Programming Vs Software Engineering

Software engineering is more than just programming or development. It means you commit to writing quality software and not just programs.

What is the difference between software and a program?

A software is a well packaged unit that can be installed or run easily in its intended environment. This includes compiled code, documentation, instruction manual, tests, environment configuration etc. A program is just raw code and useless in practice unless it exists as a software. Most developers focus and love programming but forget that software is everything and their code is only a tiny part. Imagine, if Microsoft gave you their code and gave you no instructions on how to build it into an installable version of Windows. That's the difference between code and software. Software is usable, code is not .. in a nutshell.

Software Engineer vs Developer Vs Programmer

Every Software Engineer is a programmer and a Developer at some point among other things. He/She is concerned with the end product (Software) and not just the code. The distinction between a programmer and a developer though is more a amateur Vs professional one. Developers are part of a professional work force aimed at producing software in one way or another. However a programmer maybe just passionate about coding or hacking and things like that; it does not imply any professional intent.

Importance of debugging

Most of your career will go not in writing code but in looking at your own or someone else code. For this reason it is very important to follow good design practices and document everything in a structured and professional manner. Even a brilliantly written code is worthless if it does not make sense to the reader 2 or more months later. Debugging can get complex, you must learn tools and master your IDE and discipline yourself to debug well. In fact if you think being a developer is about writing cool code all the time, think again. You need to learn how to debug complex code. That is why one should use good logging practices etc.

Software Quality

Software quality can be measured by the longevity and cost to use and maintain a piece of software. This implies code that is well supported, documented, tested and is easy to debug. Brilliant code is useless unless you are writing some new algorithm never thought of before (very unlikely). Note: A lot of developers in the industry are confused or frustrated due to, what they believe is a lack of opportunity. What they basically want is someone to tell them Go ahead write code, learn at our expense and not care about what you deliver and how we can maintain it after you are dead!. If that is your idea of programming, I suggest you look for another career. However if you are committed to creating a usable software for an end user and want to take pride in the overall quality of what is being delivered, then only software development is for you.

Can programming be considered an art ?

This is highly debatable but here is my perspective after 29+ years of being a programmer and a professional. By all definitions software engineering and development does not qualify in this conversation so we shall limit ourselves to programmers.

Any innovation also includes creativity. That's more a basic intelligence pre-requisite. However, in any science, engineering or even coding one realizes true genius is an iterative process over the piece of work and not just the person skill set. (huh!)

Ok, Lets assume you are a master programmer or a hacker. In terms of skill you are pretty much accomplished. However, even so; when you work on your masterpiece your vision of what should be, may change with every iteration, that you did not foresee when you started. Even high level designs undergo some changes (admit it bitch!). In other words the process is more evolutionary. Evolution is a sequence of trial and tribulations that go beyond imagination and hit real and hard constraints and feedback. An artist in my mind differs in the sense that the artist is more free in terms of their expression and Art is an expression of their undiluted imagination or abstractness that need not conform to any constraint. While programming, is iterative no matter how creative you maybe. In programming (as in development and software) you can achieve perfection only via iteration and testing. The end product maybe akin to a piece of Art (yes), but thats where the similarity ends.

However, what about musicians. Musicians I have learned also make music in an iterative process, their music is constrained by the instruments they choose to use etc. So lines blur; .. however since there is more science, evolution, more logic Vs gut involved in programming (the most artistic aspect of software); I'll still stand by saying ..... programming or coding is not art. The Code itself in its final state maybe considered an "art form" though. Over time the skill of a programmer improves and seems into the subconscious mind to make the right logical choices quicker but thats just ...well .... deep learning not art! I leave you with an equation:

1. An artist is a person who produces art
2. A program can be a piece of art work
3. A programmer is not an artist (by meer coding abilities)
4. The act of programming, can use imagination as a starting point but where it iterates to is evolution and science hence less artistic

Chaining with Java 8

  String name = "Arjun"; int age = 35;
  Employee e = new Employee();
     obj.setName(name);
     obj.setAge(age);

  organization.add (e);

The problem with setter chaining

In the above, one may choose to modify the setters with a return type same as the Object but for many reasons (see previous blog posts), that is incorrect and ambiguous theoretically speaking in terms of type.

Solution

To solve the above elegantly here is a solution I conjured using Lambda expressions and Functional interfaces.
First define a Functional Interface that will make chaining a breeze for any POJO.

import java.util.function.Consumer;

public interface Chainable {
 default T chain(Consumer c) {
  c.accept((T)this);
  return (T)this;
 }
}

Now, for code that uses it assuming our same Employee object implements Chainable

 String name = "Arjun"; int age = 35;
 organization.add(new Employee()
  .chain(e -> e.setName(name))
  .chain(e -> e.setAge(age))
 );

What just happened?

One can look @ the above also as :

    final String name = "Arjun"; final int age =35;
    organization.add(new Employee()
       .chain(new Consumer() {
         public void accept(Employee e) {
           e.setName(name);     
         }
       })
       .chain(new Consumer() {
         public void accept(Employee e) {
           e.setAge(age);     
         }
       })
    );

Notice another thing; when you use anonymous classes you need to declare the variables as final. With lambda expressions in addition reduced verbosity you also do not have to worry about variable scope. Which is pretty neat. I have often not been a fan of paradigms that only reduce verbosity. however there is more going on here conceptually. Other topics worth reading about are Monads.

Chaining other objects that cannot implement our Chainable

/**
 * Make it possible to {@link Chain} objects that do not implement {@link Chain}
 * <br>
 * Sometimes even Lambda expressions can make a mess of things.
 * <br><br>
 * Example:
 * <code><pre>
 Map map = new ChainableWrapper<Map>(new HashMap())
   .flatchain(m -> m.put("Name", "Value"))
   .flatchain(m -> m.put("Name2", "Value2"))
   .get();
 ;  
 * </pre></code>
 * 
 * @author Arjun Dhar
 */
public class ChainableWrapper<T> implements Chainable<ChainableWrapper<T>> {
 private T o; 
 public ChainableWrapper(T o) {this.o=o;} 
 public T get() {return o;}
 
 public ChainableWrapper<T> wrapperchain(Consumer<T> c) {
  c.accept(this.get());
  return this;
 }
}

Usage:

 @Test
 public void chainableWrapperTest() {
  Map map = new ChainableWrapper<Map>(new HashMap())
    .wrapperchain(m -> m.put("Name", "Value"))
    .wrapperchain(m -> m.put("Name2", "Value2"))
    .get();
  ;
  
  Assert.assertEquals("Value", map.get("Name"));
  Assert.assertEquals("Value2", map.get("Name2"));
 }
 }

Forgot Windows login user name

Who is this Blog for?

This blog will show you only to recover local computer user names available incase you have forgotten what username you used (As stupid as it sounds, it is not uncommon! and when it happens, its a really shitty feeling!).

This blog assumes you do remember a password, you are just not sure what the username was. It also assumes you have no one else but yourself to blame. If you do have a System Administrator then its best you contact that person. However if there is no other person it is safe to assume your account name had administrative privilages. If you do not find your username in the given steps, chances are you are using a computer setup by an administrator who may have another account that can still help you.

Forgot Windows UserName Context

Recently I had a very strange but scary encounter. While connecting to another display device, I messed up my Login Default User. As a result, on restart Windows prompted me to enter the USERNAME and PASSWORD. As strange as it may seem, I was so used to typing only the password I forgot the Username, which is typically <DOMAIN>\<LOCAL NAME>.


Knowing your local domain: It is worth noting that the <DOMAIN> name can be found @ the login prompt also when you try to login and are not successful normally. Windows does hint that much to you by stating your username will be something like DOMAIN\local user

Alternatives to Password recovery

Maybe this is such a stupid use case there is no official way to handle this and on the threads I saw they center around password recovery. I saw some threads on SAFE MODE and Password recovery but even SAFE MODE prompts you for your password. There are some tools like Windows Password Key, however they rely you to burn an image onto a DVD or Flash Drive (which is painful for the lazy). Thankfully being lazy does push you harder in other directions.

Recovery steps

Luckily, you DO NOT have to go through a more elaborate; password recovery phase, and can follow these simple steps without any deviation.
DISCLAIMER: This was tried and tested on Windows 7 so I cannot guarantee it works exactly as follows on any other version.

1. Reboot your computer and ensure F8 is pressed before you see the windows Logo
2. A command screen (black with stuff written in plain text) SHOULD appear with some options.
3. Select Repair your computer. Note: You may be told or tempted to try other options, but none is simpler than using this for our purpose.
4. Let it boot. It will prompt you for a language. Select US or anything that suits your comfort and carry on.
5. The following screen is what you are waiting for, a Dialog with a Drop down of usernames and a Password box
   This is particularly useful in 2 ways:
   1. It shows you the user names in a drop down
   2. It also allows you to atleast test the password *you think you know* to the username *you think you know*. This way, if you are not sure which username you have the password to, you can try one against each to validate. On clicking "OK" it will only allow you to the next step if you got the combination right. If you get the successful combination exist the process. Do not bother with any subsequent steps.
   Note: In the unfortunate scneario, you do not get it right then you need to go for a Full recover your password scenario. There are plenty of blogs online for that. Since you are here I hope that is not the case to start with.
6. Reboot your computer normally, and your memory loss issues should be taken care of by using your username and password that you have re-discovered in the previous step.

Learning from Brazil's Defeat

Reference to Context

For those who followed the worldcup, Brazil going down to Germany by 6 goals must have been a shock. However, what many don't know is that a Goldman Sachs team of number cruncher's had predicted twice that Brazil would win the world cup. Making this prediction worse is the fact that they did not get just the outcome wrong, but many of the teams they earlier predicted did not even make it past the 2nd round. Surely, a thrashing was predictable if the system had any credibility.

Link to their earlier prediction: http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/outlook/world-cup-sections/world-cup-book-2014-statistical-model.html
Link to the revised prediction: http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/outlook/world-cup-sections/world-cup-prediction-model-update-6-26-2014.html

Inference

I have always believed, using statistics to predict where you may fail, is more easier than predicting where you may succeed.
One should always listen to numbers & reason but where do you draw the line?
To me what comes clearer is, failure is easier to predict using mathematical models but success is not a number thing. The human will and intuition is a more powerful tool.

People may say, well isn't it two sides of the same coin? It's not ! That's because there are many faces to the coin, and the outcome of one is not a simple inverse of the other.

Risks/Failures can be assessed by probability better, I feel. This is because, failure requires the first breaking point. Means if there are multiple related events, failure is a result of ANY one event failing. Think of a for { } loop with a break on the first fail condition.
This is easier to approximate and calculate and hence trust (for me).... success on the other hand is NOT impacted by failure and neither do related or unrelated events of success guarantee further success. Success is harder to prove or trust!

Even in web-site analytic's, I have observed that you can predict why people are NOT buying something better, than why they WOULD be buying something. Luckily in E-Commerce consumers are more interested in their reasons for failure to improve their conversions, than focus on whats working for them.

Summary

Arguably, you can be sure of what WON'T work than what WILL work. Though one should backup all facts by numbers, as far as predictions go I'd be careful not to guarantee or trust predictions just on the basis of numbers.

Other References:

• Germany's 12th Man: http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/07/10/germanys-12th-man-at-the-world-cup-big-data/

Ajax Crawling using HTMLUnit

Lately Ajax is finding more and more use in modern Web Applications. However for websites that load a lot of their content "on Document Load", using JavaScript there is a problem related to SEO. The Crawler can only get the HTML from the Server request, it cannot directly execute Ajax.

You may write solutions where you have two different versions of the same page and decide to present one to the Crawler and one for actual use, however it has sever handicaps in terms of SEO crawling. The reason being, you really want to present only 1 Link to the user & crawler. Since we know SEO is a lot about link building and off-page credibility than it is about on page.
The solution I present here; you can take any URL on your site and convert it to an Ajax Crawlable URL without having to Code on the page or for that page in mind. So as a Generic Site wide solution its ready to go without much mental cycles on thinking about it on a per page basis.
A full understanding can be gained from the following links of what is required to achieve the optimal solution:
Google Ajax-Crawling Understanding
Google Ajax-Crawling Full Specification

Solution for Java Sites

Our solution has the following steps:

1. Create an Adapter that converts a Request with Ajax to HTML using HTMLUnit.
2. A publisher that writes the HTML to cache/storage
3. A Filter that distinguishes Crawl requests and uses the cache if available or generates it

STEP 1 : Request to HTML using HTMLUnit

/**
 * An adapter that takes in the URL address as a String and returns the HTML String as output using HTMLUnit.
 * 

 * Note: A call to this adapter is Synchronous and thread blocking.
 * 
 * @author Arjun Dhar
 */
public class AjaxUrlToHTMLTransformer implements Transformer {
 private static Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(AjaxUrlToHTMLTransformer.class);
 
 /**
  * {@link WebClient#waitForBackgroundJavaScript(long)}
  * @default 15000
  */
 private int javaScriptWaitSecs = 15000;
 
 /**
  * {@link BrowserVersion}
  * @default  {@link BrowserVersion#FIREFOX_24}
  */
 private BrowserVersion browser = BrowserVersion.FIREFOX_24;
 
 /**
  * Connect to servers that have any SSL certificate
  * @see WebClientOptions#setUseInsecureSSL(boolean)
  */
 private boolean supportInsecureSSL = true;
 
 /**
  * If false will ignore JavaScript errors
  * @default false
  */
 private boolean haltOnJSError = false;
 
 private static final SilentCssErrorHandler cssErrhandler = new SilentCssErrorHandler();
 
 @Override
 public Object transform(Object input) {
  if (input==null) {
   return null;
  }
  
     final WebClient webClient = new WebClient(browser);
     WebClientOptions options = webClient.getOptions();
     options.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
     options.setThrowExceptionOnScriptError(haltOnJSError);
     options.setUseInsecureSSL(supportInsecureSSL); 
     
     //Optimizations
     //options.setPopupBlockerEnabled(true); //No use for popups     
     options.setCssEnabled(false); //For crawling we don't care about CSS since its going to be Window less
     webClient.setCssErrorHandler(cssErrhandler);
     options.setAppletEnabled(false);
     
     //The following two lines make it possible to wait for the initial JS to load the products via AJAX and include it in the final HTML    
     webClient.waitForBackgroundJavaScript(javaScriptWaitSecs); //Wait for document.ready Auto search to fire and fetch page results via AJAX
     webClient.setAjaxController(new NicelyResynchronizingAjaxController());     
     
     try {
      final HtmlPage page = webClient.getPage(input.toString());

      final String pageAsXml = page.asXml();     
      webClient.closeAllWindows();
      
      return pageAsXml;
     }
     catch(Exception e) {
      throw new RuntimeException(e);
     }
 }

 //TODO: Rest of getter Setters for the bean
        //...
}

STEP 2 : Publisher to publish resulting HTML to Storage

        public class Publisher implements ApplicationContextAware {

        /**
        * Base path on the FileSystem where we will store Cached files.
        * Note: This is not mandatory, as you may choose any mechanism to store your cache of SEO friendly Pages.
        */
        private String folderLocation;

        @Autowired private ApplicationContext springAppContext;  //Optional. helpful to use Files as Resources when using Spring

 /**
  * It is critical to have a Mapping/location resolution on how a Web-Request translates to a path in the storage.
         * You could define any algorithm suitable to you. For demonstration purpose we value the PATH & QUERY PARAMS
         * so have an implementation that generates a Cache File name based on those inputs.
  * 
  * @param webPath as String. The is API will
  * take the literal implementation of the webPath. 
  * For this reasons it is recommended the webPath be cleaned of protocol, host, port before it is passed if we wish a more generic Page level match.

  * It will expect the decoded version of the String.
  */
 public URI getLocation(String webPath, String facetNameId) throws Exception {
  String relativePath = webPath.replaceFirst("\\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+(\\?|$)", "").replaceAll("(http(s)?)|\\?|\\&|\\.|\\:|=|/", "-").replaceAll("(-)+", "-").replaceFirst("^-|;(?i:jsessionid)=(.)*$", "") + ((facetNameId!=null)?"_"+facetNameId:"");
                String fileName = cleanChars(relativePath); //Some pseudo method that cleans out Special chars etc to give it a legal file name
  return new URI("file:///" + fileName + ".html");
 }

 public void publish(String html, String webPath) throws Exception {
  URI publishFilePath = getLocation(webPath, null);
  String outputPath = publishFilePath.toString();
  if (springAppContext != null) {
   Resource res = springAppContext.getResource(outputPath);
   outputPath = res.getFile().getAbsolutePath();
  }
  FileWriter fileWriter = new FileWriter(outputPath);
  fileWriter.write(html);
  fileWriter.flush();
  fileWriter.close();  
 }

        /**
        * Fetch the content from a given URI defined by getLocation
        */
        public String getContent(URI uri) {
          //TODO: Your implementation of fetching the file contents from the URI. Standard stuff...
        }
}

STEP 3 : Filter to present HTMLUnit generated pages

/**
 * If the Application uses Ajax pages that generate HTML via JavaScript and we want to make the pages also Crawler Friendly
 * as specified in Google specs
 * then we use this filter so that the pages Generated by {@link Publisher} can be accessed by the FIlter directly when the Crawler requests for them.
 * 


 * Filter Init Params:
 * 

 *  
htmlPublisherBeanId - String Bean Id of the {@link Publisher} ; used to generate a fresh page & publish if no published version is available
 * 
 * 
 * @author arjun_dhar
 */
public class SEOAjaxGenPagesFilter extends Filter {
 private static Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(WicketFilter.class);
 
 /**
  * As per Google specs
  * the crawler will convert all != (Ajax Pages) to URL's with param _escaped_fragment_ and expect the server to render back the pure HTML version.
  */ 
 public static final String GOOGLE_AJAX_CRAWL_FRAGMENT = "_escaped_fragment_="; 
 
 public SEOAjaxGenPagesWicketFilter() throws Exception {
  super();
 }
 
 private boolean isSEOCrawlRequest(final HttpServletRequest request) {
  String q = request.getQueryString();
  return q!=null?q.contains(GOOGLE_AJAX_CRAWL_FRAGMENT) && !q.contains("seoajaxcycle=true") /*Avoid recursion*/:false;
 }
 
 private transient Publisher htmlPublisher;
 
 protected final Object getSpringBean(String beanId) {
  return WebApplicationContextUtils.
       getRequiredWebApplicationContext(getFilterConfig().getServletContext()).
       getBean(getFilterConfig().getInitParameter(beanId));
 }
 
 /**
  * Write the HTML to the Filter Response
  * 
  * @param html as String
  * @param response as {@link HttpServletResponse}
  * @throws IOException
  */
 protected void writeToResponse(String html, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException {
  HttpServletResponseWrapper wrapper = new HttpServletResponseWrapper(response);     
  wrapper.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
  wrapper.setContentType("text/html"); //V.Important
  wrapper.setContentLength(html.length());
  wrapper.getWriter().write(html);
  wrapper.getWriter().flush();
  wrapper.getWriter().close();  
 }
 
 @Override
 @SuppressWarnings("all")
 public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
  if (request instanceof HttpServletRequest) {
   HttpServletRequest httpRequest = (HttpServletRequest)request;
   if (isSEOCrawlRequest(httpRequest)) {
    String html = null;
    if (htmlPublisher == null) htmlPublisher= (Publisher)getSpringBean("htmlPublisherBeanId");
    
    String queryStr = httpRequest.getQueryString()!=null?MarshalUtils.decode(httpRequest.getQueryString(), "UTF-8").replaceFirst("(\\?|\\&)"+htmlPublisher .getIgnoreQueryParam(), ""):null;
    String filteredRelativePath = URLDecoder.decode(httpRequest.getRequestURI(), "UTF-8") + (!StringUtils.isEmpty(queryStr)?"?"+queryStr:""); 
    try {
     URI uri = htmlPublisher.getLocation(filteredRelativePath, null);
     html = htmlPublisher.getContent(uri);
     if (html == null) throw new Exception("No content found, forcing Exception"); 
    }
    catch(Exception e) {
     log.error("[doFilter] Failed to resolve published content, will try to fetch it afresh now ...", e);
     try {   
      html = (String)htmlPublisherListener.getAjaxToHTMLTransformer().transform(httpRequest.getRequestURL() + "?" + (!StringUtils.isEmpty(queryStr)?queryStr+"&":"")+"seoajaxcycle=true" /*Avoid recursion*/);
      try {
       htmlPublisher.publish(html, filteredRelativePath);
      }
      catch(Exception e2) {
       log.error("[doFilter] Failed to publish HTML file for path " + httpRequest.getRequestURI(), e2);
      }
     }
     catch(Exception e2) {
      log.error("[doFilter] Failed to generate HTML content for "+httpRequest.getRequestURI()+"; Giving up! Passing on to chain to process", e2);
      super.doFilter(request, response, chain);
     }     
    }
     
    if (html!=null) {
     writeToResponse(html, (HttpServletResponse)response);
    }
    else {
     log.warn("[doFilter] Could not find a Published SEO crawler friendly page for path " + httpRequest.getRequestURI());
     super.doFilter(request, response, chain);
    }
   }
   else {
    super.doFilter(request, response, chain);
   }
  }
  else {
   super.doFilter(request, response, chain);
  }
 } 
}

Configurations

Our example uses Spring, so you can wire the Publisher bean via Spring or instantiate it however you like. In addition the following are the Maven dependency and web.xml configs needed:

Maven Dependency for HTMLUnit

...
  
  
   net.sourceforge.htmlunit
   htmlunit
   2.15
  
...

Please note, you may get some exceptions while running this if there are dependency conflicts with your other libraries. A very common conflict is a result of nekoHTML.
Add the following Exclusion to the library applicable. I use OWASP toolkit, and this typically conflicts with that. So I add the following exclusion to the OWASP library.

   
     
     net.sourceforge.nekohtml
     nekohtml
    
   

Configure your web.xml to accept the Filter

  
    
     contextConfigLocation
     classpath:applicationContext.xml
    
    
     org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener     
    
 ...
 
  seo.ajax.filter
   com.neurosys.seo.ajax.wicket.filters.SEOAjaxGenPagesWicketFilter 
  
   contentExtractorBeanId
   seoResourceContentExtractor
         
  
   htmlPublisherListenerBeanId
   webToCrawlFrndlyPublisher
        
   
  
   seo.ajax.filter
  /*
 
...

E-Commerce Life Cycle

Follow more details on this post here

Java E-Commerce platform

Java for the Elite ?

The past decade has seen an explosion of technologies and solutions. On one had we have witnessed popular communities around WORDPRESS, DRUPAL, JOOMLA, MAGENTO and more, on the other hand within the Java community we have witnessed so many advancements in the language, platform, scripting and frameworks. However when you look closer something odd strikes you. The Web and mainly B2C driven solutions are dominated by PHP products and should make one wonder why don't we see a single Java based platform. Specially, with all the advancements and tooling one would wonder where are all these frameworks leading to?

While there are some very interesting advancements in the Java community; I prefer to coin them academic rather than useful. Be it the coming of Scala over Java or frameworks like Play-2. In spite all the innovation within the language, I do feel java developers dwell a lot on code quality (however one may choose to define it), verbosity etc. There is a certain "High", in creating frameworks rather than committing solutions that go the distance. Lets face it, most programmers do not like the noise and the politics of the outside world. I do feel this is a cultural issue rather than an issue with any platform or language. Further, we have survived our arrogance because Java is still desired by the big boys and in the so call "Enterprise" world.

Motivation for a E-Commerce platform

I'm aware of the CMS efforts from the Java community as am aware of the E-Commerce efforts. I won't name them here however Its sufficient to say, when challenged by service competitors from the PHP community competing with the likes of Drupal, Magento etc, ...Java has very little to offer. For all the frameworks we have we lack real world answers and our solace seems to be "Enterprise Development, Custom Development ". As if, we were never good enough for the average web developer on the street or maybe the average web developer isn't good enough to be writing and extending frameworks all his life. Somewhere the elitist attitude faded for me to just writing something useful to help the guys on the front line (guys like myself); catering to small to enterprise Business users from a shared Web Server instance without even SSH access to an Enterprise on multiple nodes. One size fits all! Something that can run by a client without needing a team of technical experts to maintain it. Something that packs in all the features needed to compete and do better than the solutions offered on the PHP front line and yet offer the platform benefits that Java has to offer. Not that I have anything against PHP (I actually admire things about the community), but as a java developer I do feel handicapped and loss for answers. Within JAVA we have fragmented ourselves so much that little comes out that is truly less boiler plate and more progressive. I won't mention all the Java based CMS's/Solutions I tried here, but its sufficient to prove that nothing in the Java community matches the success of DRUPAL, WORDPRESS, JOOMLA, MAGENTO to name a few, and you need to ask yourself "why" !

What's different ?

The above motivations my seem abstract. In reality how it translates is that there are many by-products of E-Commerce. Like Search, ETL, CMS etc. These not only find their way to contribute to E-Commerce but also other areas of development that are application specific. The issue with "framework" mindset is you are always providing a tool and nothing more. The higher order glues are left to the developers. That is a good thing, but in today's world these tools are not good enough. The GAP between polished services and what frameworks provide is getting larger. E-Commerce demands solutions and a lot of these "solutions" can be shared, improved, modularized or even exposed as services. Furthermore it results in leaner code bases and also better utilization of memmory, lower learning curves, lower investment in writing business ready applications.

When I look @ companies selling Enterprise versions, and giving Community edition's they seem just a little more than frameworks. But if you had to pitch it to a client, you fall very short with almost no community help from the companies that provided then Open Source solutions. We all want to make money, however what I'm against is monopoly of what the community contributes back. This is causing a dilemma for me in terms of licensing (separate topic)

There is also a lot of emphasis on reduced number of entities and Data Models. The entire CMS, ECOM, User data, etc .. you name it, can be put down in 8 Database Tables without any loss of functionality. I don't want to get into a technical discussion yet, however compare that number to some elephant you install. As features grow, so do their data needs. There are ramifications of blatant abuse of entities that most platforms adopt. These are exponential and not just limited to hardware. I feel these concerns are conveniently ignored in most projects. There are many other concepts that I won't dive into yet and let the code, architecture do the talking. Reducing and reusing entity objects (definitions and instances), does imply drastic improvement in many ways.

Structure

There are many things that go into making a CMS and more so an E-Commerce platform. Hence, all these services have been broken into Libraries. ETL, Reporting, Searching, Content Handling Services, Admin UI, Authorization, Authentication, Carts, etc etc. I have developed each as a standalone library so that people can use them independently. A lot of things useful in a CMS & E-Com can be leveraged in some other projects also. I feel existing CMS definitions are very single focused and hence limited.

The idea is that people don't have to look @ it as a monolithic project and can create or contribute to parts that are of interest, and each module can grow as its own project.

The liability of learning a new Framework

Shifting away from JAVA & PHP; furthermore if something is designed as a CMS then it is only a CMS. Its hard to extend it to being an E-Commerce platform and so on. This is not just about providing a JAVA's alternative but providing something that offers more flexibility for developers to build like LEGO blocks. Spring, Apache Wicket are beautiful example where they make this possible. This also offers a lower learning curve to adopters with no DSL or additional learning curve needed as such. However, as mentioned below we have plenty of frameworks. When you put together an E-Commerce site you do realize the gaps and the mammoth effort of putting all these together. And what you dont want is a "CUSTOM" glued solution that's a curry of all frameworks. You want solutions and services that have been tested and optimized in a domain specific environment and validated by business users and consumers.

A frustrating point of adopting new frameworks or alternatives is the knowledge curve required. The aim of any platform should be to allow people familiar with the core frameworks to dive right in. In addition, providing an independent module for each type of service allows which aspects people would like to use, customize, contribute. Solutions demand answers and the ability to replace frameworks if need be over time. However, there is a masochist in every good developer. For me learning Scala was not about a better language but was just about getting to learn a new alternative. This does not always imply we will be more productive and yet when a new framework comes out, no matter how productive, we always like the fact we can be Elite. Nothing wrong with that, but from a platform developers perspective the idea should be to allow and welcome as many people onboard and thus weed out core dependencies that are not standard practice. make it simple and useful and let people decide what works for them.

I do hope the motivation is well placed and look to hearing views. Strong opinions are welcome. I do also hope to back this up with the platform soon...

Current Status & Direction

The project has matured and achieved sufficient functionality for any small to medium enterprise to use it. However I am now to focus on the following. Worth noting I'd be looking @ a community to help me grow this:

1. Licensing - Big, tough one!
2. Documentation
3. Creating the user Forum
4. Creating a sample application for the community to demonstrate base usage and ability backed by videos and tutorials
5. Providing OOB integration's with existing popular cloud services
6. Additional Unit and integration test automation

Site(s) developed on this platform

https://lemillindia.com
https://nurhome.in

CMS only based sites:
http://wrap.co.in

more in the pipeline ...