Realtime ruminations

Ever wondered how some of the best in class architectures power the likes of LinkedIn, Secondlife and yahoo communities?  Go no further.  You can have hours of reading pleasure available at the following location.

Tracks -> Architectures you’ve always wondered about

Have fun!

Technorati Tags: architecture, e-Commerce, eBay, SecondLife

I was reading this post about how rackspace recently had a major disaster in the blog post  When Acts of God Bring Down Web Hosts - Make Money Being a Geek from Geekpreneur.

This is a big surprise esp. from a company as large and capable as RackSpace.  I am guessing there is really no escape from an “act of god” and I am sure building multiple data centers is one way to get around the problem but the way economics works out, a single data center is never designed to handle the total traffic that an organization receives and it is rather designed to handle geographically local traffic so if there is an abrupt loss of one DC, the other one will probably fall over due to the increased load anyway.   A fully redundant DC does not make economic sense since they will be used at fractional capacity at 99.99% of the time.

Another great idea from Amazon.  First they introduced the concept of “Tagging’ of products on their site that allowed a folksonomy to evolve around their product listings and now they have enabled exposure of these folksonomies via RSS feeds.

This open a good set of possibilities on what can be done with these feeds for example

1. A product finding engine can use this feed to help provide customers with fuzzy search based on the collective intelligence of all amazon customers who have tagged their products with fuzzy names
2. A social networking engine can allow integration of these feeds to their site so that customer’s product preferences are displayed on their networking pages

These are obviously some of the immediate ideas that came to my mind but I am sure this data provides some great insights into customer’s way of looking at products that can be leveraged in many of the new social computing paradigms.

I have become the target of serious blog spam. Now I am trying to figure out whether that is a good or a bad thing - am I so popular that I am receving all this attention (albeit the wrong kind) - obviously I am very popular in some circles so I am being considered “worth spamming” . The only trouble being - I now have to spend atleast half an hour each day to sift through the crud and approve the real comments (which are far and few inbetween which tells me I am not attracting the right kind of people!).

Since I run wordpress, I looked around for some captcha algorithm based comment poster that will prevent such cruft from coming in. I found one but I could never get it to work (you would notice the TTF not found on my comment site) Has anybody got a better mileage out of the right tool for wordpress? Please provide me some advice on what are the best options out there.

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I got a new toy, a linksys NSLU2 that is a NAS device has a version of embedded linux running on it. Apparently there is a very large and vibrant community around this little NAS device and they have figured out a way to add more capabilities to the existing Linux platform through a series of upgrades of both the OS and some of the user level software. You can find more about this group at NSLU Linux.

I got it loaded up with Unslug and also a bunch of other fun stuff. Works like a charm along with my WD 500 gb drive

I had bought a Nokia N80 couple of months ago since I wanted to get on to the “mobile revolution” of being connected on the go. Frankly it has been a bit of a disappointment (both the device and the concept) so I thought I would share my views to the world on this. Let me start off with the N80 and its capabilities first. It is a quad band device, fantastic display resolution with Wifi. So imagine my joy when it smoothly connected to my home network and allowed me to surf quite seamlessly to some of the popular sites that venture into. The first shocker came as the battery life, about half hour if you run Wifi and then without any warning it dies abruptly. Well I did check out the device specs before I bought it and quite a few reviews had warned me about this so I was sort of expecting this. Again, I think Nokia has done a better job in the newer N9x series of phones so I think this is not a real issue. The next challenge was entering text - I am quite comfortable with T9 entry (predictive text mode for you technically challenged folks) and I used to be a speed demon on SMS but when I had to type out emails on T9 is a challenge. I have seen the blackberry addicts type their mails on those small form factor keyboards and if you have seen their typical one line responses, it figures that those keyboards are not exactly meant for typing long mails either.

So what is the N80 good at? Playing music - Good, watching low FPS video - good. Watching movies on real player - don’t ask. Taking pictures - spotty. So in summary - for someone who has all these functions as separate devices, its a bit of a disappointment. But all of them rolled into one package with such a small form factor - priceless .

That leads to the next and bigger question, how good are such devices in disrupting the established market for connectivity (voice and data). Are they really a conceptual shift in the way we will connect to each other? Or are they just extensions of the existing technologies such as the internet?

If we examine the current crop of devices, as a medium to carry voice, I think they have evolved to serve my needs well. In fact they serve the needs of most people on the planet. This reflects on their popularity even in developing countries like India. As a device to access the internet, not just a connectivity device (aka:::: modem) but as a device that can provide both connectivity and the UI through which I use the internet, not quite there yet. So I wont even go upto e-Commerce for now.

In retrospect, I don’t think I am the target market of these devices. I typically I am used to a very reliable and high speed internet connection. I have very specialized needs from the internet beyond the standard email/amazon browsing (no its not what you think you dirty minded reader ). So maybe the N80 or any of the internet devices are not really ready for my usage patterns. The questions that remain are

• what market segment are these devices aimed at?
• what possible uses would they put such a device to?

I took refuge in Professor Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Whose theory proposes that any product that aims to bring in a disruptive innovation should address the following facets of the market to be successful. They are

1. A new-market disruptive innovation: A new market disruption is aimed at non-consumption, i.e. if the device can target a population that has in the past not had access to the capabilities provided by the device then it opens a competely new market that is not challenged by the traditional devices in that space. The cell phone with an MP3 player seems to be such a disruptive innovation. I met a person who composes music for movies once and he said that he had a collection of ragas on his phone that he listens to frequently when on the road. This surprised me since I thought a musician will have access to sophisticated sound equipment and hearing MP3 from cell phone was the last thing that would make sense to him. Interestingly he had a different story to tell - To him music is not the whole song that we hear instead its in bits and pieces that he can either carry it around “in his head” and musical scores or in a small recording device. Cell phone had become ubiquitous to his life and the way he does his business (travelling from one recording studio to another) so an MP3 allowed him to carry these snippets of “low fidelity” music that he can listen on the road and keep evolving. Once he reached a a recording studio he was able to record the actual version of it. Agreed that this is a single person incident and not a market demographic but the fact that it allows a market to thrive and expand that didn’t exist in the past and gave new tools to people to go about their lives is an example of such disruptive innovation that has all the elements of success.
2. A lower-end disruptive innovation is aimed at mainstream customers who are ignored by established companies - This kind of disruptive innovation refers to competition in a new plane which is a market that has traditionally a) not been served b) Is overserved by too little. In a way the cell phone in its basic form represented such an innovation in India. To a person on the in India driving an autorickshaw or a small vegetable vendor in India, it allowed him to be accessible easily by his customers and also give him access to his suppliers which he or she could never have dreamed about in the past due to the unorganized nature of their business. The traditional phone companies could never tap into a customer who is always on the road. The cell phones filled a crucial void - i.e. provide the ability to communicate to a market which traditionally did not have this capability. The evolution of the cell phone network architecture predictably followed the evolution according to the model in terms of crummy to begin with and then be overserved as we stand today.

So what about the Internet device? The market for such device today are those people who need access to their information and email on the road who could also perform certain financial transactions while they are on the road. But to hit the mainstream economy and be a real paradigm shift in the way we do business would depend on identifying a new market/low end disruption that will allow these devices to take root in a plane of competition that does not exist today or is not served by the mainstream today.

I believe these devices will represent a paradigm shift in the way a segment of the population thinks of connectivity today but it will not immediately enter the mainstream of connectivity solutions.

One thing about E-mail is how quickly one starts to get married to (read - take for granted) the mail client. In the corporate world, Outlook has started becoming a defacto standard especially when Microsoft Exchange is the mail server on the other end.

Actually I have started to like the features that outlook provides such as integrated calendar, notes etc., and I am sure a lot of Gnome proponents will claim similar capabilities in their mail clients but I am digressing. Once I got used to outlook and then I started to travel as part of my job, I got the rude awakening of suddenly having to use a poor cousin called Outlook Web access - i.e. webmail. I have never liked webmail in general (Yahoo, Gmail and their cousins) for some reason, I am still a client server guy when it comes to email.

So I got the necessary approvals from the network gods to use VPN and connect back to the corporate network and download email on my outlook. For some reason this just didn’t seem right to me. Having been involved in setting up 256K pipes to customer networks over the Internet and VPN, I somehow felt using VPN to access email was a gold plated solution. Added to that, our own VPN was a prodigal son and like any other spoiled brat, it chose to act up at the slightest flicker on the underlying network. Being on the road meant unreliable network connections in the first place so our VPN used to disconnect with glee at every opportunity and then outlook started doing its “sync magic” to my dismay.

Just when I was getting to a point of waving outlook goodbye, I discovered that Outlook supported access to exchange server through RPC over HTTP protocol. I quickly figured out that our network admins were kind enough to allow us to use the protocol.

Suddenly it was sunny days again. I could download and send email as long as I had an internet connection plus I had the advantage of using a protcol designed for the internet and its vagaries (HTTP).

Well having bored you with a long story, I thought I might as well share the spoils. So here it is folks

How to configure outlook to download and upload mail without VPN

As usual, your mileage may vary - please try and let me know.

Well - This year I promised myself that I will post more blog entries and more relevant ones to my blog. So its been a month already and not much happening! So in a flurry of writing enthusiasm, I am trying to write a few articles. Will post them as soon as I have them in a decent shape and then even post them on the blog.

Also this time I have decided to start a new category called “Little Annoyances” to talk about some if the software annoyances I face and work around. Seems to have become a signifcant enough to warrant its own category.

Sanjay - here is a link to my old post on exception handling. Have fun

Well I didnt need a Forbes article to convince me about it since I have been constantly watching the Google analytics logs for my own website and clearly I see 47% IE and 44% firefox with

read more | digg story

In an yet another salvo on the long tail, Lee Gomes of WSJ has questioned the Long Tail concept again in another article on the WSJ The last time this happened, there were some interesting responses from the Long tail theory group. I want to see their response to this article now.

I just ran into a blog post that talks about a tool called as JarAnalyzer. Managing dependencies is important. JarAnalyzer, an open source static analysis tool for .jar files. The author calls it as JDepend for JAR files. Now why do I consider it important - If you have worked on any large project that uses multiple JARs, it is a pain to figure out which version of library 1 JAR works with which version of library 2 JAR both within the code written by the team and outside. This tool can show a visual representation of that depedency so we can eliminate all sorts of strange circular dependencies that will hurt us in the long run during maintenance.

[Via Artima Weblogs]

Werner Vogels, the Amazon.com CTO recently posted a note on Scalability - a topic that is close to my heart and something I have spoken about before as Performance vs. Scalability , Performance vs. Scalability Part 2 and Performance vs. Scalability part 3. What Werner had to say is very much in line with what I had to say but a more simplistic - it is hard to do - kind of a post. Considering that he probably faces some of the most complex scalability problems, I hope he can talk more on personal experiences at Amazon.

I have become the target of serious blog spam. Now I am trying to figure out whether that is a good or a bad thing - am I so popular that I am receving all this attention (albeit the wrong kind) - obviously I am very popular in some circles so I am being considered “worth spamming” . The only trouble being - I now have to spend atleast half an hour each day to sift through the crud and approve the real comments (which are far and few inbetween which tells me I am not attracting the right kind of people!).

Since I run wordpress, I looked around for some captcha algorithm based comment poster that will prevent such cruft from coming in. I found one but I could never get it to work (you would notice the TTF not found on my comment site) Has anybody got a better mileage out of the right tool for wordpress? Please provide me some advice on what are the best options out there.

I keenly follow Anand Sridharan’s blog on his unique insights into private businesses in India. I don’t have opinions on his posts because a) they are insightful and a learning experience for me b) Our thoughts are reasonably alike since we seem to have by sheer fate, a common lineage. Tamilian (and proud of it) global and local at the same time with an ability to appreciate both the worlds. So I recently saw a post on his blog that was the first time I didn’t quite agree with and so I wanted to express my opinion on it. Here is the excerpt…

I am writing this during a painfully-long stopover at the Heathrow airport, on the way back from the US. It’s been a while since I blogged. Other than the real reasons – I’m lazy, didn’t feel like writing and didn’t have anything to write about anyway –my somewhat-true excuses are that I’ve been fairly busy and traveling over the last 2 weeks. I was in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, where we had our annual Bessemer Associates offsite, and then spent a few days in our Silicon Valley office.

The highlight of my Vegas trip (not counting the fact that Adult Video Awards were also held in Vegas, concurrently with CES) was playing golf for the 1st time in my life. This brings me to the main point of this post (actually, I doubt if there is one). Every person in the world falls into one of two segments – ‘pseud’ and ‘country’. Some of you know what these terms mean. For the rest, pseud loosely translates into sophisticated or pretentious, depending on how charitable or harsh you want to be. In the spirit of being MECE, everyone else falls into the ‘country’ segment! Pseud folks play golf, claim to understand poetry & philosophy, watch art films, wear designer clothes and can correctly pronounce the menu in a French restaurant. ‘Country’ people eat using their hands, aren’t really sure how to use cutlery and haven’t graduated beyond Ilaiyaraja music or Govinda movies. I am sure you disagree with one or more of these symptoms, but you get the broad idea. There is some correlation between being pseud and being rich, but IMHO, being pseud or country is really a state of mind. Either segment mostly looks down on the other, though there is the occasional envy as well.

I am basically a ‘country’ guy (hey, I went to IITM) and golf seemed like the ultimate pseud pastime. When the other associates suggested a day of golf, I was quite apprehensive. I was reassured that there were other novices in the group, and that the day would start off with a golf lesson. Lesson or not, I turned out to be as competent and elegant on the golf course as Sourav-da on a bouncy wicket. Conceptually, this game appears simple enough (hit ball in general direction of hole). Much like in running companies, execution is a lot harder than it seems. At the end of 4 hours, I hadn’t completed a single hole and had a sore back. On the positive side, there was good company and cold beer at the end of it all. I am told that this stuff is good for networking, and networking is good for career and all that. Me thinks I should do more deals in South India, where I can bond over curd rice and filter coffee, and not bother going down the pseud path.

[Via Seriously clueless]

Now I used to live many years ago in the US and worked as a consultant for a large firm. Part of that job description involved networking with clients and potential clients and golf courses was the place to do it. I had a pretty poor golf game but hey nothing is better than a potential client winning in a game of golf over you while you manage to convince him to hire your firm’s services seriously though, During my stay in the US, I never looked at playing golf or drinking beer on thursday evenings at a pub or attending a dinner party as pseud or country - in fact I never linked it to my own inner self. I just looked at them as the local culture that I need to adopt to live in that part of the world. In due course of time I too have learnt to develop preferences on these cultural aspects (I enjoy my cup of Earl Grey tea which I think my wife finds funny and pseud “ish”) while I enjoy my thayir saadam with vadu maanga which is a personal perference of mine. Over the years few of my acquired habits have actually transcended to become part of my personal prefernce (aka earl grey).

So in summary the whole idea of Pseud or country does not really have any meaning to the way I live. I appear just as pseud or country as the situtation demands and I dont find that a conflict with my own inner self which constantly evolves based on the personas I adopt. Let us face it folks - networking is a mask that we need to put on - how well honed and defined is the mask is really up to us to decide. Am I making sense? I am to myself but what do you think?

[Posted over a cup of hot madras filter coffee… brewed at home in a filter ]

This is interesting … Best Buy is enabling eCommerce rebate management.

When it comes to rebates, Best Buy Co. is trying to convert lovers of paper into users of e-commerce. As part of a plan to end the practice of customers sending in paper rebates, Best Buy is introducing an …

[Via Best Buy - Topix.net]

Now remember folks, when it comes to rebates, I read about a statistic that the percentage of people who encash their rebates is in the teens or less. To a large extent I suspect that this is due to the hassle of cutting out the UPC, sending in the receipts etc., the good part is that retailers and manufacturers can benefit from it but they need to carry it on their balance sheet as contingent liability. Is Best Buy trying to solve the contingent liability with this approach? We have to wait and see…

Well - Google Analytics decided to start working for me after I posted my last blurb. It is still showing a different visitor and hit count compared to site meter so I am not sure who is right. As one commenter posted, maybe it has got to do with Javascripts vs images based tracking. It could be that or Google is yet to plot the entire data. I am not holding my breadth on it.

Interestingly I did find the first bright application for analytics - the ability to track the adsense clickers using analytics. You will find the code and installation instructions on the SEOBOOK site. I did take a look at the asclick.js code and its a pretty ingenious idea. The idea is to install a hook on the load of the page that can track the URL googlesyndication.com and when it finds one, it attaches itself to any click on those URLs. That is a good one!

Once I heard about google analytics I decided that this is really what I need to get on and start using! Having seen some of the professional offering from companies like hitbox, I was amazed at what Google was ready to offer for free.

Obviously nothing comes free so after I installed analytics, I didnt see the reports appear for over two days and the analytics site keeps telling me to “check status” - Well I checked my code - twice! but no avail. Then I found that I am not the only lost soul on the planet begging for analytics like an urchin! Apparently google is a victim of their own success. Everybody decided to flood google with their site’s analytics that google has a reporting problem.

Its been nearly a week now and I am now seeing some of the data flow in. I am saying some since the reports for page hits dont match (not even close!) with site meter which I have come to trust over the years. Add to that my analytics page says it is currently waiting for data…

Looks like the ultimate scalability company is facing some problem in their own playground!

tag: google analytics

I recently republished two of my open source work on configuration management. The first one is an essay on CVS Best Practices (CVS BP) and how you can deploy it well in your projects. The other one is a small software utility call CVSPermissions that allows you to add user level access control capability to CVS. Interestingly I had not made updates to CVS BP in over 2 years and I still receive active mails on the same from followers around the world. I guess the article does help people get their CVS and build processes working right. Good to know that I have been able to help in whatever small way possible.

In case you are interested, you can find more information at the following links

CVS Best Practices
CVSPermissions

tag:CVS, CVSPermissions

An interesting problem space that I have been trying to solve in recent times is about implementing an “offline” mode of operations for retail stores on what are effectively centralized applications. For example, how do you enable a web based store associate support application used from various stores to operate in “offline” mode? By offline mode the fundamental premise is that the central system is no longer available/accessible to the stores and still the stores need to be able to function in a manner that they offer the best possible customer experience.

What I have found is that any approach that to enable offline mode requires a certain degree of fundamental re-architecture in the applications. Applications that have been built in modern technologies (say J2EE) follow a model where the business logic is hosted in a distributed environment and are designed to horizontally scale well in such environments. What is key in such solutions is that the fundamental assumption is that there is absolutely no network latency (gigabit LANs) thus there is no need for efficient communication mechanisms between the distributed nodes.
If we look at the simplistic solution of locating each distrbuted node at the store level and cluster together to represent the “collective” a.k.a borg style of a network mind,current networking technology limitations do not allow us to realize such a model. Even if the network issues was put to the side for a minute, there are other fundamental differences in the current application architecture approaches that cannot solve the problems that are presented in such situations.

To understand the problem space better one needs to really appreciate the retail store level systems and their needs. Let me try to explain the various sub categories in which these problems can be classified.

• Technology
  Typical retail stores do not have technology churn on their store systems since an upgrade project should potentially address thousands of stores which represents a significant capital outlay on the retailer. Thus we end up in a situation where we have to work with relatively “older” hardware. The easiest way to address such problems is through thin client solutions where the requirement on the store level hardware is minimal.
• Infrastructure
  Typical retail stores are connected to their central / HQ through leased lines that have various levels of bandwidth. I have heard of redundant T1s from some store chains to as low as 128K DSL connection from Stores to HQ. The reasons for this is manyfold and key one being how busy the store is compared to other locations and also the availablity of good network connectivity at some remote locations. Any proposed solution has to ensure that it can work efficiently at the lowest common denominator while providing the same level of service for a high volume store.
  Such varied network demands that we architect a solution that is not overly reliant on the network and rather be self sufficient to handle basic store requirements while using the network as a mechanism to notify in near realtime a centralized information gathering infrastructure.
• Legal
  Depending on the type of retailer, there will be specific legal requirements on information security and management. For example, the the Visa requirement for cardholder information security called CISP mandates specific requirements for storage of customer information. A centralized application provides an easy mechanism to store this information securely since there is only one single location where the information is stored and managed.
• Management & Maintenance
  Distributing and managing new software releases across a thousand store network is really not for the faint hearted. Especially with each store located in different timezone the ability to quickly distribute a hot fix for a software solution requires very detailed scheduling of the push for each geographic zone. Thus there is a definite advantage in having a centralized system with a thin UI where the upgrade is done centrally is a major cost advantage. The flip side of this approach being that any downtime in the central system will result in all the stores being done at the same time which is unacceptable to the business.

Thus there are definite advantages both sides of the camp - centralized or a de-centralized solution. The fact remains that “offline mode” is an important feature of retail store applications and the ability to architect an offline mode requires fundamental re-architecture of existing applications that are implemented on modern technologies. The type of architecture that is best suited for a given application is best customized for that application but in general, the problems related to distributed transaction management, data management, support and maintenance have to be addressed for an “offline mode” application.

Tag: offline mode

I read a post on Danesh’s blog about the challenges in estimating EAI projects . I disagree with his thought process because the approach that one needs to take in estimation is basically broken into three steps - they are

1. Determine the size of the project
2. Estimate the effort required to complete the project
3. Prepare a realistic schedule

EAI lends itself to good sizing using function points the EIF and ILF are so natural to EAI concepts. The differences in implementation is what Function points calls as the “adjustment factor” that you can customize for each estimation. Thus you would be able to get a good sizing estimate in terms of function points for the project.

Once you have the size you need to apply the organization metric on productivity to actually estimate the effort required to complete the project. Now that is the tricky part i.e. your organization productivity number should be measured and tracked in the same units for arriving at an effort estimate. This effort estimate is what I want to call as the critical path effort i.e. if everything goes as per plan you would be able to deliver this project with the person days of effort that has been arrived at. Now this effort does not take into effort that there is going to be dependance between tasks, contingencies, activities that are not in the project execution path directly but still relevant such as training, preparing POCs etc., So that is where step 3 comes into play -

Prepare a schedule for the project - here you would apply all the dependance between tasks to put together a schedule for the project. This will provide you a more realistic effort estimates because this process adds the “slack” that one has in a project due to various depedancies that are specific to the project.

The second and third steps are really generic in nature to estimation process that just leverages past data and a planning process to arrive at a realistic estimate. It is step 1 that ensures that there is a correct measurement of application size for estimation.

Tag: Estimation

I have re-routed all my feeds through feedburner¹. This is a wonderful system that is capable of providing RSS feeds on steroids. If you have subscribed to my blog feeds, please re-subscribe to them again using the RSS link on the sidebar or alternatively, please use the following URLs

Blog Feed : http://feeds.feedburner.com/VivekTechBlog
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1. 1Feedburner

To AJAX or not to AJAX is the question - AJAX is another acronym that is a conglomeration of technologies (a.k.a. LAMP) rather than a separate technology in itself. Touted as one of the key concepts of Web 2.0, the concept revolves around moving computing to a centralized infrastructure while enabling rich clients built on top of browser and javascript substrate with XML based communication to various services.

AJAX as a technology enables a distributed computing model with a rich client that will provide easy access to the various computing resources. As a concept this is a good thing since the only way we achieve scalability in business is to build various efficient engines of growth by leveraging distributed computing. To understand this concept better, look at some of the commodity applications in the world today - E-mail / accounts payable - no IT shop focusses on building their own SMTP gateway or an accounts payable system. They leverage commodity products such as gmail or Oracle AP/AR to build their solution on top of them. Effectively, commodity application providers act as growth engines that fuel businesses to allow them to focus on their core competency.

Extending this paradigm to the next level, services for applications that are commodity (for example authentication services) should be leveraged from a dedicated provider. This is the business justification for Service oriented architecture . Standards such as web services exist today that will provide application with the plumbing to leverage such services.

AJAX applications are (in theory) consumers of such web services and provide a rich user interface on the browser to such services. I think AJAX as it stands today cannot utilize web services in a way that they are meant to be consumed. Let me elaborate - a single service say customer service can be easily wrapped in an AJAX based GUI and presented to the user. This approach would not work well when the client is required to interact with multiple such services in a coordinated fashion. In the language of SOA, this is termed as orchestration. Non-trivial business processes require web service orchestration to implement the business process completely. Ideally orchestration requires a workflow capability that can glue together the various services and provide integrated business process realization through the application. AJAX today does not have workflow capabilities and from what I understand about this technology building a workflow engine within the Javascript interpreter running within the constraints of a browser would be like fitting a ferrari engine inside a pinto - the chassis will fall apart if it tries to keep up with the engine. Thus AJAX would be relegated to building slick web UI for email clients and chat applications.

I think the real solution is coming from Microsoft - Workflow engine is now an integral part of the operating system called as Windows Workflow foundation. This is really the right direction to go since the existence of a workflow engine in the heart of the operating system provides the speed, scalability and manageability that cannot be matched by piecemeal solutions built on top of older technologies. Eventually the Windows workflow foundation will exist on all platforms and versions of their operating systems. Thus not too far in the future you would be using your PDA running a version of Windows operating system that will have a Windows forms based rich GUI with a Windows workflow foundation consuming webservices over a Wifi network or a cellular phone network thus providing truly rich and remote computing experience.

Tag AJAX

I managed to import some of my latest posts from my jroller blog to here thanks to Rajesh’s tip on how to do it with wordpress. Thanks Rajesh!

So well written and such a key concept with a powerful example. I am impressed
read it here http://blogs.bnet.com/leadershipnow/?p=253