IKVM.NET a JVM CLR bridge

While reading through the Mono web pages, I came across an interesting project known as IKVM.NET.
This project strives to bridge the gap between the Java and the .NET world, by providing a JVM written over the .NET framework. What this essentially means is that now there is a way to easily convert a Java library into a .NET library and vice versa.


It is also possible to develop a .NET application in Java and a Java application in .NET.


Many may question the rationale behind such a framework. Earlier even I too was skeptical about this framework. But as I am involved with some projects, I realize that this framework strives to solve a dilemma that many developers faced earlier - how to use the facilities of a mature framework available on platform into the other. 


For example; today there does not seem to be a platform independent way to read MS Word documents in .NET. You have to necessarily use COM interfaces exposed in the Microsoft Office PIA. This will work fine on Windows, but with the advent of Mono, .NET apps are no longer restricted to Windows platforms.. So now I wanted to port this code to Mono on my Mac OS but could not do so as this code uses COM which is Microsoft specific technology.


I found that I could use the Apache POI to read word documents in Java in a platform independent manner and that the POI framework is pretty mature. Now using IKVM I can convert this POI library into a .NET dll and consume the classes.


I am working on this now and will blog about my experiences in another post.

For Sale: A $160,000 Apple Computer

A very interesting article:


http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/for-sale-a-16000-apple-computer/

Sequence Diagrams on Demand

I was looking out for a tool that would help me to draw Sequence diagrams with ease. And then I came across this interesting site called as WebSequenceDiagrams.

When the home page for the site loads, you do not see anything fancy except a sample sequence diagram and some text panel at the left. But then this is where the magic all begins!!

Actually the text on the left pane directly maps to the sequence diagram being drawn on the right and then there are a set of sequence diagram templates to be chosen from too from a pallete.

So to modify the sequence diagram, you modify the text by following a particular syntax, the sequence diagram auto updates itself as you specify in text the various interactions between the participating entities on the left.

Visit the site and post comments!!

FSSearchIndex Framework - An open source document indexing and search framework

Hello All,

Through this post I wanted to share with the world something that I have been working on for the past year. I am currently working on a cross platform, low cost desktop content search framework.

I was struck with the idea of developing this framework, when during the course of some assignment I figured out that there is no easy way to search for a file based on it's content,even though such an activity is one of the most common one on any desktop system.

We today do not have cross platform content search and indexing frameworks; most of the content search and indexing frameworks like Windows search make use of platform specific proprietary technologies. Others like Google search while being cross platform provide for integration using platform specific technologies like COM. Worse GDS can only be interacted with using Javascript on non-Windows OS.

The FSSearchIndex framework API has been developed to be simple and easy to use - with just 5 lines of code you can actually build your own indexing or searching application.

This project is open-source and free of cost for usage. It has been hosted on SourceForge.NET and Codeplex.

Request you all to try them and let me know how this can be improved. Any contributions towards this in terms of design, code, testing and documentation are welcome.

Since currently I am developing these single handedly there may be bugs in the Beta code base hosted at the below site.These will be ironed out over time.

Thank you once again and hope you give this framework a try.

 FSSearchIndex Framework on SourceForge

 FSSearchIndex Framework on Codeplex

For the Aspiring Software Architects....

Ok, here is a fantastic link I found on MSDN blogs that should be read by all aspiring Software Architects... that includes me too.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/architectsrule/archive/2010/08/14/how-to-avoid-being-the-asshole-architect.aspx

The link may contain some profane words... but who cares anyways... we are all adults!!

My first technical post on TechSights

Ok, so finally I found some time and motivation to "Just Do It" - create my own blog where I can post content related to technology trends in various areas right from OS security to RDBMS, programming languages et all.

This blog is not going to be specific to a particular technology- there are many ones out there, rather it is to share and collaborate with the world about various tit-bits of knowledge that we get with respect to computer science related technologies and in the process get more knowledge about the same.

So I hope this blog does it's bit to help me share my knowledge with the rest of the developer and the IT community and in return also help me learn from them.