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August 11, 2006

piconet... bluetooth at its best

You might have heard a lot about bluetooth, but apart from sending files from one cell phone to another or to another computer, has anyone used it for any other purposes?  Well piconet is one such thing that has been really picking up and has unleashed the best use of bluetooth devices and technology.

"Piconet" is a combination of the prefix "pico," meaning very small or one trillionth, and network.

Piconet is a network of devices connected in an adhoc fashion using Bluetooth technology. A piconet is formed when at least two devices, such as a portable PC and a cellular phone, connect. When a piconet is formed, one device acts as the master while the others act as slaves for the duration of the piconet connection. Also called as PAN, a piconet can support up to eight devices.

Posted by at 07:34 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Unwire yourself with Bluetooth technology

Introduction

With the advent of powerful electronic devices which have rich computing power and communication features the need for ubiquitous and seamless integration has arisen enormously. An average successful individual uses mobile phone for sending and receiving SMS, storing pictures and contact information while having a laptop or computer at home. Needless to talk about the gadgets used by senior management folks and IT professionals. All this has lead to the need to have a limitless and boundless integration of these devices and a common mechanism to do so. The challenge for achieving this is the capability of doing it in an individualized manner without the involvement of any infrastructure overheads. The answer lies in Bluetooth technology which is named after the 10th century Danish king Herald Bluetooth, who united Denmark and Norway bringing peace that lasted 25 years. Ericsson, the mobile devices and telecom giant which invented the Bluetooth technology inspired from the Danish king and named this technology after him, which is aptly aimed at uniting the computing and telecommunications world.
Let us try and understand what this technology is all about and how does it work. 

About the technology

Bluetooth is an industry standard—an open source specification available for developers to change and enhance—for short-range digital radio. It is designed to operate in the unlicensed radio spectrum known as the Industrial - Scientific - Medical (ISM) band, which is generally available in most parts of the world.

Bluetooth allows a variety of devices—not only conventional PCs, laptops, mobile phones and peripherals, but also PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and other next-generation emerging portable devices—to communicate without cables or hard wiring. It is being dubbed as the next generation communication interoperability mechanism which will touch and change the lifestyle of the masses. 

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Posted by Ishaq Quadri at 01:49 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

August 09, 2006

What is the difference between Web Servers and Application Servers?

A web server is a light weight service designed to support static content with different MIME types.

Web servers support browser based clients with published content and of course provide the required security cover. However this definition has expanded over a period of time.

Web Servers have graduated to provide users with the ability to support plug-ins  what are called as Web Components like ASP, JSP, Servlets, CGI...Etc which brings Web Servers close to what an Application Server is designed for, to support transactions and dynamic content.

But the difference is still very obvious; while Application Servers provide enterprise level business services such as
  • Session Management
  • Distributed Protocol support such as JRMI or JMS
  • Messaging Services
  • Persistence management
  • Transaction Management...etc

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Posted by Ashok Kumar at 03:46 AM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

SOA Architecture – Pros and Cons

Service Oriented Architecture is a collection of web services, at times I begin to wonder why it is so overplayed and over hyped, the reality is not all that rosy.

From an Architects perspective, you really need to ask yourself the real questions that matter instead of going over board with SOA.

Service Oriented Architecture is great, it reduces integration costs dramatically, simple to implement and is scalable.

What about performance?

With little development experience with XML I am sure you figure that XML is resource intensive over a binary format to communicate between the layers of the system.

Hence it would be a lot more optimal to use SOA selectively based on the overall requirement of the system instead of making the entire system SOA based.

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Posted by Ashok Kumar at 02:12 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)