ESP – Product Engineering – Platform and Software Products: Web 2.0 Archives

July 6, 2010

Leveraging the power of Crowdsourcing for Localization

Crowdsourcing is the new buzz word floating around the internet lately. Wikipedia defines it as "the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call". Though this a new term, the concept itself is not so new. It literally means outsourcing to the crowd. The Open source revolution which started almost a decade back is successfully tapping the power of the community to develop software. The key driving point of Crowdsourcing is participation and collaboration with the general crowd (or users) who use your applications and leveraging their expertise and time to enhance your product. Companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google etc have successfully tapped the potential of Crowdsourcing and made millions out of it by virtually investing nothing.

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Posted by Aviraj Singh at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 27, 2010

Handling Data in Enterprise Mashups

Mashups are always ever-green, hence gets the attention from all the stakeholders, be it a creator of the mashup or the user of the mashup. Thanks to Google Maps which has taken the popularity to next level. A Typical mashup application comprises of a web application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term Mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs and data sources. An example of a mashup is the use of cartographic data to add location information to real estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web API that was not originally provided by either source. These mashups have also got its foot into enterprise business and the termed coined is “Enterprise Mashups”. Here in addition to just data the process also comes into picture. If the enterprise is SOA enabled then we can directly use the BPM engine for process orchestration. Enterprise Mash up consists of:

Web services
RSS Feeds
Platform services in a cloud
Data
Client Application

In this blog, I will quickly touch upon on Data part of the mash-ups. Data in Enterprise Mashups can be in the form of:

XML data residing in RSS feeds or in webservices.
DB data
Unstructured data
JSON

In Mashups the processing of data is a dynamic activity hence the time taken to process the data may increase the overall execution of the mashup application. To tackle this problem distributed computing can be applied on different kinds of data as mentioned above.

For XML and JSON data, the parallel parsers can be used to create the Mash up. This could be multithreaded or use Multicore architecture of Intel chip at hardware level http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/eng/406212.htm. On other hand we can use hadoop’s HDFS and MapReduce for un-structured data.
Hadoop is a framework based on java that supports distributed computing scale very well for data intensive applications. Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is the primary storage system used by Hadoop applications. HDFS creates multiple replicas of data blocks and distributes them on compute nodes throughout a cluster to enable reliable, extremely rapid computations. MapReduce is a programming model and software framework for writing applications that rapidly process vast amounts of data in parallel on large clusters of compute nodes http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/. One good example of an enterprise mashup is “CRM-gadget” http://www.programmableweb.com/tag/enterprise , which searches new account or validate accounts on oracle on demand over Google local search. This mashup can tap the potential of Hadoop HDFS and Mapreduce and reduce the time to search the accounts.

To conclude, we need to build POCs and see the dynamic dissection/split of data on parallel/distributed nodes to achieve almost linear speed-up. This will in-turn reduce the total time of executing an Enterprise Mashup application.

Posted by Jayanti Vemulapati at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 19, 2009

Rich Internet Application Blues for customers and software developers

Internet evolution and revolution has brought massive shifts in all the facets of human mankind. It has made a world look like a single hyper-mart where in the e-communication is no longer a barrier. In reality the interactions have shifted from simple text based messaging to 2D and 3D base communication. In today’s internet world this is synonym to saying that the “shift is from web1.0 to web2.0”. This shift directly touches the heart of the users and reduces the gap between real business/human interactions with that of virtual interactions which exists in virtual world of internet.

We all know the innovations that are born in universities and research labs later find a place either in opensource world or in shareware world. Now we are coming to the million dollar question “what is the cost implication”? This is a pivot point for both customers and software Services Company to make the decision. There is no direct answer for this question but our research at “Infosys Java Centre of Excellence” has designed a Quadrant based decision making RIA (Rich Internet Applications) framework for our customers. As long as customer gives their inputs wrt to degree of richness they want in their applications and what is their cost budget then this framework will help them unravel their problem statement.

Let’s have a closer look at this framework. The frame work has mainly two parameters:

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Posted by Jayanti Vemulapati at 6:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)