IBM Cloud offering

Just tested the new IBM's public cloud offering. Its simple and easy to use. One can provision instances of applications, images or storage as per need.

Just provisioned two rational applications:

Rational Application Developer &

Rational Team concert

See the snapshot:



Check it out for yourself:

https://www-180.ibm.com/cloud/enterprise/beta/dashboard

IPL - Season 3

I have been following the matches this season closely - so far. Not sure if I can keep watching with the same zeal and enthusiasm, simply because of the overdose of cricket that IPL manages to feed us with every year. This is only season 3 and I am already bored of IPL. Just like one of those soap - Friends, Scrubs, Grey's anatomy where one gets sick of watching the same stereotypical characters again and again, IPL offers nothing new or exciting. Unless one is an ardent fan of a player, and loves to watch their style of play, there seems nothing else that would keep people hooked for the entire event. Personally I like a few players, and would love them to perform well in this tournament but besides that there is nothing in it for me.

It can server as a good selection bed for selectors in BCCI to form the next T20 or one day team, and equally it serves as a level field for potential youngsters who want to make their mark in the international cricket. It does serve as a big revenue earner for the chairman and all stakeholders, but I think they can do better by cutting down on number of games. The initial 20 or so matches have very little impact on the chances of a team to go to semis, and personally if I am told that after 20 or so matches the semifinal spots are still up for grabs by any team, and will be decided in the next 15 or so matches, why should I even bother to watch or worse even pay for watching the first 20 matches. It is just silly and appears like in a country where cricket is counted and followed as a religion, it is misuse of the sentiments people have for this game.

Wake up people, - skip the first 20 matches, and enjoy to your heart the last few matches, for that's where the real EQ(Entertainment quotient) is.

Reporting options with Java

Jasper reporting is the most widely used open source reporting tool with Java. The feature packed library needs a report file as input, the format of which is jrxml, which is nothing but an xml file. in good old early days people used to manually handcraft the content and look & feel of the report by editing the raw xml. However now there are various report designers available, one of which is maintained by Jaspersoft itself. It is called iReport and is very intuitive and easy to use. It spits report in various formats - pdf, xml, html, jxml, and can easily serve as input to the jasper api's within you java app.


There are competing reporting tools available, most notable is the BIRT (Business intelligence Reporting Tool) from Eclipse. Its a eclipse plugin, and has good documentation and backed by excellent development team. However the drawback is that it is not as lightweight as probably just adding a few jar files from jasper, and would mandate the use of eclipse. Building web application using BIRT would also result in bloated war file and therefore is not a good option if one is looking for quick, easy deployment and portability. Having said that,. I haven't explored BIRT yet, but have requested a team member to do so, after which we can more objectively compare the two reporting options.