Google wave and the enterprise

Came across a very interesting BPM prototype on top of Google Wave. Ever since its announcement, Wave has created quite some interest in the enterprise world on how it can change the way real time collaboration works, specially from the PLM perspective. Coming to think of PLM, where I come from, I have seen a relative reluctance from the PLM vendor community in jumping onto the latest innovations that happen around in the IT space, although off late things are changing for the better.  My exposure to SAP has been very limited and i had formed an opinion that SAP is at least a generation behind in providing a better usability to the user community. Off late I am forced to change that, based on a few prototypes and new releases that I am seeing around.

Coming back to the above prototype, I believe , this should at least, set the trend in terms of  filling the so called technology gap that exists in the PLM product space, if not a direct impact. You can catch the video here.

Google OS on the way

Google Chrome OS announcement. Part of a grand enterprise Strategy?

Leveraging Virtualization in PLM Data Migration

It has been quite some time ago that I read about how NYT was able to make use of Hadoop in conjunction with EC2 and S3 services from Amazon to convert an approx 11 million articles from TIFF into PDF.  The same analogy could be drawn when doing a datamigration involving millions of objects and the associated(which can be conted in gigabytes) documents. Usually the way forward would be to use one of the vendor provided migration scripts which would be essentially a half baked wrapper around a crude migration solution, in short a piece of trash with little practical sense.

Leveraging the enormous scale that virtualization can provide would be  made feasible by forming a clever data segregation strategy around the inherently inter related nature of PLM data and associated physical files. The idea would be to identify the smallest unit of work(at a part level or even at the BOM level) which can be stateless and then weave the virtualization strategy around that.

I hope this strategy can be feasible in bringing down the execution time by a considerable margin, which can change the way data migration is being done till now.

BOSS- India’s Contribution to the OSS Community

WOW, the last post was 8 months back..so much for my resolve to be frequently updating this blog!!!!

Quite sometime back there was this news of CDAC spearheading a project to develop a Linux solution tailored specifically to indian needs.  Pretty good initiative indeed, i thought at that time.  The reason for this post is the advt i happened to see in the newspapers last week about the 3.0 release of this distribution. Christened BOSS, an acronym for Bharat Operating System Solutions, this is a debian based distribution, available in Tamil and Hindi, but ultimately to be made available in all the major Indian Languages. Unfortunately, I have been trying to access this page for the last 2 days, but without much luck.

This distribution comes bundled with the BharateeyaOO, which is a project to make available the Open Office Software in Indian Languages.

Good luck CDAC!!!!…

Free Online SmallTalk Books

Came across a collection of free online smalltalk programming books here.

Dynamic Tooltip with DWR

I have been working on AJAX framework, mainly DWR, for quite sometime. One of the interesting requirements which came through was about a dynamic tooltip. This tooltip is supposed to pull out the attributes of an object from a web-application server and show it to the user in the tooltip and this use case will be triggered from a normal search results page. Sounds cool for the user and in one way, it looks like we can have an optimal solution in terms of retrieving minimal data. Any details the user wants will be pulled out at runtime and shown as a tooltip. The optimal solution is based on how the caching is implemented so that we don’t generate multiple hits for the same object.However, if we dont have built in caching for this, the very implementation can turn out to be a problem in that the user can literally pound the server with calls of repeated nature and returning the same set of data.  Caching on the client side was an option and eventually the whole caching approach had to be abandoned due to the lack of time on the client’s part.

Since the user base is small and we dont anticipate a huge growth in the user base, the decision to abandon the caching mechanism may not be as critical an issue as thought out to be.