jVark - A small Java/XMPP library to play with Aardvark

After spending some time with Aardvark, i found the tool really great to get answers pretty fast. Aardvark provides many ways to interact with the service however there are no APIs available as such to interact with the service programmatically. Meanwhile I was trying to make my hands dirty with Google GTalk service and developed a small and silly utility to interact with Aardvark service through GTalk in Java.

The library is very basic and helps the developer to connect to Aardvark and fire some command and see the response from Aardvark. jVark source is available at http://code.google.com/p/jvark

However the library requires significant amount of improvement for extensive use.

gag - Google Annotations Gallery

gag is a new exciting open source library has been released by Google for Java. Google Annotations Gallery contains handful of annotations to spice up the code. This new library is aiming to express the code in the more realistic way than just plain old non-readable Javadoc comments. 

Not only one can leave expressive remarks in the code, but can use these annotations to draw attention to her poetic endeavors. Apart from static documentation some annotations use runtime instrumentation to perform annotated behavior also. The annotations are divided into following different categories:

Disclaimer: Disclaimer annotations allow you to disclose certain relevant facts about your code. If you want to ease your conscience with full transparency, then consider these annotations.

Enforceable: Enforceable Annotations are annotations enforced by dynamic bytecode instrumentation. Use the following annotations, then run your applications with the javaagent:gag-agent.jar option and your annotations get enforced at runtime.

Literary and Literary Verse: Coding is truly an art. These annotations can help you make your code come alive and help the artist within you be recognized. These speak for themselves . . . so to speak. You'll forever be revered for your code style and your code style. Literary Verse is a newly added sub package of Literary.

Remarks: Remarks annotations replaces the conventional Javadoc comments. These annotations helps better expressing the code than usual Javadoc comments.

Team: This is the new category added recently. The annotations express the team behavior and can be used to express events took place during team development.

Follwing is the list of my personal favorite annotations from the gag gallery:

From Desclaimer:
@com.google.gag.annotation.disclaimer.BossMadeMeDoIt("i swear its not my fault")
@com.google.gag.annotation.disclaimer.IAmAwesome("really, this is the coolest code i have ever written")
@com.google.gag.annotation.disclaimer.WrittenWhile("i m lost, i m lost, omg i m lost")
@com.google.gag.annotation.disclaimer.LegacySucks

From Enforceable:
@com.google.gag.annotation.enforceable.AnswerToTheUltimateQuestionOfLifeTheUniverseAndEverything
@com.google.gag.annotation.enforceable.Noop

From Literary:
@com.google.gag.annotation.literary.Metaphor
@com.google.gag.annotation.literary.Oxymoron("truly a fine mess")

From Remarks:
@com.google.gag.annotation.remark.WTF("this is bullshit")
@com.google.gag.annotation.remark.LOL("this is legend...... wait for it ....ary")
@com.google.gag.annotation.remark.ThisWouldBeOneLineIn(language="groovy", toWit="the method isnt required at all")

From Team:
@com.google.gag.annotation.team.Visionary("this will surely put the Internet back in 90's")
@com.google.gag.annotation.team.Fired(person="asok", reason="well it wasnt his fault")

Well I am enjoying this treat and if you are a gut busting coder I am sure you will also enjoy too. Besides you can also submit your brilliant annotations to the library from the project mailing list.

Aardvark - A Valuable Business Tool

Couple of days before I got a news that Google acquired another popular Internet service called Aardvark in nearly $50 Millions. Aardvark is a social search engine service that connects users live with friends or friends-of-friends who are able to answer their questions. Based on my short interaction with the tool i realized that it can become a great boon for any kind of organizations.

I started using the Aardvark after this news and i found it really good tool to get the answers properly and pretty fast. I am using Yahoo Answers for all my non-technical questions and Stackoverflow for technical questions as I am a software engineer. Though both of these tools are doing pretty well, I was still finding that both the services are missing something.

Now to show Aardvark from an organization perspective, I work in a quite a big organization which employs huge and diversified manpower. Such a big enterprise contains an MIS system to keep employee profile information for future references. However its really hard to keep the latest profile information of each of the employee in the organization.

Every organization generates enormous amount of industry specific problem. When the problem arise they either seek an internal help based on the employee profile information or contact external agencies for support. In any case its time consuming at first and huge investment at the end, in the worst case an organization spends huge money on an external agency who fails to do the job and eventually either the problem is dropped or they find someone from inside.

To not cause such a heavy damage, now a days most of the companies (well software in particular) use Wiki/Forum/Blogs to tackle the situation and spread the knowledge. But this approach is limited to a set of companies and its not interactive. User seeking the information has to search through the set of services to find the answer to his problem.

People tend to learn new things every now and then so their profile keeps on updating compared to organization which prefers to update the profile information every six months or a year. So this approach creates mismatch between the actual employee profile and its organizational print. Because of this match many a times Organization end up hiring brand new resource or seek for some external agency to solve the problem.

Aardvark is a tool which can really bridge the gap between this mismatch. Employee getting new knowledge every now and then can update her profile immediately. Aardvark is intelligent enough in delegating the question to right persons. Such an intelligent and fast communication medium can be used in Enterprises to solve problems immediately without investing further valuable resources.

Well while writing this Aardvark is officially part of Google so in future we might see many new features combined with existing Google services.

Google Buzz - sharing with GMail

Buzz a new service just announced by Google available under the GMail account. Buzz is designed to share day to day stuffs like text, images, videos, etc. Most of the features are similar to other popular social sharing services apart from the GMail front and other Google services integration.

Following are few buzzes of the Buzz.

• Two mode of sharing is available. Public sharing similar to twitter and Private sharing where update is visible to the users of selected group(s)
• Many external applications can be configured as a connected sites like YouTube, Google Reader, Picasa, Blogspot, Blogger and Flickr. As such you can paste link having images or videos, Buzz will scan the media files and show you the available contents to select if there are multiple images or videos available. I tried with flickr, vimeo, wikipedia and smashingmagazine
• All Buzz entries are available in your Google Profile page under Buzz tab
• Any post shared in the Google Reader will be available as a Buzz entry if the Reader is configured as a connected site
• A Buzz can be directed to user(s) through '@' symbol before the username like @dhaval.b.nagar@gmail.com
• Twitter updates are available as buzz entries if Twitter is configured as a connected site
• To create RSS for your own Buzz entries, go to your profile page and select the Buzz tab. Copy the URL and add it in the Google Reader under Add Subscription
• Buzz allows to post Link, Images and Videos to entries. Images can be seen with presentation feature on the same page. Videos can be seen live
• Each conversation can be seen independently from the Time Link given on the top right of the dialog box
• As such you can paste any link on the conversation dialog box and Buzz will find all the available images and videos on the page. You can select at max 4 media content to post.

Overall Buzz falls somewhere between the Google Wave and many other popular social applications. With the failure of Google Wave (or may be Buzz in near future) we will see many such applications trying to fit in the "Social Shoe" from Google.