Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) is an annual event for software developers, started on 2008 with the first summit held at Bangalore - Indian Silicon Valley. I attended the Java track in that event, where the other two tracks were Dot Net and Web. That was a useful session for me as I happened to hear the geeks talking about Java technology and able to meet like minded people.

Implementing Ajax features in a Java web application is considerably easy if we are using JQuery JavaScript library. JQuery provides built-in methods that we can use to enable Ajax in our Java web application.
In this post, I am going to demonstrate the Jquery’s Ajax capability using a small weather reporting web application. I’m not going to give the entire source code here. Instead I am going to explain the important pieces of the application.

Recently I was reading a blog post Personal development environment, in which the author was asking the readers to share what are the software they use for their personal projects. We all use advanced,enterprise development applications at office, because the company pays for it. But when it comes to home/personal projects, we can not afford for a commercial IDE just to develop Hello World application. So, most of us would go for a open source / free development applications. I am too not an exception for this rule. So, here …

After the Gmail make over, now it’s time for the Google Reader to get some face lift. Google has made some look-and-feel changes and feature changes today to Reader. If you are using Reader as your feed reader, then you would have noticed this change already.
Here are the things that are changed in the Google Reader interface:

First and foremost Reader gets a slick UI which makes me to feel that Reader’s lost it weight. Rounded corners are gone now, so does the drop shadows and dark colors. Now Reader has …

Recently one of my colleague asked me the question
“I am a Java resource. Is it necessary for me to learn and understand the web design?”
I’ve seen many newcomers to Java language has been discussing this topic with themselves when they are given training in HTML and web design. For many of those folks, JavaScript is the another name for a nightmare. They just don’t understand the necessity for a Java developer to learn HTML. This happens mainly for the people who are switching from a AS400/Mainframe or any other …

In my last post about the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), I mentioned that I am willing to watch a Tamil film Kanchivaram in the festival. To add on to that, I’ve got a list of best films to watch in IFFK 2008, suggested by famous Tamil writer Ramakrishnan. Though I may not be able to find time time to see all the films suggested by him, I would like to hand-pick few from those list and watch them. The films that are in my list are:

I have been using few UML modeling tools like argoUML and starUML for quite some time. I have already blogged about my first impressions on argoUML.In that blog post, one user replied that I should have a look at starUML which is also free/open source and is lot better than the argoUML modeling tool. So, I tried starUML also. After using both UML modeling tools, here are my observations on them.

When Wikia search engine was launched, the hype it generated mainly because of it’s ability to consider user feedbacks also for the search results. That is, the user can promote/demote, add comments to any search results to improve it’s placement in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Prior to this, all of the search engines were doing some kind of ranking algorithms (like Google’s Page Ranking algorithm) to list the search pages, but none of them were considering one most important metric - User feedback. Wikipedia got this point exactly …

International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) is an annual event held at Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Organized by the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy, this year IFFK is going to be held between 12th - 19th December 2008. With the screening of nearly 130 films from around the world film lovers are waiting for a visual treat.

Web has evolved from the static interlinked pages to what we are seeing today - dynamic, interactive, very much alive. Thanks to those web programming languages, with out which this evolution of web would not be possible. When I say web programming languages, I am referring those languages which are run at the server side. These programs generate the content dynamically and sends it back to the web browser. There are so many programming languages out there to program the web, but which one is alive and kicking? Let’s compare …