Category: Thinking

Idea for Windows Phone Team – Make switching easier and less costlier

Microsoft is already paying developers for porting their applications from iOS and Android. This is all well for the developers but what about the end users. They have already invested a lot in the apps on those platform. So the cost of switching is not just the hardware/carrier-contract cost but also buying all those apps again for WP7. Also, what happens to all the data that is stored in the apps on other platforms?

Microsoft, here is an idea for: pay extra to developer to enable importing data from other platforms. And make all those apps free for the consumers who already purchased those apps on some other platform.

Java Code Generators – A short rant

Java is known to be a verbose language and the situation worsens when you step into bloated enterprise java world. You need to write tons of code and configure a lot of JXXX to make your simple webapp work. Though the situation is improving in the recent years with the introduction of convention over configuration approach and also of annotation based configurations but still, if you compare the amount of code required for a functional webapp in Java then it would be at least 2X to 4X more than that of similar webapps written in other frameworks like Django or RoR.

A lot of java frameworks and IDEs tries to hide this complexity by generating code – from simple getters and setters to entire DAO layers and what not – that might give small productivity gains in the beginning but eventually every additional line of code in your project, either hand-written or generated by a state of art code generator, someone will need to maintain and evolve it, which according to some is almost 90% of the total software costs.

Thats why framework like Play feels like fresh air and it seems to be making inroads in the bloated enterprise java world.