Monday 25 August 2014

Thoughts On Hibernate

The main purpose of Hibernate/JPA was to address and solve the Object - Relational impedance problem. Java is an object-oriented language and there is no way but to use classes and methods. So we design and develop our Java applications in the object-oriented way.

Since programmers use and deal with objects, and data resides in tables related by common fields (keys), there is a mismatch. Technically, yes, the way data are laid out in the columns of tables and the way they are used in the application as the class / instance variables there is. So when we see, comprehend and discuss the data on the application side and the database side, there is a difference in the visualization and communication.

Wednesday 20 August 2014

Flying Short Distance With Ruby And Dijkstra

It’s been long since I wrote a decent program in Ruby; decent as in non-trivial, non-Hello-World program, but not one for a client to put in production. I find Ruby coding a pleasure because of its support for ‘Perl-isms’.

The program I wrote is to find the shortest distance between two airports. If we setup the airport IATA codes as vertices of a graph, and distance between two airports as the edge weight between two vertices, Dijkstra’s Algorithm will find the shortest path between two given airports.

Saturday 9 August 2014

Grails Trails : Use Case 0.2

From my previous outing with Grails, I am continuing my pursuit of Grails development. This time with a very simplest of the simple use cases.
Add a menubar to home page.
Menubar should have one menu item -- Profile
Profile menu item should have two sub-menu items -- View / Edit

Wednesday 6 August 2014

Film Making And Technology

Technology (from Greek τέχνη, techne, "art, skill, cunning of hand"; and -λογία, -logia) refer to the collection of tools, including machinery, modifications, arrangements and procedures used by humans. Engineering is the discipline that seeks to study and design new technologies.
-- Wikipedia
Technology and film making. I am beginning to like this interplay, being a movie fan from my childhood years, and having spent my adult years in engineering and technology. Of course, the film industry is heavily technology driven already and breath taking graphics are the handiwork of skilled professional playing with modern software. What’s new is that it is being brought home into the Telugu land.

Monday 4 August 2014

Level Zero Post On R

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” -- Aristotle
Tutorials that tell the learner to “do” the tutorial are the ones that I like the most. A lot of regular tutorial give a bunch of steps, examples and even the application to deploy. But that doesn’t aide very much in learning. Sure, if you are working on a project and get stuck on something, you would use the tutorial as a quick reference. But if you are on the beginning of a learning curve of a new language or a framework, you gotta type up the code. When I go through a tutorial, I take prints and actually type the code, then compile and deploy the examples. The time span that you would get as you do the typing and the different ideas you get strengthens the learning process.