Application Environment - RoR

So i thought I have installed everything - so it seems. when i run the testApp. It does gives me the same if I call the application using http://localhost:3000; however, when I clicked on the link "About your application environment" - It returns some errors

More investigation is needed. In the mean time, i have downloaded the 70MB InstantRuby and the MySQL Essentials.

Exercise 5. Network and Programming frameworks

1. A Simple Chat Client/Server system - I found this simple chat server at
http://wiki.tcl.tk/11005

The codes use sockets to wait for calls or message to be pass through; within that it use handlers to handle each of these participants' nick name and pass through. Once a socket is opened, almost like a session, the data is broadcast to both ends of the socket.

2. Peer to Peer Computing and Grid Architecture or Grid Computing have both similar objectives - both claiming to resolve problems prevail at large scale computing societies and both of which have gained in popularity in the successful deployment and applications (Foster., I & Iamnitchi. A, 2003)

Behsaz. B, Jaferian. P, & Reza-Meybodi. M (2008) defines "Grid computing is a distributed computing approach to create an illusion of simple yet large virtual computer from a large set of heterogonous computers sharing various resource types to benefit a (virtual) organization." where as P2P computing is defined as Global Computing ""Globalcomputing is a distributed computing approach for computing with a large collection of heterogeneous computers which are essentially scattered over the world and sharing various kinds of resources."

P2P tends to be larger in scale due to the popularity in the use of domestic home use computers and often has less accountability and reliability is therefore not very suitable for mission critical type applications or workflow process. On the other hand, Grid computing tends to focus on the sharing of resources of mid-size servers capacity with very reliable DNS/routing/IP address to support the reliability for more "mission critical" or "workflow intensive" applications.

3. Comparision of web development framework.

I have not used any web application development framework; but i will attempt to compare the JAVA framework and the RoR framework.

JAVA - requires the compilation of the code to binarys and requires the Java Virtual Machine to process the binary. Ruby on Rails on the other hand tends to be a very simple and elegant solution to first time programmers as it hides away all the details and troublesome syntax related issues in low level programming languages. Both of the languages are object-oriented programming languages. IBM (2005) published a comparison of the two web development framework and outlines the stack view and clearly shows that RoR has simpler structure.

Reference

Foster. I & Iamnitchi., A (2003) On Death, Taxes, and the Convergence of Peer-to-Peer and
           Grid Computing,  Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago.

Behsaz. B, Jaferian. P, & Reza-Meybodi. M (2008) Comparison of Global Computing with Grid
       Computing . Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Amirkabir
       University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), 424 Hafez ave., Tehran, Iran
       Retrieved on http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~behsaz/Publications/GlobalvsGrid-TR.pdf

IBM (2005) Ruby on Rails and J2EE: Is there room for both? Two Web application frameworks compared.
 Retreived on http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-rubyonrails/

Exercise 4. Virtual Private Networks

1. VPN which stands for Virtual Private Network is private network constructed within a public network infrastructure (Ferguson & Huston, 1998)

Coming from the telecom domain of expertise. VPN in the older days could mean "corporate networks" and "environment" that has to be end to end secured - physical layer. With the advent of packet data swtiching networks, information can be "wrapped" in a virtual envelope, with address information, and be sent via various routes with network protocols such as the IP protocol. Older protocols are like the X.25 standards in data communications or X.400 for mail messaging. These are pretty much old school but some are still used today. Datapac for example is a common data network used extensively in HK during 1980's to 2000's.

DNS on the other hand is Domain Name Servers. IP addresses is in the form or x.x.x.x and name servers are needed to reroute pneumonic names such as google.com to a traceable table of ip address and eventually reaching the physical location of the server that serves the page of google.com. DNS is a complex hirearchical system of trust and labelling system in a lay man's terms.

2. TCP protocol - Transmission Control Protocol. With the design of IP, being packetised and kept in an virtual envelope, each packet of information and data will have to be routed with the given information (as headers, trailers) as to where it should go. TCP allows the efficient parsing of the address information in order to reach its destination. TCP and IP are very closely knitted terminology and data protocols because they are complimentary. IP is related to packetising data and information and TCP is related to the transport layer of the packet data.

3. E-Business applications is a very abstract term; it gets abused a lot. Sometimes, people think by owning a domain name, a email account, a website is automatically a e-business capable. In my belief, to be classified as a genuine e-business application, the convenience and output must be greater than the effort of inputs and that the application must solve a problem that otherwise cannot be solved by existing means. Ebay is a classic example, Paypal is another example, Youtube is also another example but not nytimes.com

Intranet - accessing corporate network and resource using IP protocol inside a building or site
Extranet - accessing corporate network and resources using IP protocol outside a building or site or remotely

Web portal - a website which plays the role of aggregator and repository of many information feed and content. eg. http://nytimes.com

B2B - Busines To Business websites ( This B2B word brings me tears. I once invested as an angel investor US$20K in a business called B2Bweb.com in 1998-2000. It literally vaporises !!); however success in operating B2B marketplace has been better for Alibaba
(BeijingReview, 2007) debuted at listing at Hong Kong Stock Exchange eg. http://Alibaba.com

B2C - Business To Consumer websites (I did make some money online running B2C online stores before selling the business when in Canada, I have no negative sentiment towards this B2C name). eg. http://www.eToys.com

There are also C2C websites. C2C is like ebay or china's taobao (BejingReview, 2007), and kijiji type of classifieds adveristing websites.

4. With respect to VPN. Most of today's business applications and online businesses are running some form of VPN - by resources sharing of secured sessions; session based i.e. not link based. In the most simplest form, it is as simple as using https://xyz.com of the payment gateway or login session to a corporate network. In theory, the global network or the Internet that we use today is in fact a global VPN being sliced and diced into "sessions" of VPN.

In the past, there are many international value-added network business. AT&T VANS, Infonet, Sprint IVAN, BT IVAN and NTT, GlobalOne, etc. These international data networks are slowly moving aways from their own infrastructure (eg. T1/T3 link based network) to IP based networks. In summary, I would say that TCP/IP is now the most important network protocol replacing X.25 in VPN.

Reference:

1. Ferguson. P & Huston. G (1998) . What is a VPN ?
Retrieved from http://campus.murraystate.edu/tsm/tsm340/vpn/vpn.pdf

2. Bejiing Review (Aug 9, 2007) B2B Pioneer a Millionaire Maker
Retrieved from http://english.beijingreview.com.cn/print/txt/2007-08/03/content_71488.htm

Exercise 3. Rapid Evolutionary Prototyping Approach

Let me see. R E P A . That's REPA !

Just like prototyping, the need for instant gratification is always necessary. End users and web developers or application developers always need "feedback" - an active rather than passive pathway to gain better understanding of what has been done, and what can be done moving forward.

Only by making available an environment to help users and developers to visualise or to imagine how the complete system work can help make the entire project MOVE FORWARD.

This Rapid Evolutionary Prototyping Approach will involve two phases
i) evolutionary application prototyping - kind of staggering the application development process
ii) implementation

In this situation, it is often useful to apply project management techniques to ensure phased review checkpoints are available.

Agile software development is on the other hand a methodology in which many and frequent check points, review and adaptations are made when comes to development of software. Both of them has a significant amount of overlap.

An update on my Install of RoR and running it

So it's time to actually execute and create the environment for RoR. I followed the instructions provided by our tutor and it worked reasonably well. He didn't mentioned it but assumed we still remember the following DOS command:-

mkdir rails
cd c:\

My windows XP had blocked this Ruby kernel to initiate its interpreter. Simply "unblocking" it should work.

And when i open my browser (firefox) and type in this URL (http://localhost:3000) , it works well and provide me this following page.

Exercise 2. Technology and the evolution of business options

Five (5) sites each offering the 4 different business options : Online shopping, electronic payments, database access and WAP sites.

1) Amazon.com - offers online shopping, electronic payments, database access and the main URL is at http://Amazon.com with the the mobile wap URL is at http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/lp.html



2) eToys.com is another website which offers also online shopping, electronic payments, database access and its WAP site has been downsized since 2002. eToys.com has filed for Ch. 11
since last year and its assets is now being acquired by possibly ToysRus.

3) Expedia.com - is a online travel website that offers booking services for discounted or last minute airticket, hotels and car rentals. The mobile wap site in US is already shut down. The UK WAP site is still accessible (http://www.expedia.co.uk/daily/wml/default.asp?tpid=1)



4) ebay is obviously supporting e-commerce, electronic payments, with various database, but its mobile website is one of very few that is still operational with this URL http://m.ebay.com



5)

Sidenote: WAP Sites - WAP is really old tech (Circa 1999-2001). Even for major content aggregator or search enginers like http://wap.google.com and http://mobile.nytimes.com all used to work well but why are we still studying WAP sites anyway. It's hard to get working WAP sites in 2009 (ebay is very exceptional). WML is so shortsighted that at one stage every venture capital company place one of their eggs in a company that somehow "sells" or "had" a mobile gateway that handles WML.

In addition to the 4 business options, I beg to differ. Shouldn't perhaps we should investigate instant messaging or some form or store-n-forward messaging. There are a lot of websites that now offers "outsourced" interactive chat as a pre-sales or post-sales support. What about ICQ the good old ("Oook Oooh") .. the predecessor of MSN or AOL AIM or Yahoo Messenger or Skype or Google Talk or Facebook Chat.

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