Omnipresence of Evolution – The Series

It’s been long time since I got chance to write something here. A lot many things I feel like to share with and I hope this post would be a good start.

In Feb 2007, our team informally discussed and decided to present things which one liked, learned and wanted to share with others. I chose ‘Evolution’ as the topic of presentation. I delivered a couple of presentations but could not stop the reading on the topic.

Evolution is an interesting process. It is the history with a running context. A context gives a perspective to an observer. One can have many simultaneous contexts and thus many simultaneous evolutions. However when one applies a higher level context to all the running contexts, one can see a higher level evolution – Evolution of evolution (or jargon-ishly ‘Meta-evolution‘).

Evolution is a passive continuous process. It does not play any part, rather it is the script under constant development. One can not sense evolutionarily important cause unless it leads to perceivable effect(s). An observer (who has a context and a perspective)  chooses meaningful patterns from the insignificant routine.

Although it’s been studied prominently in biology, it’s not uncommon to see patterns of evolution elsewhere. This series is such an attempt, to see the World through the lens of evolution. Feel free to comment, as they would add different perspectives and would help us co-evolve.

Adobe-Apple Merger : Rise of Titan

I was exploring on internet about Oracle’s offer for Bea systems. During that exploration, I encountered a blog post which discusses the Oracle’s offer, around many interesting facets, including a speculation about merger between SAP and IBM. Sometime back I read about Microsoft’s interest in Yahoo. Years before we saw a huge merger between HP and Compaq. All these inputs triggered a thought in mind my mind – a merger between Adobe and Apple. It might be my flight of fancy, however the merger can have many practical benefits, to each of the entities.

Adobe has strong foothold in applications and products such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe CS3 and now Adobe Flex. In the era of Rich Internet Applications, Adobe’s Flex should play a very important role. Historically flash has been a popular portable runtime, but only for browsers. Adobe Integrated Runtime provides the same capability on desktop so that Flex applications can be run as if native applications. Apart from these products, Adobe supports ColdFusion, a server-side web platform, similar to ASP/JSP/PHP/Rails. Very recently there was a news indicating Adobe’s interest in online office suite. Having a good foothold in the products space, what Adobe does not have (or at least I don’t know) is exposure to hardware platforms, appliances and operating systems. This is where Apple’s expertise can support to deliver dramatic results.

Apple has been the choice of connoisseurs. Mac, MacOS X, etc have become popular and their users are difficult to be convinced to switch to another platform. Innovative products and services such as iPod, iPhone and iTunes helped to develop a creative and positive image in the minds of people. Despite all these success stories, Apple could not be successful in application software, comparing with its platforms and appliances.

Apple’s experience in hardware, platforms and services combined with Adobe experience in applications, platforms and development tools complementary for each other. Of course Apple is larger in terms of revenue, employee strength, number years in business etc. Two choices are available (as I see them) – Merger or Collaboration. Merger of Adobe and Apple can emerge as an entity which can be more innovative and more competitive, to play an important role in years to come.

But after all, this is all day-dreaming…

Java Processors – Can it be Resurrection of Phoenix?

Over last 12 years, Java has become almost de facto in application development paradigm. Initial days were complaining about the performance of Java programs. However there is no doubt that enormous efforts that have been put in optimization of Java compiler and JVM implementations, have given handsome returns. But we know, rather we need to know, that there is an upper limit to this optimization for performance, being implemented as a software. Despite Java’s wide acceptance, Java Virtual Machines are limited to be software deployments. There is an emerging need, to have Java Virtual Machine in  hardware.

Fortunately the space is not an entirely unexplored territory. There were several efforts to implement Java processors and including PicoJava, one of them from Sun Microsystems. It seems a very promising concept and it should become more and more relevant in days to come. Imagine a system with many cores, for example ‘SUN UltraSPARC T2‘ that has 8 cores per CPU. Now all these cores are identical and a server with 8-way configuration would have 64 cores. This kinds of systems leave a lot of room for something called as ‘Domain-specific Processors’, hence it makes lot of sense to have four dedicated Java processors part of the system. One of such example is presented by IBM for its System Z Application Assist Processor(zAAP). Primary benefit of having such processors would be their specialization. Such processors can be optimized to a larger extent, they can be upgraded frequently and would be cheaper. Apart from that, these processors leave the main general purpose processors free to do their tasks. Thus a Java Processor can be a co-processor to your main processor. Remember the known examples such as ‘Intel 387′ or today’s Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Checkout some benchmarks for IBM’s zAAP.

Another very interesting initiative is from Bea Systems, that talks about JVM Hypervisor. This can, meanwhile, provide some breathing space. The idea was, I guess, first presented by Joakim Dahlstedt (CTO of Bea) at JavaOne 2006. One can find PDF of the presentation here – “Bare Metal”—Speeding Up Java™ Technology in a Virtualized Environment.

Separation of concerns and ideas

It is almost always initially easy and later on painful to mix ideas. Same happened for me, for a while. Hence I decided to start another blog, ‘http://clairvoyant.wordpress.com’.

So to make it simple -

• http://evolutioneer.wordpress.com- Nothing but technology
• http://clairvoyant.wordpress.com - Anything but technology

I hope this would be working fine.

Ruby – Hype on Rails or Productivity on Rails

‘Technology is the religion and advancement is the faith’

Things are changing in the New World (the Internet) and indeed ever changing the lives of those who use it (errrr! Rather live within it). Let it be games, forums, social networking, emails, e-commerce, applications, storage and anything you imagine. Of course laymen have different perspective of the evolution of the Internet (and the revolution of the Globe) than the Techies, the Geeks, the Nerds, the Wizards, the Jedi, the Masters and the Pundits. Then why so much of noise is around, one would start understanding the reason only when one does ‘connect’ oneself to this New World.

To make this New World a better place to live in, better development environments are needed. Programming languages and IDEs are not good enough to make a development environment better. We need something that will not retard the momentum and carry this New World further, safer, smoother and faster.

‘Ruby on Rails’ had just launched; some began to add ‘Ruby’ and ‘Rails’ words into their list of ‘favourite’ jargons; some complained about “Why new language when our favourite language has solved all problems in the World?” . To their surprise Ruby is not new. Before Columbus, Americas were existed. Actually popular in Japan, Ruby had required a killer application; Rails became that killer application and also a Ruby-window for rest of the World.

What is so special about Ruby? There has been several languages around (at least 8512). Then why Ruby? There is an answer, one of the possible answers: The Meta Answer (i.e. the Meta-programming ). What would make Ruby better than Python, PHP, Lisp and Smalltalk? The answer is still simple, a simple question : “Who says Ruby is always better?”. But it is better most of the time. Ergonomic object-orientation and accessible meta-programming with expressive syntax are the interesting facets of Ruby.  Dynamic languages are interpreted, which have their pros and cons. This makes these languages suitable for a kind of applications. Domain-specific languages would make Ruby a preferred choice as the Enterprise Glue. ‘Ruby is slow’, ‘Ruby takes more memory’, etc have been the proven arguments. Java too suffered of similar proven arguments. But what matters now, is the same what did matter then: Which language can deliver.

There is a performance comparison of two implementations of Ruby, Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9, with other languages such Perl, Python and PHP.

Comparing Ruby 1.9 (with the YARV) -

• Python
• Perl
• PHP

Comparing Ruby 1.8 -

• Python
• Perl
• PHP

The performance-gap is being closed. One can see a future that is clear, rather crystal-clear and the color of the crystal is red, rather Ruby red.

So who needs a Ruby-Lobby now? Fans or Foes?