When I studied computer science GIGO was a common term that’s commonly used to nail down into my head that computers are stupid if you write something stupid. GIGO stands for Garbage In Garbage Out which means computers are mere processors that produce appropriate output for the input provided. So if you throw in garbage you are sure to get garbage out. Even to this day GIGO is valid and you cannot throw in anything you want to a computer and expect out something meaningful. It is just that we now have good looking screens to put the garbage in and good looking screens to get the garbage out.

One of the important areas of software development is technical writing. Technical writing is documenting the software that has been developed. A technical writer is a person who is well versed in the business as well as understands the technical aspects of the system and has good written communication. What does it take to write good software documentation? Refer to this article “Writing Good Software Documentation” for more information.

In North East India there is a saying “When the bamboo flowers, famine, death and destruction follow”.  I got to know about this from a beautiful program called “Animal Planet Insights” in Animal Planet channel yesterday. When the program started with this message I was wondering how could this be possible and I was more interested to continue watching the program. The villages suffered a huge loss of human once in every fifty years until 1950’s and as per the saying every time it happened when the bamboo flowered.  A variety of bamboo that only grows in north eastern forests of India has a lifespan of 50 years and when its end comes, flowers that becomes fruits. The fruit falls down the seed within grows up as new trees. The bamboo fruit is rich in vitamins and other essentials that invite rats. These rats eat up the fruit and the natural system of a rat is that when there is plenty of food it copulates and gives birth to more rats than normally.  This multiplies the number of rats enormously.  Once there are no more bamboo fruits the rats enter into the paddy fields and eat up everything. Due to the enormous number of rats there was no way the villagers could stop them. In one night the entire paddy fields surrounding the villages are devastated. The rats don’t stop there; they enter into the houses and eat up every piece of food. Some people leave the village but most of them are stuck with famine and lose lives because of hunger. The bamboo forest cannot be destroyed because it is a source of input for various purposes in the villages.

The program continued on to explain how the villagers in the recent past came up with different ways of traps to kill the rats and reduce the number of rats during the bamboo flowering season. The program also showed other chain reactions that cause devastations like more rats invite deadly snakes. Sometimes from the onset we get easily deceived to believe something to be the cause of a problem when it is actually not.  A deep probe and trace would reveal the root cause of the problem. As another saying also states one needs to find the root cause of the problem and solve it rather than to try to treat the symptoms. Easy fixes to problems may not be an effective solution and could come back with something huge or could produce a side effect. Identifying the root cause and fixing it is the only effective solution.

Note:- This post is part of the “Foundations” series.

Undoubtedly we all accept that at this point, Google is the most powerful search engine and one that is widely used. In fact it is hard to believe that it is a search engine and gives a feel that it is the starting point of internet. We also know from search engine to many other useful tools that have changed the way we look at World Wide Web. All of them for free. What’s more in store? Watch this video “Master Plan - The power of Google” for a visual insight.

Happy Weekend!

If you practicing UML or using UML in your project then the “UML Quick Reference” could come handy. If you are totally new to UML the article in IBM Developerworks - “UML basics: An introduction to the Unified Modeling Language” will get you started.

Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture is a set of architectural principles that help in representing the state and the transition in web application in terms of application’s domain using standard Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).  The URI’s represent the state of an application and is translated by the browser, server or application to the internal needs. For example traditionally a URL like http://www.somesite.com/orderdetails.jsp?user=xyz&order=1234 represents a request to the application to bring back the order details for the user xyz for the order number 1234.  This URL is more constrained to the internal methods of sending a HTTP request rather than a request representing an order request.  In REST the order detail state in the application for user xyz for the order number 1234 would be represented as http://www.somesite.com/user/xyz/order/1234. A significant advantage in such a representation and access mechanism is the easy to understand URL. This can be followed throughout the application including the transitions through hyper links.

REST was formally defined by Roy T Fielding in his work on Software Architectures. It is worth mentioning that Roy T Fielding was also one of the co-founders of the famous Apache HTTP Server. The Web 2.0 era has graciously welcomed REST with open hands and is one of the highlights of the web sites that apply it. The hot Ruby on Rails has built in capability of REST. Java/J2EE technology by default did not have support to REST but a lightweight framework like Restlet can be used to achieve this. The FAQ section has good information about Restlet and references to REST. For not so technical readers, take a look at this blog article by Ryan “How I Explained REST to My Wife“.

PreciseJava has best practices documents on Java/J2EE technology components. These best practices could be an eye opener for writing quality code and creating a performance effective J2EE web application. Every organization has best practices document for the technologies they are working on. The documents available in PreciseJava could be a direct input to such documents and an organization can leverage them effectively.