DIWALI  is quite nostalgic to me as i think of how i celebrated diwali during my childhood days. As our comedian vadivelu  says “ethu seithalum PPlan pani seyanum”J J J.Immediately after the DASARA festival ends i used to start planning for the list of crackers i need to buy,the colour of dresses i need to buy etc….since i was brought up in an apartment i got a lot of childhood friends.whenever any one of our childhood friends buys any crackers or dresses we all used to assess what are the things he has bought etc but even if i  think of that now it brings a pleasant smile on my face eventhough it is hard to say a HAI and a BYE now since everyone are quite busy in their schedule these days.One week b4 the DIWALI itself we used to starting bursting crackers but the momentum picks only on the eve of DIWALI.B4 sleeping on the eve of the DIWALI we all used to challenge ourselves as to who will burst the crackers first   in our apartment in the next morning.one thing i am proud enough to say to u is that i was the one who won the challenge most no.of times.Mostly everybody in my house will get up at 3.00 A.M in the morning.After getting up in the morning first thing i used to do is to burst a 100 or a 1000 wala.Then after finishing the GANGA SNANAM everybody in our apartment used to share the greetings. SWEETS AND SAVOURIES will be exchanged with our neighbours .one of the phrases my late grandfather used to say is “IT IS BETTER TO EAT GOOD QUALITY FOOD STUFFS WHICH COSTS MORE THAN TO GIVE TO THE  DOCTOR AFTER EATING POOR QUALITY FOOD STUFFS .SO DONT COMPROMISE ON GOOD QUALITY FOOD ITEMS”.Cricket will be never be missed on every DIWALI too as we all used to play matches on DIWALI starting from 10.00 A.M in the morning with all age groups participating in the match.OMG !!!why can’t those days come again in my life???????.With the momentum of enjoyment reaching the highest level in the evening ,me and my friends will start to burst crackers again after 6.00 P.M and after 9.00 P.M comes the time for combining all the crackers which have not bursted  in one  place inside a box and then one of our friends used to ignite it and there comes the thrilling  part with every friend of mine running in different directions in order to safeguard ourselves.

With increasing maturity these days the interest in bursting the crackers has taken a jolt may be because with the increase in competition of TV channels we also get some good  programs in our television sets.Thanks to our chief minister for providing television sets for free of costs.One cant deny the fact that  “DIWALI is still not the same  as it was b4”.Another thing I also want to say is that  One most used word by the people these days is RECESSION.I went onto find the meaning of the word RECESSION in the oxford English dictionary and it said that a decline in economy or prosperity but CAN ANY ONE SAY THAT THIS IS THE TIME OF  RECESSION after going on to RAGNANATHAN STREET OR USMAN ROAD OR BUNDER STREET OR IN SWEET SHOPS LIKE ADAYAR AANDABHAVAN OR KRISHNA SWEETS during the time of Diwali???????.My adios to this post to everyone by wishing everyone a very HAPPY AND SAFE DIWALI AND LET THE FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS ENLIGHTEN EVERYONES CAREER !!!.

His life was so happy when he was a kid……

Playing….. ..Laughing. …….Sleeping. ……

He grew up…
One fine day he got a job in a company..
He was asked to follow a small boy where ever he goes…..

He became so famous that…..He was seen everywhere.. .. on websites….

Roadside hoarding… desktop… etc…

One fine day… A new company takes over the old….

Pug is panicked.. in a nail biting situation!!!

It’s been decided… &
Pug was sent off… Now he is jobless…

New concept adopted…here comes zoo zoo….

Moral: Never love your company, love your job, you never know when your company stops loving you.

Company needs professionals. Be professional.

Give a thought to this… LION’S WORD…

Live as if you were to die tomorrow… Learn as if you were to live forever…

History

The term “Web 2.0″ was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999. In her article “Fragmented Future,” she writes

The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] and maybe even your microwave.

Her use of the term deals mainly with Web design and aesthetics; she argues that the Web is “fragmenting” due to the widespread use of portable Web-ready devices. Her article is aimed at designers, reminding them to code for an ever-increasing variety of hardware. As such, her use of the term hints at – but does not directly relate to – the current uses of the term.

The term did not resurface until 2003.These authors focus on the concepts currently associated with the term where, as Scott Dietzen puts it, “the Web becomes a universal, standards-based integration platform.”

In 2004, the term began its rise in popularity when O’Reilly Media and MediaLive hosted the first Web 2.0 conference. In their opening remarks, John Batelle and Tim O’Reilly outlined their definition of the “Web as Platform,” where software applications are built upon the Web as opposed to upon the desktop. The unique aspect of this migration, they argued, is that “customers are building your business for you.” That is, they argued that the activities of users generating content (in the form of ideas, text, videos, or pictures) could be “harnessed” to create value. According to Tim O’Reilly:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

From there, the term Web 2.0 was largely championed by bloggers and by technology journalists, culminating in the 2006 TIME magazine Person of The Year – “You.”That is, TIME selected the masses of users who were participating in content creation on social networks, blogs, wikis, and media sharing sites. The cover story author Lev Grossman explains:

It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Technology overview

The sometimes complex and continually evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-oriented browsers with plugins and extensions, and various client-applications. The differing, yet complementary approaches of such elements provide Web 2.0 sites with information-storage, creation, and dissemination challenges and capabilities that go beyond what the public formerly expected in the environment of the so-called “Web 1.0″.

Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques. Andrew McAfee used the acronym SLATES to refer to them:^[19]

Search

The ease of finding information through keyword search.

Links

Ad-hoc guides to other relevant information.

Authoring

The ability to create constantly updating content over a platform that is shifted from being the creation of a few to being constantly updated, interlinked work. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that users undo and redo each other’s work. In blogs, content is cumulative in that posts and comments of individuals are accumulated over time.

Tags

Categorization of content by creating tags: simple, one-word user-determined descriptions to facilitate searching and avoid rigid, pre-made categories.

Extensions

Powerful algorithms that leverage the Web as an application platform as well as a document server.

Signals

The use of RSS technology to rapidly notify users of content changes.

Benifits of RIA:

RIAs offer organizations a proven, cost-effective way to deliver modern applications with real business benefits:

• Offer users a richer, more engaging experience.
• Keep pace with users’ rising expectations.
• Increase customer loyalty and generate higher profits.
• Leverage existing personnel, processes, and infrastructure.

Why Rich Internet Applications??

What is an RIA anyways? Well HTML applications are state-less. Application servers maintain state by using cookies and session variables to keep track of users, but all the logic is on the server. So while a user is looking at a page in their browser, the application is unable to do anything until the user commits an action that sends data from the page back to the server for processing. The code processes the data, and generates resulting HTML that the browser loads back in.

A simple example would be a report or search tool that queries a sales/CRM database based on various criteria from the user such as deal time frame, product group, and sales executive. The user enters these values, clicks on a submit button, and the browser goes blank while it waits for a response from the server and loads the resulting HTML which would be a tabular list of records that match the criteria: For eg

Time Frame From To Product Group All Adapters Routers Hubs Switches Sales Exec All Jeff Smith Bob Gordon John Sykes

Look familiar to anything you’ve done? Now if the user wants to change the parameters, or perhaps sort on a particular column, typically the page would need to be sent back to the server where it rebuilds an up to date report based on the new criteria. Pretty standard stuff for Coldfusion, JSP, PHP, ASP, or any other servlet language.

In the Flex world, your application wouldn’t need to post a request to the server every time the user made a change. Instead of the logic living purely on the server side, your presentation tier is all on the client. So imagine changing filters or criteria, and the table automatically updating as a result. Imagine clicking on a column title and the column automatically sorts without reloading the page. This saves hits to your web server, application server, database, and network. For one user this may not be a big deal, but what about 1000 users, or 10 000 users?

HTML based applications are a series of HTML web pages; Flex applications are LIVE applications. A simple analogy is imagine Word or Excel being an HTML web application; vs the real application itself. It could be done; but the real application is aware of your mouse movements, every key stroke, and provides much more feedback to the user by using sound, animation, and other visual queues

Web Devolopment standards Changing:

Flex and competing technologies such as JavaFX, Ajax, and Silverlight are pioneering today’s changing approaches to Web development and have played a significant role in changing how users like to visualize their data. Flex and its rivals are relatively nascent technologies and are still in the process of overcoming issues such as portability across browsers, security, limits on client-side caching, and so on.

One of the most significant competing technologies to Flex is Ajax. Their capabilities overlap some, but they also fill substantially different niches. Flex excels at targeting rich and complicated graphical structures, while Ajax is used primarily for text-based content. Ajax works closely with HTML, and its data is transferred in XML (or JSON) format, while Flex can support XML, JSON, and even a binary format of data transfer. The fact that Flex supports binary data transfer probably puts it far ahead of Ajax in terms of data transfer rates and compactness.

Flex uses a combination of a tagged based language called MXML, and an object oriented language called Actionscript 2.0 (the language of Flash).

You build your main files in .mxml, and can build custom components and objects in .as (ActionScript). The Flex Application Server (a J2EE application) will compile your code into a Flash file (.swf) which the browser then loads. The Flex App server provides other services such as being a gateway to RemoteObjects (eg CF CFCs) and WebServices.

Adobe Flex is at the forefront of those tools that help you create RIAs, whose features often include rich charting, drill-down animations, 3D effects, and a new level of responsive user interaction. Such features are especially important in the burgeoning areas of business intelligence (BI) and Web 2.0 content creation and delivery. Core Web 2.0 requirements typically include asynchronous processing, doing away with the request-response paradigm, content aggregation, and so on—things that applications like Flex can help you do with less effort and in less time.

Flex isn’t billed as RAD (Rapid Application Development); it’s geared towards Enterprise Applications where the real-time interactivity and rich workflow are the primary ROI. However developing in Flex is by far faster than developing productivity tools in Flash natively; on some accounts there are development speed gains of 10X.

HOW FLEX WORKS:

Flex IDE is developed on Eclipse and can be used as a stand-alone Integrated Development Environment. Flex IDE offers powerful features that include rich editors, a versatile debugger and in-built objects

USE:

Imagine dragging and dropping an item for sale into a shopping cart instead of clicking on the old school [add to cart] button. This type of functionality is easy to implement. Or the whole realm of sound; where you can provide audio guided applications that talk users through their first time in the workflow.

Advantages of Flex:

Flex delivers many significant benefits that are worth noting. Many (but by no means all) of Flex’s most significant benefits derive from the fact that it is built on top of and extends Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash Player. Key benefits of Flex include:

1. Complete browser portability. Any browser that supports Flash Player—and that includes almost every browser—also supports Flex and its scripting language, ActionScript (AS). This is in distinct contrast to Ajax, which is affected by the incompatible implementations of JavaScript implemented in different browsers.
2. Consistent look-and-feel. Flash Player is well known for delivering the same look-and-feel to all operating systems and browsers. Flex utilizes the Flash Player engine, so it benefits from that same consistent look-and-feel.
3. Robust security. Flex leverages the highly tested Flash Player security model.
4. Rich UI. Flex benefits from Halo Skins, gradient fills, vector graphics, and other Flash Player features.
5. Scalable vector graphics (SVGs). Flex stands out from most other RIA-based technologies because it supports vector-based drawing and direct embedding of SVG mark-up files. SVG-based images look equally good at any resolution a given browser supports. This is in distinct contrast to bitmap-based images, which can degrade significantly as you scale up a given image’s size.
6. Asynchronous request/response model. Flex offers complete support for asynchronous processing of user requests. Asynchronous processing enables a Web site to break away from the page-centric model, where every user request spawns a time-consuming page refresh.
7. Binary data communication. Flex offers complete support for binary data transfer between a Flex client and any back-end server. You can send this data using Abode’s proprietary Action Message Format (AMF) (now with an open source specification) or any other format you might want to leverage or develop in-house. Flex even supports opening binary sockets from client-to-server, which enables you to achieve “real” data push. Note that this feature might not be able to use a browser’s encryption facilities such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL).
8. Runtime shared libraries (RSLs) and modularization. Flex’s support for these features ensures that you can load modules dynamically, which means you can add new features to an already running application and even make use of RSLs loaded by other Flex applications running on the same client machine. This can help you reduce the start-up time of your application’s features because it shrinks the size of the initial binary.
9. Client-side caching. Flex offers superb support for client-side caching. With the user’s permission, a Flex application can cache unlimited data on the client side, which reduces network round trips if the same data is requested again in the same or future sessions. You can cache any kind of data, including full object graphs, custom classes, maps, and arrays. This support is significantly more advanced than HTML cookies that allow an application to store only String-name value pairs and limit even those to a general restriction of four KBs per Web site.
10. Cross-browser communication. Flex supports communication between applications running in the same type of browser, between different tabs of the same browser, and even between applications running in different browsers on a user’s machine. This feature means many applications can share data among themselves, enabling an extremely rich end-user experience.
11. Streaming. Flex offers excellent support for streaming binary data. Streaming can be a life saver for data-heavy applications that need to transfer large amounts of data to the end user because this approach lets an application display data in parts to the end user as soon as the data arrives.
12. Strong back-end connectivity. From its inception, Flex has featured excellent support for popular back-end technologies such as the Java Platform Enterprise Edition, the Microsoft .NET platform, Cold Fusion, and PHP. This connectivity support has helped fuel the rate of Flex adoption for the client-side layer.
13. Rich Framework. Flex offers a robust framework for component development and contains many off-the-shelf components already built-in for the developer’s convenience. This facilitates rapid development of projects and timely deliveries.
14. Debugging and Editor Support. Adobe has made an extremely smart decision by developing a robust Eclipse-based editor called Flex Builder, which greatly simplifies developing and debugging Flex applications.

This combination of features makes Flex a compelling choice for creating UIs now and for the foreseeable future. Another big plus for developers using Flex: You can create some interesting solutions aggregating and reusing already built components, which fits well within the spirit of Web 2.0. However, things get more difficult if you want to build new custom components from scratch. The power that Flex provides might inspire you to want to create rich, beautiful components that have thus far been solely the province of desktop applications you build with libraries such as openGL. Think about the possibilities of writing a gaming engine on the Web that builds on the concepts of the Electronic Arts racing game, Need for Speed. Or you might want to build an ISP topology with live views of data flows and link usages. I think you will see applications like these and many more in Flex’s future, but the market and toolset aren’t quite there yet. In any case, enterprise businesses have a lot riding on their Web-based UIs, and they can benefit tremendously from the power of Flex.

Similarities to Java Programming Language:

Adobe built Flex on top of its Flash Player, which is a proven technology for rendering rich UIs. Flash Player as it exists now is well suited for graphics designers, simplifying how you create MovieClips, time lines, banner ads, and so on. However, Flash Player applications aren’t so appealing for enterprise developers who are accustomed to developing applications with object-oriented design and components that extend other components. On the other hand, Flash Player’s native language is ActionScript, an ECMA-compliant scripting language that resembles JavaScript, and designers tend to be more attached to XML-tag-based languages. Adobe noticed this gap quickly and bridged it by introducing MXML. Adobe’s approach with Flex resembles the approach Sun™ took with Servlets and JSP technologies. Code written in MXML gets translated to ActionScript code, which in turn gets compiled into something called Action Byte Code (ABC)—not unlike what happens with the Java Byte Code process. ABC is packed into the binary SWF format, which is delivered when users request it over a Web browser. These SWF-based files can run locally as well as in a stand-alone Flash Player plug-in. However, the Flash Security model doesn’t allow local files to access network resources and vice versa

VARIOUS VERSIONS OF FLEX:

Jack Dorsey had grown interested in the simple idea of being able to know what his friends were doing. Specifically, Jack wondered if there might be an opportunity to build something compelling around this simple status concept. When he brought the idea up to his colleagues, it was decided that a prototype should be built.

Twitter was funded initially by Obvious, a creative environment in San Francisco, CA. The first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Obvious. In May 2007, Twitter Incorporated was founded.

When he first saw implementations of INSTANT MESSAGING Dorsey had wondered if the software’s user status output could be shared among friends easily. He approached ODEO, who at the time happened to be interested in TEXT MESSAGING.Dorsey and BIZSTONE decided that SMS text suited the status message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks. The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from EVAN WILLIAMS who had left GOOGLE after selling them as PYRA LABS and BLOGGER

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Twitter is a privately funded startup with offices in the SoMA neighborhood of San Francisco, CA. Started as a side project in March of 2006, Twitter has grown into a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.

Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide by ALEX’S WEB TRAFIIC analysis. Although estimates of the number of daily users vary because the company does not release the number of active accounts, a February 2009  blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits^. In March 2009, a NIELSEM.COM blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, ZIMBIO of 240 percent, followed by FACEBOOK with an increase of 228 percent.However, only 40 percent of Twitter’s users are retained.