The Mind trail has moved

I have moved the trail to http://regumindtrail.wordpress.com
as it provides better blogging features. See you there

Convention over Configuration

Of late I have been quite intrigued by some analysts reports on IT becoming a commodity service. By being a commodity, it no longer appears intellectual or elite.
The driving forces - cost, expected higher productivity, competition, e.t.c.

We view and judge programming languages and platform by the amount of flexibility that they provide. This explains the umpteen number of configuration files that our applications have these days. After all we have been taught to "externalize" as much as possible, out of the application code - the reason : maintainability and flexibility.

But havent we taken it a bit too far? How often do table and column names change for e.g? Can we instead agree on conventions for a few of these instead. Why conventions? Because it opens many exciting possibilities around creating or using frameworks to do a lot of work for you. A great example is the Ruby On Rails(RoR) platform. Iam not endorsing RoR here. I however like its idea of being able to do so much behind the scenes because the application artifacts - tables, classes follow convention. Coming to think of it - we do enforce conventions, dont we?

So why not create the conventions ins such a way that it can benefit us, the developers, and not just some standards watch dog? Eventually everybody benefits - the developer writes less code, the project is done cheaper, developers are seen as being more productive, cost comes down e.t.c

Get what Iam driving at? I seriously feel that the comments in the early part of this post will become a reality. We just need to be able re-define the way we do things - one such is adopting "Convention over Configuration" and building intelligent frameworks on top. I see RoR doing that.

Rich Internet Applications - I may start loving them...

Got this cool idea on ClustrMaps from another blog. Going to update mine to include one as well. Truly amazes me when you see what ideas people come up with world-over.
Makes me wonder about the revenue model for sustenance of these companies......

Why write my own indexing and search engine

Like any developer, I used to trust only the code I wrote myself. All that has changed with OpenSource and its widespread use.
However Iam always on the lookout to write something that is better than what is available in OpenSource - personally a means to justify the act of writing an application :)
The growing volume of data in an enterprise can be a liability or an asset, depending on how you see it. Access to this data converts it to useful information.
How does one access information easily? Do we really care about the millions of hits that Google returns? I dont think we go beyond the first couple of pages.
I define "Effective search" to address the above issue - I need to get to the information of interest fast, period.
OpenSource indexing and search frameworks are far behind the commercial ones like a Google search appliance or the Verity or other search engines.
Looking around, Lucene turned out to be a good fit for my index. The catch is I still required parsers, readers and data sources to make it complete.
This led me to write Ferret. It doesnot re-invent the wheel i.e wherever possible.
The good news is that it can index file systems & web sites(secure inranets and public sites). The best part is that it is highly customizable - I can add a datasource to index databases for e.g or add parsers to new file types.
The recent announcement on availability of Omnifind led me to evaluate it and of course compare with Ferret. After some extensive study of its features, Iam still to find out if I will be able to recommend it to a client when I cannot customize many aspects except the look & feel maybe. Also it beats me why I cannot schedule an indexing operation or atleast provide API to invoke the indexer! Omnifind suits the "indexing for dummies" needs but not for any active deployment within a coprorate portal for e.g.
For now, Ferret does all this and has found a client :)

Creating an Identity management framework

I ask - how many times have I written a login screen for any application? I have lost count. I did it when I started programming with the tools that support GUI. List includes - Foxbase, VB, Web Forms, and later Java Swing and now portal pages.
The options to store the credentials remain pretty much the same - RDBMS and a Directory server for more sophisticated implementations.

Frameworks like JAAS provide ability to plug-in implementations for login modules. Is it enough just to authenticate the user? Applications of course want to retrieve details of the logged-in user that includes the standard identifying information and minimal data that can relate a user with a business entity - one of importance in your domain model.

This trail is a thought process and implementation approach for an Identity management framework that may be extended to support authorization.

The Trail is born

Well I had to start with something to get my blog up....