My book on Akka titled - Akka Essentials published by Packt was released on 26th Oct 2012. The book is available from PacktPub site as well on amazon.com.

"Akka Essentials" will show you the current challenges with Java Scalability and concurrency model and how Akka’s Actor Model can help you design and build applications that are inherently scalable and fault-tolerant. Whether you are building new applications or want to refactor an existing application, you will learn the right techniques to build and scale up in no time.

This book is aimed at developers, architects who are building large distributed concurrent and scalable applications using Java/Scala. The book assumes knowledge of Java/JEE concepts but no knowledge of Actor model is assumed.

I dedicate this book to my father who passed away on 30th Oct 2012. All earnings from this book will be donated to my father's favorite charity.

This post originally appeared at www.techspot.co.in

The advent of the Consumer Business application like Facebook, Twitter has changed the definition of Application Scalability. Decade back 10 million+ was a large user base, Facebook will touch 1Billion+ users by end of this year. There are hordes of applications in 100+ million user range. The techniques and approaches employed by these large Consumer Business Applications are different from the traditional enterprise application design and architecture techniques.

If we study the architectures principles employed by these large Consumer Business Applications, then we can conclude to the following

• All the large consumer business applications are build and make use of Cloud Computing
• Applications are build using a combination of open source products and platforms
• Create solutions where the current set of solution do not meet requirement or scale up (e.g. HipHop, Hadoop, ChaosMonkey etc)
• Constant knowledge sharing within the community (FB/Twitter/Google open sources lot of their internal products)

Google IO 2012 developer conference has just concluded last week amid lot of fanfare.   I for one think that Google has lot more influence on Enterprise technology than it seems. Some of what Enterprises see as latest and greatest of technology (such as Map Reduce) has been pioneered in Google a while ago.  This is one the main reasons why I followed this event closely.   

Over the 3 days Google has several technology and product announcements across the product lines.   Here are the top 5 picks at Techspot.

1. 

   Cloud Connect is a global Cloud Computing event that has come to Bangalore, India this year.   The event is organized by UBM, a reputed media organization that publishes Information week magazine.   Other popular events organized by UBM includes Interop.   Bringing Cloud Connect to India, shows the importance of India as a Cloud market. Event happened this week 5/24 to 5/25 at Nimhans Convention Centre.
   

Blackberry 10 OS is unveiled this week at Blackberry World.    In many ways Blackberry 10 is probably the last chance for Blackberry to gain back the market share and be a formidable competition to other Smartphones.    If the announcements at the conference are any indication, Blackberry is going all out this time to make their next generation of OS as the best smartphone platform.   

Some of the interesting features of BB10 mentioned in the key note:

• UI Overhaul – More modern user interface based on Panels (similar to WP7) and the flow interface that switching between applications smooth and seamless.   At last, BB user interface is on par with the competition.
• Intelligent Keyboard – Finally BB is betting on touch interface.  BB is trying to bring its legendary physical keyboard expertise to touch interfaces.    Keyboard with gesture support and intelligent prediction keeping the usability a key priority. 
• Camera with timeline - Camera has a timeline history, so if there is an issue with a photo captured (such as somebody eyes are closed), one can rewind and capture another moment which is more perfect.

The most notable of all, is the focus on developers. There has been significant focus on Developers in the CEO keynote.  One of the BB’s problems has been to attract developers to build quality apps to be able to compete with other smartphone platforms. To address this problem, BB has spent significant time and effort and put the developers first in BB10.  

Here is how -

My presentation on Developing Scalable Apps for deploying on IaaS cloud, which i presented at Cloud Developer Conference 2012
Developing Scalable Apps for deploying on IaaS Cloud CDC April 2012

This post originally appeared at www.techspot.co.in

Cloud based services are so ubiquitous that it is almost impossible to imagine our daily life without these. These services range from web e-mail services like Gmail to productivity apps like Evernote to Social Networks like Twitter to Information services like Weather.com. I can count at least twenty different services that I use on a daily basis and probably hard to live without. I get tremendous value from these services, both personally and professionally. However, there is an ugly side to these services. Each of these services live in their own island and it is hard to go on to each service to keep up with it.

• Isn’t it great if I can push my favorite Google Reader article to Instapaper for a later reading?
• Isn’t it great if I can get an SMS alert, if the weather.com forecasts rain in Bangalore today evening?
• Isn’t it great if I can move my personal tweets to my Gmail account for later reference?
• Isn’t it great if I can get an email alert if my twitter follower mentions me?

What we need is a way to plumb all these discrete services together to create more valued experience.

Social Networks are traditionally focused on sharing of status messages and links. The focus of these networks was about sharing of all kinds, but not as much as about the Visual aspects. This focus has been shifting recently to Visuals. This can be seen in the recent growth of the Visual Social Networks such as Instagram and Pinterest. These networks put the Visual aspects in front and center of the sharing.

Some of the facts that support this observation:

• This week Facebook announced to buy Instagram for $1bn. (Instagram has just 13 employees but has about 50 million plus users. Instagram works by providing several photo filters that can make ordinary photos / pictures visually appealing. After applying filters these pictures can be share.)

• Pinterest has 12 million users and has grown 145% from January to March. (Pinterest operates like an online pin board. Pinterest allows to bookmark (called pinning) any pictures that we see online and share them on a board. Anybody who likes your picture can also pin it. Popularity in terms of Pins most likely to get noticed and drive traffic)

Consumerization is described as the trend for IT to first emerge in the Consumer space and subsequently makes its way into the enterprise world. But what exactly in the consumer world, that is making the users, demand the similar things from the enterprise IT. To understand the underlying need, we need to first examine the basic requirements of the user.

Kathy Sierra, co-creator of the Head First series of books and founder of javaranch.com, describes the hierarchy of needs from the user(s) perspective. The needs are stacked in the order of increasing engagement from the user. Starting with the basic needs of a defined functionality and its correctness, moving on to the learnability, efficiency & usability and finally culminating in intuitiveness and enchantment. Merely provision of correctly working functionality is not guarantee of the success of the application(s). The idea is to hook the user; the application needs to do something extra.

Using the hierarchy of needs as the background, we will see how the applications in the consumer and enterprise world stack up.

Bigdata has caught the fancy of each and everyone. Consumer and enterprise world is looking to adopt the Bigdata. Analysts are talking about it, proclaiming it to the next big thing!

This is my take on how the Bigdata market space will evolve in 2012 and years to come.

• Data Analytics Service – We will start seeing SaaS vendors that will start offering data analytics as a service (e.g. 1010data). These vendors will be able to pull in your unstructured data and provide you standardized reports and data services. This is very similar to the Web analytics (like Omniture) but access lot more data to provide patterns. 70-80% of the data analysis pattern will be similar across industries. These vendors will be able to provide these reports as off the shelf capabilities. For the other 20%, the web interface will allow the user to create patterns to analyze the data

Any application you pick up, there are some issues – big or small. There will be copy-paste code, mistakes, algorithms which could have better thought through. But what distinguishes an antipattern from these normal errors is that like patterns these antipatterns are recurring throughout the code base. In my recent experience in dealing with performance issues, I had observed certain recurrent themes that are undermining the overall application performance. Most of these antipatterns are well documented but it seems we do not learn from others mistakes. We need to make our own mistakes. I am recounting some of the common patterns that I observed in the recent months.