authentication System
Yahoo BBauth
Google Account Authentication API

Today building a new web application involves the essential step of evaluating AJAX frameworks and select an appropriate one. In this post I will detail the various criteria that should be considered while making a decision.

Adoption Criteria

This criteria is important for IT managers (or EA strategy) to decide if it would even be necessary for the development team to take a look and evaluate.

• Licensing Model: Under what license(s) is this product offered? How would that affect your organization?
• Cost: How much does the framework cost (upfront)? Also consider cost of development tools, support, consulting? How many free updates are there? If the framework is free, is there a PRO version? If so what are the benefits and cost?
• Frequency of Releases: What is the frequency of releases/updates? Is it adequate? This shows how active the framework is among the community?
• Technology Maturity: How long has the framework been around? How stable are the releases? What is the philosophy on backward computability? What is the product road map?
• Talent Pool: Is there talent pool available for this framework? What is the expected learning curve? Input from the developmental team is certainly helpful here.

Development Criteria

This criteria is will help the developers assess the framework viability.

• UI Components: Does the toolkit offer rich set of mature components? What is the future road map for new components? Are the components customizable?
• Programming Model: What kind of programming paradigm is supported? Is it strongly typed or dynamic? Is the model familiar to developers? If not what is the learning curve?
• Web Framework Integration: Are there web frameworks that provide some out-of-the-box support? Are there any conflicts (or challenges) in using this toolkit with web framework?
• Documentation Quality: Is there adequate good documentation available? Are there books available? If so what are the reviews?
• Browser Support: What browsers and versions are supported by the toolkit? What is the road map? Are the supported browsers sufficient for the requirements? What does the community say about this?
• IDE Support: Is there IDE support? How much do they cost? How do they fit in with currently used IDE?
• i18n: Is there support for multiple languages?
• Utilities: Frameworks provide utilities like Browser Manager(Back/Forward Button Support), Drag-n-Drop, Java-to-JavaScript Serialization (for example, DWR). Depending on specifics of the requirements this criteria should be considered.

Maintenance Criteria

This criteria helps to evaluate and foresee any maintenance challenges that may be encountered.

• Community Support: What is the size of the community using the product? How active and responsive are the online forums? Is the blog updated frequently?
• Hosting: Is there hosting support for the framework JS files? For example, Yahoo UI provides hosting support
• Profiling: Is there built-in profiling support? If no are there any external tools that can help? Are there browser related constraints in them?
• Beta Components: The frameworks tend to offer lot of Beta components. For these components its worthy to look at their known issues and assess the risk.

Conclusion

Analyzing and evaluating the frameworks using the above mentioned criteria will help make an informed decision and thereby will help avoid potential future issues. During the evaluation if a framework is missing a particular feature or component and is available in another toolkit you should look to ensure that there would be no integration issues and will peacefully co-exist. Please feel free to suggest perspective for improving the evaluation process.

The issue of Privacy is one of the major concerns in the web today. The most common of such concerns centered around the user data having to live in the cloud with the potential for it to be exposed, stolen or misused by external elements (including the service provider). In this post I share my thoughts on how some of the emerging technologies can help address some of the concerns.

Emerging technologies such as Google Gears, Microsoft Sync Framework and Microsoft Volta provide programming paradigms around online/offline synchronization and an execution context. As you may already know Google Gears opens the possibility of the synchronizing content with browser plugin to provide seamless offline experience of online content. For example services like Google Reader and Zoho Writer leverage this today in their offerings. Microsoft Sync Framework opens the possibility of data synchronization across any device and data format. While Microsoft Volta promises to decoratively allow developers to execute content both online and offline.

As stated earlier the concern of the user data having to live in the cloud can be eliminated by architecting applications to load data locally. The web essentially becoming a platform for software delivery while data may be securely stored locally. The user has the choice of storing data in a medium of his choice, for example in USB drive or local hard-drive or just online. Technology support for encryption capabilities to securely store content should be just a matter of time.

Also the service providers wanting to provide data-sensitive contextual user services/experience may leverage paradigms provided by Volta. This will ensure that any user concerns around Privacy are addressed as well.

As the concept of web as a platform continues to grow so will the user’s concern of Privacy and data security. Emergence of technologies and their application in creative ways may help address such inevitable concerns.

UPDATE:

Related:
Google Gears Enabled Sites

In today’s web applications the need for returning model data from controllers in XML/JSON format is quite common. Mostly these requirements are met by writing custom code in controllers. In this post I will present technical approach that would enable your applications to return data model in XML/JSON or data format of your choice to the web tier using Spring MVC without modifying your applications.

Basically the idea is to return XML(or JSON, etc) whenever we encounter a request to the controller with parameter returnData=XML. This can be accomplished by writing a HandlerInterceptorAdapter with postHandle method to do the following:

void postHandle(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, Object handler, ModelAndView modelAndView)
{

if ( request.getParamter(“returnData”) != null && request.getParamter(“returnData”)=”XML” )
{

// add a XML Serializer to the model
// Find the model object names and add the list to model attribute “xmlModules”
// Set the view name to “xmlView”

}

}

In your xmlView (JSP or Velocity Template) for each attribute in xmlModules use the XML Serializer to generate XML and render it. There are few applications for this approach:

1. Enable front-end to readily use AJAX for existing controllers
2. Use this as a strategy to get a debug view of model data during development
3. Based on some additional key use this to get debug view from production for troubleshooting purpose

Resources:

1. XStream for XML Serialization

Tags: java spring ajax