Phew! its been a year without blogging

Its one of those "I cant say why I did it" thingies. Its more than a year since my previous blog spot and the date is definitely not an indication for my stagnant mind :) I've been doing the usual, trying to be on the bleeding edge, trying to understand new markets, understand SaaS in particular, Web 2.0, SOA, Architecture and some stuff. It was a pretty normal year. I got married too. and you know the usual.... whoa! I got married! It seems kinda odd repeating that to myself. I am a married man! I feel like OLD? :)

Well that apart, I think last year was important in many other ways. It was the yet another year for industry consolidation with companies running amock with M&A's, re-inventing themselves, creating new technologies, churning out new stuff. There is a plethora of Hot Technologies that have gained significance. GWT, RoR, Flex, JavaFX, Scripting Langs, Mashups, platforms and all said and done there are still people who think that Hibernate is bleeding edge:) yeah may be they should feel proud of C!

I have kind of categorized blog posts that people tend to write when they simply cant think of anything else to do..no writing reflections is not one of them ;). They either write stuff like "How to write a Resume" or "Top 10 items for the XXXX" or "Agile XXXX" or "Why Agile Sucks" or "How to improve software development". PPPPPlease.... it all started with Steve Yegge , the funny blogger as I call him started lashing out at Agile. And the band wagon started with Anti-Agilists being a cult theme. You are cool if you thump the agilists! No doubt Steve had some very valid and some very funny points that I completely agree with. Infact he kind'a crushed, and poured mud over Agile's grave. Whats the use of digging up the body and thumping it left right and center? :)

Then all of a sudden people had no idea how to write a resume, atleast thats what the bloggers thought! The rantings about resume continued. Everybody looks at ateleast zillion things at multiple stages in the resume. No use writing about it in a blog, you actually require a 10 volume book for it. The simpler approach is to simply be yourself and make the resume reflect you. You will end up someplace where people actually like you simply because they thought your resume makes sense!

At the end of day the only thing I can think of is, blogs have their advantages and dis-advantages. You give the pen to everybody, you better be ready to get a truck load of S*** from most of them but feel happy that the couple of folks who wrote somethings that made sense improved your knowledge some way!

Coming back to what I did last year, I have been actively looking at SaaS, architected a platform for SaaS based service delivery and did some cool Web 2.0 work with GWT and man I love GWT. We even used GWT for the SaaS Service Delivery Platform and it really works wonders to non-JavaScript guys trying to make sense of what the heck JavaScript is all about. Of course you need some JavaScript skills along with some hard core troubleshooting DOM of different browsers with Firebug and IE Dev Toolbar. But I am happy with GWT and am evangelising it like hell in my org!

SaaS seems to be an intersting market, with its own challenges. A part being application architecture, a part being supporting platform architecture and of course the Operations Architecture. You need to get everything write or you are screwed!

Have been reading Gianopaolo's and Micheal Chong's Blogs since they started to get some insight into what they have gone through. They are pretty cool guys.

Last year also was the year when I got some first hand experience with building and understand SaaS. The Appliance Model seems to be a very interesting compliment to SaaS based delivery and most companies are realising it.

Its been a quiet year with lots of value adds to me and from me to my org. I probably am beginning to better appreciate the future of this business being driven by SaaS as the primary model of delivery with augumented offline delivery modes like Google Gears and Appliances.

Integration with inhouse as well as standard on-premise models as well as on the cloud integration, standards for compatible data exchange between Service Providers, are all things that would evolve over the next years.

and I will be keeping track....