Thursday, May 31, 2012

Byte code instrumentation and the ORM magic

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All ORM tools use some kind of byte-code instumentation to do the persistance magic behind the scenes. But as an architect, it is important...

Mapping between Entity Objects and DTOs

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Very often, we need to map between our Entity objects and DTO's. This mapping code can be quite tedious to write. There is a lot of ho...
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Performance benchmarks

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Every development project needs a formal performance engineering process - one that emphasizes on early performance testing and benchmarkin...

JavaDB (Derby) in JDK 1.6 and above

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JDK 1.6 and above ship with a default pure Java database called as " JavaDB ". Is is based on the open source Apache Derby proje...
Monday, May 28, 2012

What is a framework?

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When someone says they have defined a "framework", what does it mean? Is a framework just a library of resuable components? Or is...
Thursday, May 24, 2012

Eclipse Memory Analyser

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Read the following good reviews on Eclipse Memory Analyser . Looks like it can read both SUN JVM HPROF memory dumps as well as IBM JDK dump...

C heap vs Java heap

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Found this interesting discussion on StackOverFlow around C Heap and Java Heap. A good read and its important to understand that the JVM i...
Thursday, May 17, 2012

RAID basics

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Found this good blog that explains in simple terms, the various levels of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). RAID 10 has becom...
Wednesday, April 25, 2012

'volatile' keywork in Java

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Found this excellent article on the web explaining the 'volatile' keyword in Java and how it can be used for concurrency. The tuto...

Difference between Concurrent Collections and Synchronized Collections in JDK

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Traditionally, we have also used object locks (semaphores) and synchronized methods to make our collections thread-safe. But having an excl...
Friday, April 20, 2012

Google Chart APIs

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The last time (around 1 year ago), when I had evaluated Google Charts API, I was a bit disappointed. The Chart API only enabled you to embe...

JavaScript coding guidelines

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With RIA applications becoming the norm, developers have to deal with a lot of JavaScript code. It is important to have proper coding conve...

JAMon lives on !

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I have been a big fan of JAMon tool for monitoring Java applications.It is lightweight and has a cool UI that gives you the stats you want...
Thursday, April 19, 2012

Passing wilcard * in Runtime.exec() command

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One of the projects I was consulting on approached me with a peculiar problem. The application was executing unix commands from a Java prog...

Cool library for Java NIO

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I often felt the need to write a wrapper class libaray around Java NIO packages to reduce the complexity for developers. I was pleased to f...
Friday, April 06, 2012

Closed Loop vs Open Loop Models in Card Processing

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Found this good article on the internet that describes the differences between closed loop and open loop models. Excerpts from the article...
Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Architecture of Open Source Applications

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Found this cool book on the web, that explains the history behind many successful open source projects. The chapters also contain a good ...
Monday, March 26, 2012

Techniques for website design on all devices

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Today, there is a growing demand to create websites that can render across multiple devices such as desktop browsers, tables and smart phone...
Friday, March 23, 2012

Lightweight UML sketching tool - UMLet

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For years, I have been searching for a lightweight tool to quickly draw UML diagrams - in order to brainstorm an idea with my team. The trad...
Monday, March 05, 2012

How to ensure that IOCP is used for async operations in .NET?

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In my last post , I had blogged about IO Completion Ports and how they work at the OS kernel level to provide for non-blocking IO. But how...

Non blocking IO in .NET (Completion Ports)

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Non blocking IO is implemented in Windows by a concept called ' IO Completion Ports ' (IOCP). Using IOCP, we can build highly scal...
Thursday, March 01, 2012

Why no delegates in Java? And will Closures come to Java?

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Having worked across Java and .NET platforms, I often compare the features of one over the other. One of the interesting features of the .NE...
Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Connection timeouts in a mirrored SQLServer

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Recently, one of my teams was facing a connection timeout issue when we tried to implement 'parallelism' in a data-driven applicatio...
Monday, February 20, 2012

Business Intelligence vs Analytics

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My collegue Sandeep Raut has a very simple blog-post explaining the differences between traditional BI and Analytics. Summarizing a few key...
Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Using Parallelism in .NET WinForm applications

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We all have gone through the travials of multi-threaded programming in WinForm applications. The challenge in WinForm applications is that t...

Parallelism in .NET

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In one of my previous blogs , I had pointed out to an interesting article that shows how TPL controls the number of threads in the Thread Po...
Monday, February 13, 2012

Data Services in the Microsoft world

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In my previous blog , I ranted on the concept of Data Services in creating a data virtualization layer. In the .NET world, data services equ...

Ruminating of Data Virtualization

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The industry is flooded with confusing terms when it comes to understanding 'Data Virtualization'. We have IaaS (Information as a se...
Thursday, February 09, 2012

Google Protocol Buffers

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Just found a good post by the Google Engineering team ranting about the historical context of Google Protocol Buffers. My first reaction t...

Alternatives to XML Serialization

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Today, there are a lot of alternatives for XML serialization of data structures. These data interchange formats are smaller and faster than ...