Launch of TechTracer

Hi friends,
It bring me great pleasure to announce the launch of my new technology oriented site names TechTracer. The aim of this site would be to promote new technology related concepts and tools to help you in your daily activities.

The vision for this site is to bring into light important aspects related to J2EE, AJAX, Web Services and Java Certifications since I am working in these fields.

You can access TechTracer with the URL’s http://www.techtracer.com or http://techtracer.com

Hoping to have a nice jouney in the world of technology with all you who have been reading posts in this blog and supporting with your advices. Do leave your footprints out in TechTracer too.

Snapshot of TechTracer :

SCDJWS - mission accomplished

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Edit: The author has moved to http://techtracer.com
All further posts will be published at the new location.

Future of Web Preview - CoolIris or Snap?

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Edit: The author has moved to http://techtracer.com
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Microsoft Office Online and its weird strategy

I wanted to try out the Microsoft Office online as I think this is the first time Micorsoft is giving a try out facility for its office products online. Microsoft is so much succumbed to its propreitary theory that when you try out the office online demo in your Firefox browser, you are shown the message that, the demo can only be viewed only in Internet Explorer 6.0 or later version.

In order to use Microsoft Office Live, you will need to have Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later running on Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Microsoft Windows Server 2003. You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer from the Internet Explorer downloads page.

Keen on seeing the demo I closed down Firefox and opened it in Internet Explorer and I was shocked to see what was in front of my eyes.

Groovy with Grails – Java’s fight back to Ruby on Rails

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Edit: The author has moved to http://techtracer.com
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Meebo’s new avataar

Meebo is finally out of its Alpha version and has made quite a lot of upgrades on its alpha version. Meebo, right from its launch has been consistently growing on its reputation as the famous web based yahoo messenger for most of the folks who wished they could chat from their office where messenger couldn’t be installed. Meebo has struck on its right course by supporting the 4 major e-messengers viz. Yahoo, AIM, MSN and JabberTalk. This integrated e-messenger which has been one of my favorites right from the moment I had used it now comes with a pop-out messenger feature which make its resemblance to the desktop Yahoo messenger including the drag and drop users into different groups. Its become more richer in its UI and also now supports chat logs much akin to Yahoo. I suppose meebo will be the most wanted messenger as its much easier to open up a web page, log into your favorite account and start chatting. Who would want to waste time in downloading and installing the desktop ones!!

Note: I am all the more pleased because wordpress comes with a built in widget for using meebo and you can even chat with me now right while reading my blog with the integration of my meebo in the sidebar to the right.

Experiencing Mozilla Thunderbird

I never had used Microsoft’s Outlook Express as I did not like using a POP account locally as I thought that it might hinder the performance of my network due to bandwidth consumption. I still do, nevertheless I wanted to try out a POP account access at some point of time so decided to give it a go. Besides gmail takes a lot of time to open in my browser. I have a gmail account and to my surprise, it already has an option to enable POP access to the email access.

I am a frantic user of Mozilla Firefox so decided to use Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 Mail Client rather than going on to Outlook just for the heck of it. And hey, it’s damn simple!! Gmail provides a complete step by step procedure for configuring Thunderbird with its POP and SMTP servers and within minutes I was reading and composing mails from within Thunderbird.

The cheesiest thing about using Mozilla Thunderbird which I later found to my pleasant surprise was that Firefox automatically gets integrated with Thunderbird and you would be able to access Thunderbird from within Firefox. Furthermore I can now configure my Yahoo account also in it. Firefox provides the most wanted facility for me i.e accessing syndications from blogs I frquently visit.

So checking mails or blogs now doesnt require any more waiting for your page to load.  Just log intoThunderBird and have fun!!

Open vs Proprietary Standards

I was quite irritated while reading this point in a post on ajaxian

The kind of rich interactivity that Flash and Windows Presentation Foundation provide are going to be leaps and bounds ahead of what any browser technology can do, and that’s why they will succeed. The web becomes richer every day.Ajax applications can’t take advantage of them in the way the Flash or WPF can.

The web, as we see today has evolved massively in terms of its interactivity is all because of the open standards. DHTML, CSS and now AJAX have made it more and more acceptable and the developers community have strived to make it all the more reusable and easier to maintain by providing libraries, frameworks.

CSS now as we advocate its use over the older designs through the use of table elements is only becuase CSS is an open standard. Had it been proprietary then the web would have been hampered in its stead fast growth. I have read about SVG and have a strong feeling than it would not take much time to grow and capture the web as AJAX today.

I support people who make technology available for the benefit of the world and its refinement rather than making the world come to them asking for it. The web is growing beyond imagination considering RSS feeds, XHTML standards for cross browser compatibilty, XML-SOAP for enterprise application interoperability, wiki’s etc.

People would only be able to enjoy and reap the benefits of these technologies if and only if we accept more open standards  and enhance it in the form of communities. Moreover open standards have a global reach as they do not need anything outside the normal resources. This makes a developer’s initiative all the more successful and his efforts to achieve success faster.

RSS and Portals

Its heard frequently that yahoo is a web portal,not a web site. So what is a portal and what is a website?
A web site is a collection of information about some particular stuff.A portal on the other hand is not information.It is a collection of services…(not web services). Yahoo provides mail servcie , searching service, shopping service, messaging service under one roof i.e www.yahoo.com thats why it is a portal.Similarly google, amazon, ebay are portals which provide many services under one domain.Portals have to exchange info between the existing services and thats why it requires a different setup and framework to make the services go hand in hand. Portals are customizable,websites are not i.e your mail box can be customized as per your needs but not your bookmarked page. The site content of a portal can also be customized owing to your authencity as the user of the portal.

Websites are used to display information. Some of them release feeds throught RSS or Atom. RSS or ATOM feeds are the way of spreading information. News, Blogs, Mails use feeds to provide the same information onto your site. You just need to parse the content present in the feeds which are standardized globally as the RSS 2.0, Atom 2.0. Feeds is a convenient way to extract information from your site which actually was provided by someone else instead of provoking the user to go to the site every time he needs some information thus saving time n travel.

JSON

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate.JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.

JSON is built on two structures:

• A collection of name/value pairs. In various languages, this is realized as an object, record, struct, dictionary, hash table, keyed list, or associative array.
• An ordered list of values. In most languages, this is realized as an array, vector, list, or sequence.

For more information refer http://www.json.org/