10 Technology Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore – From Gartner
Archive for the ‘Trends’ Category
10 Technology Trends You Can’t Afford to Ignore – From Gartner
Sunday, January 10th, 2010What Fatwire/Google Analytics Tracking Really Provides?
Thursday, January 7th, 2010First of all wish you all a very Happy New Year .
There have been lots of posts around Fatwire and Google Analytics integration but none with much information. Here are some of the details which might help to provide some insight around integration:
There are four different types of tracking defined with the integration tag:
- Tracking the use of a particular asset; be a PAGE or any other type. A PAGE asset will trigger a page viewed tracking event
- Tracking when a recommendation has been selected or clicked by the user
- Tracking when a list of recommendations is requested. The object type is set to RecAsked.
- Tracking when a recommendation is listed for display purposes. The object type is set to RecListed.
Based on above tracking system, two modes of operations are defined:
- Basic which tracks physical page views using the GoogleAnalytics (GA) _trackPageview function and the request to display Assets using the GA Event facility function _trackEvent. This basically covers first tracking type.
- Examples:
- <Asset Name> [<Asset Type (c)>=<Asset ID (cid)>]
- FSII Home page [Page=1223456789]
- Examples:
- Advanced is extension on top of the basic tracking system to record Engage Recommendation information. This mode makes extensive use of the GA Event Tracking facility to record asset related information for recommendations and segments. The three components of a GA Event (category, action, and label fields) are used to store FatWire information. This covers the last three tracking types.
- Examples:
- Recommendation Listed
- <Recommendation name> [recId = <recommendation Identifier>]
- FavouriteBlogList [recId = 123456789]
- Recommendation Listed
- Segment information with list of assets
- FavouriteBlogList [segId = 123424325435], shishankinfo [Blog = 987654321], apoorvinfo [Blog = 1357924680], contentprise [Blog = 2468013579]
- Examples:
Non–Latin Character Domain Names
Saturday, November 14th, 2009Recently ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved the introduction of the complete Internet domain names in non-latin specific languages (Non-latin characters in domain names)
Extract from one of the Press release:
“Up to now, domain names had to use the 26 Latin letters in the English alphabet as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen.Technical efforts have enabled display of parts of Internet addresses in other scripts, but the two-letter suffixes had to be made up of those 37 characters.The approval for non-Latin characters applies for now only to domain names connected with the two-letter country codes, like .ru for Russia and .cn for China.Languages that could become available in 2010 for Internet-site names include Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Hindi and Korean.he so-called generic top-level-domain suffixes, like .com, .net and .gov, will remain Latin-characters-only for now.”
Tha above announcement could bring in number of changes in current industry. Here are few of them:
- Web Content Managment: With new non-latin domains getting registered everyday, WCM demand will increase than ever before with the focus on multilingual support. In my experience with WCM, I have not come across many implementations that support multilingual. So, its going to be a challenge for both the product vedors as well as System Integrators. It is important to test the current implementations for non-latin languages and becoming a Must Have feature for any implementations going forward. The same will hold good for e-commerce .
- Translators: The market for translators will increase and will become more prominent. The content will start becoming more localized to regions and translators will come to rescue to retrieve any such localized information to outside world. And there is a good chance that translators becoming one of the offerings of WCM products.
- Search: Local/regional seach will start occupying the search space. This might lead to emergence of lot of localized search engines and will provide stiff challenge to some of the bigger players today in the industry
- Social Networking: With Web 2.0 and social networking the key in todays world, I can imagine local facebook, twitter etc. versions emerging in the market. Localized social search is other area to watch out.
- Migration tools: Emergence of tools which could help to migrate your existing site to localized version
The announcement will:
- Bring in new business opportunities and whole new dimension for non-latin countries
- Internet users will increase exponentially
- Internet will start becoming the preferred source of communication for non-latin countries through localized email and social networking sites
- System Integrators local market in non-latin countires will increase many folds
- Add more challenge to the big brands as they will be pressured to register their current domain names in any number of non-Latin-script languages to prevent fake sites
- Another potential issue highlighted is that some characters in non-Latin scripts appear similar to those of Latin-alphabet characters. So, if we substitutea non-Latin character for the similar Latin character, it will createa unique URL — and the potential for site-spoofing
What are your thoughts about it?
Translations – Web 2.0 Extn? Or Web 3.0?
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007
There is lot of talk about Web 2.0 all around with focus on making web as a platform, enhanced user experience etc. with DATA as the primary focus area. But one thing that is still missing in Web 2.0 is about translations – from one language to other. There is lot of data in different languages which might be useful for me, but due to language constraint I am not able to really utilize that. Google is making head-ups in this area as well where they recently added new languages to their blogger including Hindi. They also came up with the concept of file a search in one language and you specify the results language. I am sure soon Google’s blogger will give option where you type post in one language and it will give you option to translate post in other languages using automatic translators and your post will appear in different languages to different people based on their Geography settings. Is this going to be Web 3.0?
How CMS will adopt this?
Google Gears: Missing Open Source Community?
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007Few days back I wrote about making web applications offline, well Google again are way ahead of the crowd and they already came up with the same called Google Gears. It is an open source web browser extension that enables web applications to provide functionality while user is offline. Google basically talks about 3 main layers to achieve this
LocalServer – which caches and serves application resources like HTML, JS,CSS, images etc locally on the clients machine
Database – which provides browser-local relational data storage on user’s computer with domain based security
WorkerPool – which pools asynchronously in the background to contact online application
A pretty cool Beta release with few samples and open APIs. But I am really sad that Google Gear installer doesn’t work for people who are behind proxy. I even posted in the Google Gear group but can’t see any response. There are presently around 227 topics floating in that group and almost 55-60 of the topics are around installation problem ( search for install, installation, 80040800 etc.)
Most of developers are behind company proxy’s and due to such issues people are loosing interest even when its an interesting development. Well for open source, community is the main source for information,ideas etc. and Google is lagging in that.
JAX India 2007: Day 4: SOA and ESB for Enterprise Architecture
Friday, June 1st, 2007
The day 4 was a surprise for me, as the number of attendees reduced many
folds. Well I went to attend the session “Leveraging SOA and ESB for
an Enterprisse Architecture – Bryan Cheung“. Looks like Bryan is a
big fan of coffee specially from Startbucks and he all the way of his
presentation used Startbucks as the example. He basically used the topic well
to showcase Liferay’s capabilities and even coined a new term called SOL
(Service Oriented Liferay) 
. According to him, from SOA point of view
there are 3 important things with respect to service offered:
Specialization - Specialized in Coffee. Need not worry what is
happening inside to make worth coffee cup
Interface – Always the same interface, ask for a coffee at counter, pay the
amount and get the coffee
Reliability - Whether in US, Europe, India the taste is the same
And Liferay too does in the similar fashion, same services with almost any
Operating System, Application server and database combination.
Few other sessions are covered by Binil on his blog post JAX India 2007:
Day 4 report
Well in all JAX India, though looked promising with the
Buzzy catchy title, the overall feeling was that it didn’t meet what
was expected out if it. I was really surprised at the Oracle counter,
where I asked info about their new Web Center suite and the answer I got back
is to fill a feedback form and get the CDs which has all the information.
If that is the case, I am better of searching over Internet
Also, in terms of arrangement, there was a lot of confusion about which
session happening in which Hall. It was a complete mess and people were just
running around to catch up with the sessions. I was in Hall B for a session
and the next which I wanted to attend was in Hall A. So after session I sent
to Hall A to get a surprise that the session I want to attend has been shifted
to Hall B. The time I reached there, all the seats were full and there was
hardly any space to stand. A better organization is required.
Anyways Thanks SDA India for hosting such event and looking forward to a
better organized and more targeted sessions next time. A Big thanks to all the
speakers who cam all the way to share their experience and knowledge.
More reading at Hits and Misses: JAX India 2007
JAX India 2007: Day 3
Friday, June 1st, 2007The first two days really made me think if it is worth to travel all the way to Tata institute to attend sessions. Well I did not make it that day to JAX India 2007 but here are updates from Amit Agarwalla from Day 3. Happy Reading !!!!
JAX India 2007: Day 2: JSF, Java Architecture Management, Best Practices WS, Java IDEs
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007The Day 2 of JAX India saw the start of 40 conference sessions spread over 3 days. Here is extract of the sessions that I attended.
Introduction to JSF for Struts Developers – Craig McClanahan
The session was targeted to cover an overview about Java Server Faces. The agenda includes:
Origin of Struts
Craig started with giving an overview of how Struts came into existence.
The main reasons was
- Multiple language support
- Available on the web
- Separate responsibilities into layers etc.
In the Mean Time…
As the time went on, Standardization started taking up the market with lots of new Standards, like componenting for interoperatability, target for drag and drop etc.
JSF Key Concepts
Craig stretched on the key concept of Components which brought JSF in existence.
In all the session did touch upon the high level fundamentals of JSF but my expectations were different. I would have preferred a sandpit project like Hello World demo which would have given a better understanding. Anyways this is my thought.
The second session was an interesting presentation on IDEs future.
Java IDE(s) – Then, Now and Eventually – David Intersimone
The session was around 20 minutes but the content of the presentation was really good. Few key things from the presentation:
Future of IDEs
- Support for Rich Internet Applications
- Support for Ajax
- Collaborative features within IDE
The next session that I attended was Increase Project Success with Java Architecture Management – Alexander Von Zizewitz. The presentation was really cool !!! He depicted dragon as the Complex Java Project with a small man with sword and shield in his hand as us trying to overcome the dragon Here are few interesting points from his presentation:
Known project problems
- Time Pressure
- Skills not meeting system requirements
- Unwanted dependencies
- Complexity growing
And if we fall in the pitfall of the above problems, we start just making it work and then start the real problem like:
- Increase in testing time
- Problems with deployment
- Making changes become increasingly difficult
So what are the ways to control Java Projects that Dragon doesn’t rule the world:
- Avoid Package cycles by using jdepend
- Code Reviews specially peer-to- peer
- Check Style and FindBugs Tools usage
- Checking key metrics on regular basis
-
Define architecture of the system at high level of abstraction
-
Cut horizontal into layers to represent different layers like
User Interface, Business Layer, Data layer - Cut vertically into slices to represent actors
- Define allowed usage for each actor
-
Cut horizontal into layers to represent different layers like
- Define useful matrix threshhold
So once your system is divided into horizontal layers and vertical slices, start mapping code to logical diagram on the following lines:
- Each package mapped to exactly one sub system
- Good naming convention
- Subsystem should have well defined interfaces
-
Work independently
- Start with layering
- Add vertical slices
- Define subsystem interface
- Fine tune rules of engagement on subsystem level
Once you are done with this, measure the overall coupling at system level, sub system level, package level etc. using Component Dependency technique.
5 Golden Rules to ensure technical Quality
- Create cycle free logical architecture
- Avoid package cycle
- Keep Average Component Dependency low
- Keep size of Java files ( < 700 LoC)
- Define threshhold for complexity
In all the presentation was interesting and provoke at looking more into SonarJ tool which Hello2omorrow has come up with to solve such issues.
Apart from these I attended Best practices for inter-operable Web Services – Thilo Frotscher, the details of the session are already covered by Amit in this blog.
In all the sessions are not too much impressive may be due to limited time allotted for each session. Looking forward to Day 3 at Jax India 2007.
JAX India 2007: Day 1: Web2.0? But I am Barely keeping up with Web 1.0 Right Now !
Monday, May 28th, 2007
Its been an exciting day on the inaugural day of JAX India 2007. The day was
meant for workshops and I attended half a day workshop on
“Web 2.0? But I am Barely keeping up with Web 1.0 Right Now !”
by Craig R McClanahan. Here is extract from the session:
The session covered from history of web to what is Next Generation web (Web 2.0) and what we should do towards it. Here is extract from his presentation:
HISTORY OF WEB
He started with his experience of Web way back when he started in 1975. From Lonely computers, which were self-absorbed applications to telephone lines (part lines to kids line) which lead to evolution of Internet and standards like HTTP and HTML.
MAINSTREAM WEB APPLICATIONS TODAY
This section of the presentation covered about how the current web applications are. Few main highlighting points are:
- Increasing support for cross browsers
- Key area of development happening around Mobile space
- Server side capabilities are growing
- Programming understanding in multi-threaded environment
- Storage capacity is effectively free, CPU nearly so
- Network infrastructure improving
- Development technologies maturity at a much slower pace and challenges are in coming up with a framework like Struts and IDEs for JS-DHTML developments
- More and more user personalization
- Standardization at different scales and complexities
NEXT GENERATION WEB DRIVERS
Craig stressed on using next generation web rather than Web 2.0 with emphasis on 4 key drivers:
Enhanced User Interfaces
The driving force is the limited usability of web applications compared to applications installed locally. Ajax and DHTML are the immediate solutions.
Lightweight Programming Models
- Strong preference towards simplicity; less code = less initial work, less update work
- Scripting languages again gaining popularity with many large application built with php, perl etc.
- Loose coupling and layer based design
- Increasing preference for quick, iterative approach (Agile model)
- Programming models
- Ajax and DHTML (server side business logic)
-
Ajax and DHTML (client side business logic ) i.e. making web applications
available offline - Browser plugins (Flash/ Flex/ Java FX etc)
Web as a Platform
- Web applications to become more of a service
- Web platform providing Social network effect
- Reducing “local islands” of important data
- Users looking something bigger
- Identity
- Flexibility
- Ubiquity
The read/write web
- Web as a Bulletin Board
WHAT SHOULD WE DO
Craigs Top Ten Suggestion List
10 – Expose Data/Logic as services
9 – Incorporate External Content
8 – Seek QOS (Quality of Service) deals from Sources
7 – Give QOS Deals to users
6 – Adopt Agile Processes
5 – Test Driven Development
4 – Architect for Scalability
3 – Embrace Heterogeneity
2 – Reach out to Mobile Clients
1 – Enable User Provided Content
The session turned out to be good for users who do not have exposure to Web 2.0. The first 45 minutes where Craig covered History of web and existing applications was bit too extended and I was looking for more on Web 2.0. Let’s hope the other sessions lined up around Web 2.0 will be able to provide more insight.
Internationalization in a different way
Monday, May 28th, 2007Some days back Google launched a new feature on Google Translate, where search query is in one language and the results can be a from the web pages in other language.
From Google: How does this work?
1. Search for Dubai tours from English to Arabic.
2. We translate your query into “جولات دبي” and find Arabic web page results.
3. Finally, we translate the Arabic web page results back into English for you.
This will bring in a whole new experience in the Internet world. It gives an opportunity to explore all the hidden information which was impossible before due to language barriers. I will expand this article to how it will change in the CMS world.