UI Crossroads

User Interface, Unification and then Disintegration. So Browser to Apps, WHY -- it’s from need to want journey i.e. from generic to specialized to personalize User Interfaces (UI).

As technology evolves, it allows more customization and sophistication. Today we are standing at another crossroads where ease of use is taking front seat and standards are taking a hit, thus today we create more than one UI for our application - namely Web UI, IPhone UI, Android UI, Windows UI....

Hang on; the verdict is not out still. HTML is making a mega comeback, watch out for HTML5. Platform independent UI is on unveil.

SOA thought process demands platform agnostic UI. But Business world thinks otherwise, till technology proves ROI. Eventually we have seen time and again technology supersedes, profit machines (corporate houses). Case in point: extensive use of SOA framework to integrate diverse systems with ease.

Effort turnaround time points towards Platform Independent UI.

Massive Parallel Processing In Cloud - "BIG Data"

Massive Parallel Processing In Cloud - "BIG Data"

How Pyramid of Giza was built? What it takes to run a chip? What's the Universe made up of?

Basic fabric of nature is - 'building block needs to be atomic and should be available in plenty'. Same applies to computing world. There is a limit to scale up, because as we scale up, maintenance overhead increases and soon we reach to a point where scale up advantage is nullified by the corresponding increase in maintenance overhead.

So the way to go forward is nature’s way. Scale out. Concept - when many atomic computing resources are leveraged in parallel, the impact is massive. And that’s what we call MPP - Massive Parallel Processing.

With each passing day internet infrastructure efficiency is getting stronger in terms of payload and speed. Now that forms the foundation for MPP in Cloud. Unlimited atomic computing resource availability (literally) on cloud from many vendors, is another thumbs up for MPP in Cloud to become a reality.

MPP in cloud needs, scale out architecture paradigm to be effective.

Big Data concept is a reality - “Think Scale Out”  

Economics of Compression

Compression is a mechanism to reduce space required to keep a certain thing or entity. In the world of databases this word assumes a greater meaning. In the information age, data is growing at exponential rate. As we have more avenues to capture data.

With this growth in Data, Organization increasingly wants to draw meaning/value out of this data. That entails - Data Engineers now have to maintain huge volume of data and not only that, the need for performance is also growing.

Algorithms for compression have evolved, providing reduction in space required to maintain data. That’s just the beginning.

Trinity of computing resources namely CPU, Memory and IO plays a vital role in the performance. Out of these three, IO is the weakest link in the chain when it comes to data management performance.

So with reduction in size of data using compression, the need for IO decreases resulting into performance increases. But there will be increase in the total CPU cost, as compression and subsequent decompression will need CPU cycles.

A word of caution - High Cardinality data is difficult to compress and frequent updates at granular level will be slower due to compression overhead.

When in need of Performance one needs to take compression factor into consideration.

Intelligence Revisited

In information world, Intelligence is overloaded word.

Today’s dilemma is "Intelligence presupposes problem is known". That’s where the roots of rework and dead end roads start.

Case in point -:  Business Manager asking how business process is doing. Well the answer lies in, what’s the basis. That's were building the target line comes into picture. How do we get to know those target lines? Seems to be million dollar question?

There are two sources to identify the target line.

·         Experience

·         Discovery

Technologist hands are tied up as far as Business Experience is considered. Now we move towards discovery mode. We can get the top performance numbers from past data. And this forms the basis of target lines. Let’s beat our numbers - that’s the way to go. And supplement this with experience of business managers.

Once target lines are set we can measure, and improve. Intelligence enables Progress......

MVC an Insight

A input triggers a process which may produce implicit or explicit output. In the backdrop of this simplicity MVC framework/architecture manifests itself.

MODEL - Core Process Engine
CONTROLLER - Communication Hub (Receives/Sends Instructions/Data)
VIEW - User Interface

In the trio, Controller forms the basic fabric of the architecture. Its the layer which "cements" as well as provides "independence" to Model and View. Infrastructure which provides PERSISTENCE by modulating/handshaking on both sides i.e. VIEW and MODEL.

As the clients now a days have enough memory and CPU power , VIEW (user-interface) can be intelligent. And that's the space which can contribute to scalability , all the UI needs can be taken care of without the server coming into picture.

Business logic and data binding makes the MODEL. Here flexibility is a big challenge , SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) approach makes this area of architecture most refined process of all. Business Processes identification leading to component build up. Data Layer acts as persistent memory while data schema will reflect business cases (Entity-Relationships).