Indian Tech Blogs, OpenSocial and Some Humble Thoughts

No doubt that blogs are more about the individual’s or the group’s opinion and that any news posted on a blog need not necessarily be cross-checked like a journalist does. However, as we have observed, most of the prominent tech-bloggers outside of India, verify their facts and give it the time before they make any overly critical observations in their coverage.

If you look at the Indian Startup blogging community, the blogs I follow are contentsutra, pluggd.in and startupdunia.com among others. I follow them because I like to read their analysis and thoughts about Indian Startups. Recently, the trend of bashing any new ideas and any startup they come across has risen. One believes that these comments are being made without understanding the startup’s motive behind its actions and if it fits into the startup’s vision.

As an example, consider these blog entries on two of India’s widely followed blogs on internet and startups.

Here are the articles :

1.) MingleBox launches orkut Apps - Is Sleeping with Competition that bad? on pluggd.in
2.) WTF - MingleBox makes apps for orkut ? on Startupdunia.

Both articles talk about minglebox.com - an Indian campus oriented hangout place for teens and youth, launched apps for the Indian audience on orkut under Google’s OpenSocial platform.

As bloggers, each of them had different takes on this. No issues. These were posted just following the post on the official orkut blog showcasing the apps made by minglebox. Looks like no further information was looked for and a hasty post was up on the blogs. What made me think so?

If one were to go through the apps directory on orkut, they would have seen not two apps. A small check on the apps directory would have helped the readers get the correct information.

While pluggd.in perhaps got it right in terms of the value proposition for minglebox, Startupdunia, using very strong languages goes on to question on how orkut itself benefits from these apps - “If anyone can figure how orkut benefits from this (other than getting two additional apps into their fledgling app repository), can you kindly enlighten me ?“

What is OpenSocial? Briefly put, it’s a standard to make the web communities serve better to their users. Instead of developers writing different sets of APIs for different containers(social networks), OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs that allow developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:
1.) Profile Information (user data)
2.) Friends Information (social graph)
3.) Activities (News Feeds, friends update)

To put things in a better perspective, concepts of Microformats and data portabality help us make better sense of Open Social.

These apps are for the containers under OpenSocial and not just orkut alone. And it helps the developers building these apps if these can be ported to other social networks with minimal effort. Maybe there’s some play in there for a company like minglebox. Let’s wait and watch, shall we?

While feedback, reviews and critical analysis are most welcome, especially for startups, one wonders if our bloggers and commentators are a little too skeptical of any new approach or initiative by startups? Isn’t it better if we let the new approaches and initiatives take some shape before being extremely critical of them? Just some humble thoughts from an observer of the the Indian internet and startup scene.

A lot of people, including myself, regularly follow news and reviews mentioned on these well-known blogs. It’d really help us if there is some background check and more thought put into the posts, as we more often than not, tend to take them at face value. And as someone closely associated to the web rightly said,

With great power comes great responsibility

We’ve watched this movie enough number of times, haven’t we?

Peace!

Tribute to Bangalore Police

sometimes we under estimate things and people.

Story of my new ThinkPad.
I left Riya in March last week{will write more about this later} and Joined MIH as a Web Development - Tech Lead. During the second week in the company, new laptop given from the company has been stolen from my home.

I kept the laptop on a bean bag in the living room, and kept the door closed but unlocked for 10 - 15 minutes in the morning . Between 7AM and 7.20AM , It just got disappeared while I was in the bed room.I called up the police control room and reported the incident immediately. They referred me to the Mico layout police station.

After waiting 3 long days in the station and with some higher end recommendation, I got my case registered and got the copy of the FIR. All these things happened during the good Friday week. I felt the police were rude and mean to me. They said, they will investigate and let me know. With a heavy heart and bad mood I went back home.

After more than a month, yesterday I received a call from Mico Layout Police station. They wanted me to verify if my laptop is there with the recovered sets of laptops from a thief.

I went today morning and among the huge set of laptops, there were only one Thinkpad and it was not mine. . However, I really appreciate the police and specially officer mr.Guruswamy for taking an effort to find my number and giving me a call from the 100’s of manual FIR booklets . Now I do have a hope of getting my laptop someday

So, props to MICO Layout and whole Bangalore Police . You guys actually rock

Introduction to Ajax Frameworks

Healthy Warning: Its an introduction note to the Ajax beginners and late adopters to choose from the top frameworks. If you are an experienced d00d , don’t waste your time reading this

Prototype for downloads and more info

First of all, Prototype can not be called as an exclusive Ajax framework. It should be called as a Utility framework powered with Ajax.
Sam Stephenson created this amazing library of functions to ease our JavaScript development practices for the web developers. Best part of protoype are the shortcuts to handle the DOM elements, form elements, array and many more.

Prototype is backed with rich Ajax support. Periodical executor and ability to execute a js function on ajax returned html makes your life easier.Another great utility comes with the prototype is Try.these functions. This function will attempt to execute one path of code until it encounters an error, and then switch to the next path, way better than writing a browser detection code every time. Other than that this framework is powered with features like, key press event handler, mouse handler,class creator and even comes with ability to attach an event to the DOM using observe.

Scriptaculous downloads & more info

It is a collection of Web 2.0 style JavaScript libraries that help web developers add AJAX functionally to projects.The power of AJAX allows for rich user interaction without the trouble that has bugged traditional web applications. Building upon the wonderful Prototype JavaScript library, script.aculo.us provides you with some great additional value like adding some cinematic effects into your RIA efforts.

Google Web Toolkit downloads & more info

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. It comes with browser history management features that will compliment the back button issues in normal ajax application and it also have the ability to integrate with your JUNIT test cases. This is more recommended to developers who are more familiar with Java or C++.

YUI Library downloads & more info

The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. It even have some of the coolest colorpicker and some other cool ajax ready to use features. Y! comes with features like darg and drop, tooltip, containers, widgets and many many more goodies. Y! is very serious about this community and its backed up with very good documentation and tutorials. I liked this one after prototype (thats just personal opinion ;-))

Dojo downloads & more info

Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time. It fills in the gaps where JavaScript and browsers don’t go quite far enough, and gives you powerful, portable, lightweight, and tested tools for constructing dynamic interfaces.

Dojo powered with widgets like SortableTable, TitlePane, Form validation,Menus and menu bars and Google & Yahoo maps . If your a mashup developer, you may like Dojo over other frameworks.

Rico Downloads & More info

Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request. Rico also powered with features like cinematic effects and drag & drop.

Atlas downloads & more info

I never used this. But my Brother did in his application.This new Web development technology from Microsoft integrates client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 server-based development framework. In addition, “Atlas” offers you the same type of development platform for client-based Web pages that ASP.NET offers for server-based pages. And because “Atlas” is an extension of ASP.NET, it is fully integrated with server-based services. “Atlas” makes it possible to easily take advantage of AJAX techniques on the Web and enables you to create ASP.NET pages with a rich, responsive UI and server communication. However, “Atlas” isn’t just for ASP.NET. You can take advantage of the rich client framework to easily build client-centric Web applications that integrate with any backend data provider. It required Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 .

I shall try Atlas on my Home PC one of these days

There are more tools like xajax, sajax, tiny ajax, MochiKit, xoad, haxe etc.

Personally if you ask my favorite, I go with the prototype for its amazing set of utility functions and the powerful ajax features. Plus a large community is using ruby on rails which integrated prototype. Opensource community already demanded adding prototype to core js libraries. So someday you should not be surprising to see prototype features on js core. If you are a .net guy, I badly want you to try atlas. It seems like very promising and cool. My second option will be YUI for its simplicity and power packed features and widgets.

Orkut is down for almost 24 hours, youngsters going crazy!

I am not exaggerating this.

Just read this blog entries and a discussion forum entry says “I feel like crying” . It’s a well known fact that after Brazil, Indians are the second largest community in Orkut. And in 2006 Orkut become one among the top website in terms of traffic. What makes Orkut so special compare to any other social networking sites ?

Secret is their Scrap Book, People ,Teens and Adults just love to scrap their friends and some peeping tom’s get that peace of mind by keeping an eye on others scrap book. So I was talking to my 19 year old friend from Bangalore and she feels like “World has come to an end” She is feeling “so empty” . She even went on saying “sue google” if they permanently shutdown the services.

Dear Orkut,
If you ever decide to shutdown the service that will be a black day for the millions of Indian Youths. IIT’ians and other top colleges in India use your scrap book service to discuss assignments, homeworks and People even use it for small things, like scrapping to ask what time you’re going down to the mess for dinner.

Please come back soon My little friends(mostly) & even big friends are going crazy here :p

I am back, this time for real

Well over the last few months life has been changed a lot. First I got busy with some unavoidable and unfortunate events happened in my personal life. Then I got so real busy with www.like.com launch and post patch releases along with some serious health problems.

There are so many things to blog about and I have to confess that, I may take some more time to catch up with all new cool stuffs you guys already know. Anyhow… I promise this time I am going to blog more often

Riya API Example - using Ajax

Here is my modified Ajax API example of Riya public search. I have used ‘xmlhttp.js’ from www.ajaxextended.com for cross domain access. I have also used prototype.js file keeping some other feature addition in mind. You can download the stuff here. Lemme know if you face any issues. Enjoi!

fun with Java - for beginners

Ok. I am back after a short long break ;-).

This time I am going to post a simple java programme. If you are a beginner in java you are invited to answer the output. Condition is you have to tell the answer with out compiling the code . Here we go..

class Test
{

int num1 = 20;
int num3 = getNumber();
int num2 = 30;
int getNumber()
{
return num2;
}
public static void main(String[] args)
{
Test t = new Test();
System.out.println(t.num3);
}
}

barcamp clash :-) muthu v/s tara

That's right , Both of them got the same time slot :-/ So I decided to attend muthu's xdesign session and missed pinko marketing . Well never mind, I can talk to tara sometime later in office and cathup..yay!

from barcamp bangalore

I am blogging from Yahoo! campus in Bangalore. Morning sessions just started at 10.00AM IST. The total turn around is almost 150+ . First sessions were Mobile computing and Art of Scrum. Right now I am waiting for the voice over xml session to start at 10.30Am.

One best thing about BC bangalore is we have a global crowd here , there are people came all the way from USA just to attend the barcamp.

I will talk more about each session later…

Ajax - Road Ahead

Over the last year, Ajax as a technology enjoyed a historic year in-terms of usage and glory. Ever since Adaptive Path published the article about Ajax written by Jesse James Garrett, most of us might have seen the way Ajax grown up as a technology. Today a search for  "Ajax Framework" in Google list more than 200000 links. As an Ajax programmer, I feel glad about it. But are we missing something here?

Everyone is busy developing their own Ajax framework for their web2.0 applications. And everyone is struggling with the cross browser JS issues that can spoil your hours and even days of efforts. Isn't this the right time to give a little thought about this? How about developing an Ajax framework that can submit for the approval of W3C and which can be easily integrate with any platform and technology. A framework that works just fine across the browsers as expected.

I may sound like crazy, but just imagine having a common piece of Ajax and that just works fine across the browsers. Imagine you are getting more and more time to do wonderful stuff using a solid ajax framework. Sigh! I hope one day Ajax - I - NATION happens

Meanwhile if you know any JS debugger for IE let me know