SpringSters - Sharing a Little

Many of us at MangoSpring have been eagerly waiting for BarCamp Pune 4. Anuj, Vishwa, Shivesh, Basant, Ravinder and myself were all in attendance. It was an exciting day, as this was the first public demo and showcase of PurpleTrail, our first big project at MangoSpring. We have been spending a lot of time and energy getting it ready for public use, and we just recently entered it into beta stage. BarCamp was the right platform to showcase it.

BarCamp is not new to most of us. Anuj had already presented in previous BarCamps in Delhi, etc and I have been an organizer for some previous BarCamps in Pune. BarCamp is always a hit, as 99% of the people attending the event are very interested in the technology, unlike other conferences.

I chose a very interesting topic: “Git Introduction”. I have been using Git for the last two months in my free time. We don’t use it at MangoSpring yet, though I hope that will change soon. Overall, I have found Git to be an excellent distributed source control management tool and I wanted to tell others about it.

On the day of the BarCamp, our talks were scheduled for the first and second talks after lunch. The entire morning at the BarCamp was noisy. People were discussing with each other, and it created a quite geeky, techie and enthusiastic environment.

At 2pm, Anuj started his fast, though relaxing, speech. He has prepared slides and explained in detail and how it works? Initially people were listening as they did not have any idea about product. As Anuj started explaining the features, I was seeing “wow” in their faces. Almost everyone listening got excited about the product. As time went by, initial small whispering in the crowd turned into silence. The only talking was Anuj’s voice, and he had captivated everyone’s attention.

Next Anuj moved onto the demo part of the talk, and this turned out to be a big success. As decided, Anuj demoed the web version and most of the clients running (Symbian, J2ME, desktop, WAP). There are two great moments I remember best. The first was when Vishwa was using WAP and the Symbian client to chat with Anuj, who was using the web version. The second was when Anuj invited two guys sitting in the audience to a demo using their mobile numbers. Within no time they received invite SMSs. Both of these were even a “wow” to me, as it was a real world thing happening in front of me. I think that I was even more happy, as I have been responsible for working on the SMS invites portion of the product. It was very clear that our communication platform the power to change people’s daily life. After seeing everyone’s reaction, I am quite sure that Anuj’s talk was the best talk in this BarCamp. Even afterwards, some people told me that they liked the product very much.

After the it was time for my Git talk. The target of the talk was to inspire people to start using Git for their projects. It turned out to be a good talk, and I think I have inspired enough people to consider Git as their source control management tool.

BarCamp Pune 4 was a great success. Hats off to the BarCamp organizers and the presenters. We all are waiting for the next BarCamp which is scheduled to happen in September.

I am a J2ME fan but that doesn’t stop me from noticing some of the limitations of J2ME J.This post is about some of the ways/ideas I have found to overcome those limitations.

1. In J2ME as we all know there is no API for sending an email. Such an API would have been of great use when we wanted to send an email through our J2ME application. But if you just have to send an email through a J2ME application you could pass the email subject and body as well as the senders and receivers name to a Java Servlet the Java Servlet will then collect all this information passed to it by the J2ME application and use Java Mail API to send the email to the desired recipient.
2. There is no way to access the SMS inbox in J2ME this is because the J2ME midlet runs in a sandbox and has limitations on what all operations it can perform.The idea for overcoming this limitation is to have a native program (written in the native O.S.) which reads the SMS inbox and writes to a Local Socket the J2ME application can then read the data from the Local Socket. But this is not perfect solution because we will require different native programs for different devices.
   
3. Every mobile device has an SMS port i.e. the port at which the mobile device receives the incoming Messages (SMS) for example Nokia devices receive SMS at port 0. Now for a Midlet to receive the incoming Messages(SMS) it has to listen at a specific port on the device. Now one can send Messages (SMS) to a device using J2ME (i.e. by using Wireless Messaging API) as well as the normal method (without using J2ME).The Messages send using normal method will be received by the receiving device on the SMS port. On the Other hand Message send using J2ME will carry port number and will be send to a specific port of the receiving device. So we require a midlet on the receiving device listening on that specific port to receive a SMS sent through J2ME.This puts forth an interesting question i.e. if we have a midlet listening on the SMS port of the device will it receive both type of message? (i.e. Normal messages as well as message send through J2ME.) I actually tried it out and found that this didn’t happen. I was unable to receive both types of messages on the device when my midlet was listening for messages on the SMS port of the device. So we can say that we can only receive the Messages sent through J2ME when we have a midlet listening for messages on the receiving device. As I said previously there is no way for accessing the SMS inbox in J2ME but what we can do is to have a midlet listening for SMS on a specific device i.e. get the Message before it actually goes to the inbox and we can have our own created inbox (J2ME application created) for storing the Messages received by the Midlet.
4. We use platform Request method in J2ME for making a voice call. But the problem here is that we really don’t have any way to end a voice call programmatically. The facility such as ending a voice call programmatically would have been useful for situations such as giving a Miscall through J2ME.The problem with platform Request is that it is totally under the native Systems control so once we call the platform Request for making a voice call we have no way to stop this initiation of voice call programmatically. But now the Mobile Telephony API (MTA) (JSR - 253) is released which promises to have more control over voice call initiation and by using this API we can also end a call programmatically. But still no device yet supports or has the implementation for this API.
   
5. Many times we would like our applications to provide Text to speech facility but there again because of the limited resources on the mobile device we may not get fast conversion of text to speech. By that I mean that there may be a some time lag between text to speech conversions of each word because of the limited processing power of the mobile device. The only idea I can think over here is to pass the entire text sentence to a servlet and J2SE also has some classes for text to speech conversion and get back the audio from the servlet and simply play the received audio in the midlet.By doing so we are assigning the much heavy operation of text to speech conversion to servlet which will run on some server and will definitely have more powerful resources than that of the mobile.

Watch out for more in the next post J

The much anticipated Barcamp 3 was a great success! Many of us springsters gathered at the PSPL Campus to represent MangoSpring and show others why it is one of the best technology companies in Pune.

Our very own Springster Anil was one of the organizers of the Barcamp. He did a great job juggling back and forth between his event organization duties and joining the fun with his fellow Springsters. The sessions for the day were well coordinated in advance, and lots of people showed up to share and gain knowledge. The only two lady speakers at the barcamp were my fellow Springster Anjali (our happiness manager) and myself. Our sessions were slotted for the afternoon, which gave us both the opportunity attend the other presentations with our fellow colleges and soak up as much from the other presenters as we could.

MangoSpring’s time to shine started in the afternoon with Anjali speaking about “Organization 2.0″. It was a very healthy discussion on how we are building “culture” at MangoSpring. For more on this, see Anjali’s blog below. Following Anjali’s presentation, we gave a glimpse of the technical work done at MangoSpring. I was then let loose to talk about one of the technologies that we use here- “Push Technology-Cometd”.

To briefly explain “Push Technology-Cometd”, it is an alternative means for data delivery to the browser. Our classic web paradigm of “Pull Technology “gives us some hiccups when it comes to real-time based or multi-user applications. In a normal web-based application which needs to show fresh data, we expect the client to request (poll) the server at frequent intervals in time to maintain the freshness of data. However, this leaves high chances of the user seeing stale data for some amount of time before the next polling cycle kicks in. “Push” addresses this problem with its completely opposite approach. Using “Push”, the client initially opens a long-lived connection with the server and registers its interests in the specific channel it wants. From then on, the server
pushes data and updates the respective client as and when the data changes. Using this technology, the freshness of data is maintained for the end-user without any user or periodic browser intervention.

Cometd is a project which implements this technology and has drafted a spec called Bayeux, to make implementation of Push Technology more standardized and
developer friendly. The Cometd server implementation which we work on is being written entirely in Java. Many more details that I talked about in the presentation are captured in the slideshow uploaded with this blog.

At the end of my talk there was a good Q&A session which reflected the interest of the audience in the session. This was great for me, because it gave me an opportunity to get my thoughts across. Afterwards, many people also had specific implementation questions and questions about multiple server implementations of Cometd.

After the presentation was over, it was a great feeling knowing that I shared everything that I had set out to. It was also great to have our fellow Springsters there for support and motivation. The cheers from Abhinav, Anil, Anuj, Basant, Hari, Nilesh and Rana were much appreciated!

When all was said and done, the end of Barcamp 3 Pune left the Springsters with enriched knowledge and greater confidence ….and don’t forget the smiles on our faces!

- Isha
Click to download the presentation

I have been loosely associated with BarCamps from its start in India back in early 2006. The first BarCamp happened at Delhi and well AJAX, ROR, Web 2.0 were then not mainstream as they are today. I had spoken on contextual flow between mobile and PC. Read here and here

Since then I have been to BarCamps in Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai. Spoke on different topics and given product demos.

And now its BarCamp3 in Pune. A lot of common names on the wiki already.
We at MangoSpring are an active participant and supporter of barcamp, MoMo’s ( Mobile Monday) and the likes. We hope to be present their in strength. To learn, to see, to hear and of course to share.

Quiet a few of us are looking forward to give sessions. Anjali ( our Happiness Manager) is eager to talk about what she calls ” Organization 2.0″ - must say she has become quiet good at using these buzz words She believes that organizations need Happiness managers and not HR managers. Also her ideas on ‘Naked organization’ and flat structure inspired us to come up with TaskBin.

I myself shall talk about how communication has evolved over the internet from bulletin boards to email, from IM to sms, From scraps to twitter. We at MangoSpring our working on our stealth product Felix in the space of communication and messaging. We believe that true innovation in this space has only just begun to happen and are glad to be at the forefront of it.

Hari is a changed man. From Java fanatic to Rails convert in 6 months. He wants to share his experience with fellow developers at BarCamp and Isha is all set to show how push technology on browsers is here for good and show case Cometd implementation.

More on BarCamp 3 as it happens.