Enterprise 2.0 *Update*

Finally, I have managed to check my first set of files into the CVS repository at rubyforge. It is weird that this didn't work the first time....but it sure works now!!!!

For all you tech junkies out there, the commands to check out the files as anonymous are the following (just press enter when prompted for anonymous password)...

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@rubyforge.org:/var/cvs/enterprise20 login
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@rubyforge.org:/var/cvs/enterprise20 checkout modulename

Just replace modulename with "." and you will be fine :)
Let me know of any issues that you may have.

Misconceptions on Web 2.0

Image source: Tim Oreilly's Web 2.0 explanation

In part with my continuing effort to explain Web 2.0 to my non-g33ky friends (or my own dad for the matter) outside my office space (when you are with the unavoidable question "So what do you do these days?" in lunch catchups or any social events), I have been trying to seek a one-liner explanation that can cover all of Web 2.0. It's similar to developing a sales pitch to pitch to a venture capitalist that Web 2.0 is cool and will bring you money. This is the hard part.

A lot of the queries eventually turns to "So what language does Web 2.0 uses? " I can sense the first misconception the general public has about Web 2.0 is the technology. Most people not working in the knowledge space associate every buzzword in IT with some big technology. The implementation part of IT is technology, but Web 2.0 comes in at the strategic part of IT, where companies try to seek new methodologies to position themselves in the market. Tim Oreilly couldn't have had it more accurate on what Web 2.0 is. The association of technology is understandable in this case. Nevertheless, a direct association is fallible. Technologies are merely tools to implement the principles of Web 2.0. Did I just mention principles???

YES, Web 2.0 is nothing but a set of principles that is still debatable by a number of industry hot heads till today. [PERIOD]

Being as technologically agnostic as I am, the technology to implement Web 2.0 principles are open-ended. My personal preference is to leverage light-weight languages such as Ruby on Rails or PHP, but to fully integrate with a corporate legacy systems, I would imagine using Enterprise frameworks such as J2EE or .NET.

In short, Web 2.0 comes in as a potential business proposition to businesses on how they can leverage the principle, coupled with others such as SOA or Google Enterprise Search to revamp the corporate IT ecosystem to drive up shareholder's value in the market. The technology part of it is pretty open-ended and the selection of it pretty much depends on a range of risk/feasibility studies associated with it to best suit the corporation.

So there you have it.

1. Web 2.0 == Strategy phase (leveraging Web 2.0 philosophy)
   
2. Java/Ruby/.NET and etc == Implementation phase (implementing Web 2.0 philosophy)
   

Feel free to comment on any "misconceptions" I have given in this post.

A new take in the graphics world

As part of building a pet project with 2 other programmers, my interests in graphic design recently has recently been instilled. I have been very impressed with the web pages I have visited that contain really nice logo designs and layouts....

In fact, long long time ago far away in the hip and early 90s, I developed artistic flair in painting and sketching pictures. Since then, I always believe I am a little gifted in the artistic world.

However, the love for science and technology took over that as career choices. Since then, I abandoned my practice of drawing, but NEVER my love for graphics.

I have been a fan of digital art and animation, but never the time to learn it. I once modelled a chess set (to be exact, only a horse piece) and it took me 4 hours to do it in 3D MAX. Time consuming it was. I even tried modelling half of my friend's face..but abandoned half way due to other priorities...

Ever since then, I have been looking for a "COMEBACK" terminator style...and I finally found a way to do it: By incorporating digital art and artisitic designs into the very application that me and my buddies are building. I have been eye-ing at the Intuos 3 6x11 A5 wide . Looks like this is the starting point for me to revive the development of my artistic skills once more. The only problem is this sucker is quite costly...wonder if my firm has a employee discount arrangements
with WACOM or at least NextByte Apple Center.

Will post up my first drawing once I get my hands on that baby!!!!

Rails data integrity : To trust or not to trust

In the midst of my Utopian Rails world, something prompted me to rethink using the ActiveRecord associations heavily in Rails. You may have guessed right, it is related to data integrity.

Rails enforces "data integrity" at the application level by forcing you to use certain conventions.
Semantics are built in within ActiveRecord to check for patterns in the database to enforce those integrities...

In traditional applications, data integrity is maintained in the physical layer of the database.
This is achieved through old school SQLs and database design principles such as using foreign keys and such. In the enterprise Java world, integrities are well looked after by programmers manually developing SQL statements to cater for it.

In Rails, you define these in the application level. The question remains: Can you actually trust Rails to fully maintain your data integrity in a large software environment. This may be okay for blogs and forums, but what about an enterprise software environment where you can have potentially ultra complex relationships defined.....

Now that's a rethink of relying too heavily on Rails to maintain data integrity....
Overall, I am more comfortable with rules clearly defined in SQL scripts rather then having to imply the relationships by checking table fields and also reading the definitions of the logical models in Rails....

either that..or I am just really old school...

Enterprise 2.0 is now on RubyForge

It's been a while, but Enterprise 2.0 finally has a place to call home and to showcase itself to the open-source community. Let the scrutiny of the open-source community begins!!!!

As you probably notice, the page still need some fat-trimming and polishing. That will be done overtime.

The blogging and social bookmarking part of it are functional. Each day I write the software with Ruby on Rails, each day my love for Rails grow. It's such a simple framework to use, and has clear visibility on the components interacting with each other from the IDE instead of going through a bazillion xml configuration files. Long live, Rails!!!!

Now,,,,if only RubyForge would resolve my login issue quickly for me to check in my code before I accidentally poured coffee on my laptop and killed everything in it...*fingers crossed*

Maybe RubyForge can also let me run my blog engine on my site.....What better way to showcase than to let people actually play with it....:)