17 Mar

Personal Syndication Platform using Google Spreadsheets

Posted by venkks in Uncategorized.

I recently stumbled upon Google Spreadsheet’s worksheet syndication publishing feature. Basically you can publish your spreadsheet as a RSS/ATOM public feed. Also using Spreadsheet GData Client API it is possible to add new entries to your spreadhseet. Leveraging these abilities the possibility of using Google Spreadsheet as a Personal RSS platform seems very straight forward.

Basically one can create a worksheet and set the publishing option to output RSS (or ATOM or any format of your choice) and select an appropriate publishing frequency. Once this is done whatever you add to your worksheet is available for anyone who subscribes. Also there is an option to customize and publish a select range of cells and not an entire sheet.

Now it is possible for Clickables (Google Gadget that I developed few months back) to use spreadsheets and provide persistence bookmarking of shared links. Also, integration with Yahoo Pipes! can bring about a lot of data mashup feeds.

4 Mar

Modular software using AOP

Posted by venkks in Uncategorized.

The adoption of Aspect Oriented Programming paradigm in enterprise software is rapid. It is interesting to look at various applications of AOP in enterprise architecture:

  • Apply design patterns as modules
  • Application security architecture
  • Transaction, Logging, Stats, etc.
  • Enforce architectural design standard for application development by leveraging AOP tool support
  • JVM Clustering

AOP allows modularization of application and provides manageability and loose coupling from a software architecture perspective. From a product perspective, it allows to easily plug in features by allowing various implementation of aspects to be plugged-in quite easily.

Resources:

AOP Software Design Using UML
AspectJ Tools
Spring AOP
JBoss AOP
Clustering JVM using Terrocotta and AOP

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24 Feb

OpenID Adoption

Posted by venkks in Technology.

As we know OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric identity. The goal is to have the user remember one user name and password and login to any site which supports the protocol. It is light-weight and supports SSO.

In the past few days there has been a lot of traction to OpenID adoption with the announcement for its support from the giants AOL, Microsoft and Digg. So if you have an AOL account then your open id is http://openid.aol.com/username and you can login to any website that supports OpenID. With the growing number of startups the adoption rate for OpenID is poised to grow rapidly.

User Resources

To start using OpenID you will need to obtain one. If you already have an AOL account you could use that if you like. Or you can obtain one from http://www.myopenid.com/. For a quick overview of OpenID here is a video.

Developer Resources

From a developer perspective for you to support OpenID either as client or server there are several resources available as noted below:

OpenID Enabled – OpenID community
OpenID Client/Server Libraries – C#, Java, Perl, C++, PHP, Ruby, ColdFusion
BotBouncer – A CAPTCHA service for OpenID

I was looking at OpenID4Java API – Consumer side and is pretty straight forward.

OpenID and CardSpace

Here is a post explaining how these two complementary technologies can work together. Its interesting.

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11 Nov

ePaper

Posted by venkks in Technology.

“The Hindu” – India’s National Newspaper has released its ePaper, an online edition of its printed daily. I’m impressed by the simplicity and elegance of ePaper. Its infact a very innovative use of a simple technology — map on image which brings to the user the feeling of reading “real” newspaper.


In my opinion from an implementation prespective, the scanned images of the printed paper (Digital Assets) must have been annotated with appropriate text links as metadata. The publishing system would have to pull and these together and publish them on the web. The PDF/Text option allows the user to choose his format of choice for viewing.

I installed Times Reader bulit on Windows Presentation Foundation (.NET 3.0) as a standalone application. There is no doubt that this also brings a user experience of reading the real newspaper. I would assume that this will be the future web version of NY Times as WPF-E (Everywhere) becomes available.

Update: Recently I stumbled upon provider of ePaper technology – PressMart

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