India is “No.1 Developer nation”, says Sadagopan (IIIT Professor,Bangalore)

The Professor urged developers to build programs that last long and admires that we are the number one developer nation
Never mind the argument whether India is a developing nation or a developed nation, the fact is that we are the number one developer nation, said Professor S Sadagopan of the International Institute of Information Technology here amidst rousing cheers from code-crunchers.
He was addressing around 700 software developers at the IBM Rational conference in Bangalore.
The theme of the conference this year is Software in Concert, and quite fittingly speakers at the conference were ushered on to the stage to the sound of rock guitar riffs.
Sadagopan urged developers to build programs that last long. Tracing the changes in the industry from old programming languages from Fortran and Pascal, to todays frameworks, he said that software has to evolve according to the changes in the IT world.

We are moving from products to productized services and from computers to appliances. The ability to program software for a gamut of devices has not happened yet, he said.
The Rational user conference also saw the launch of the latest version of the software in India. Developers got a sneak peek at what they could expect from the new release- support for global distributed development; SoA governance and regulatory and internal compliance features. Version 7 allows for componentization which means you can install optional installable features and specific components for targeted users, said Martin Nally, CTO, Rational Software.
He also gave a small preview of the features of the next release, which promises to offer a collaborative platform. As a precursor to Version 8, the company has announced what it calls its Jazz initiative, a collaborative platform that would leverage on Internet based technologies such as blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds and blogs, thus enabling real-time development platforms.
Rational plans to throw open core components of the work on Jazz to the developer community.

Flock : A New Web Browser

Few days back guys at Flock released a public beta of their much awaited Browser . It was an exciting news for me for two reasons. One i happen to meet with Chris at barcampBangalore and attended his presentation on Micro formats . it was awesome . he was till very recent past associated with this project . Now he is a freelancer doing consulting work .
secondly this project was making a very different and somewhat dramatic bet on the future of browsing as we know it . Since the inception of browsing technology ( Mosaic Onward ) the approach to developing a browser is pretty much standard . browser was more of a gateway. it was done in a more and more generalised fashion . there was no optimization for any application specific or domain specific usage pattern . there was support for ActiveX,XML,Frames but they were not aimed at any particular user base . that means there was no application level optimization there was no specific browser for E-Commerce or for Usenet or blogs or for video . there was a business sense in doing that .of course if you optimize your browser for one user group you run the risk of alienating with the rest of Internet users . since no single user base was big enough to make this kind of effort commercially viable so it was in the best interest of developer to make it as Horizontal as possible .
folck is the first browser with this application layer optimization . they have positioned themselves as a browser for web 2.0 crowd who are neck deep in to social networking and tagging and other such stuff . their tag line says “Browser for You and Your Friends”. with its feature for Blogging, Feed reader and photo sharing it surely have some appeal to this user base . i am hooked on it right now and plan to do so in future but i really wonder how long i can keep up with the inconvenience of using multiple browsers . Maintaining History , Book Marks ,feeds,passwords at two places is too much of work .
its really an interesting experiment . do we really need a separate browser for every kind of browsing we do ? can we all the features of folck be pushed in to FireFox by some extension or some plug gin . is it just an heck an experiment or this is a start of a new trend .well time ahead will be the judge of it . but right now i am captivated by the sleek interface and new features of folck . Kudos to the team .good luck …may the force be with you .