Udayan Banerjee

Of late patents around mobile technologies have been in the news. Four high profile news items are (1) Oracle suing Google for Java patent violation, (2) Apple and Samsung fighting each other in different parts of the world, Microsoft, Apple, Rim and others jointly buying Nortel patent library for $4.5 billion and (4) Google buys Motorola Mobile and gets 17,000 patents. This is only the tip of the iceberg. This diagram from Reuters shows the complex battlefield of mobile patent and significant portion of these patents are for software. In the sideline of this patent war, a debate has been raging about the usefulness of the US patent law governing software patents. Point to note here is that each country has a different patent law. For example, in India, software per se cannot be patented. If you want to have a quick look at what patenting is all about have a look ... (more)

Agile Adoption – Crossing the Chasm

Everybody acknowledges that IT has to plays a key role in any new service or product design. Therefore, IT needs to align with business and be flexible to changing business needs. It is a question of how to be agile rather than should we be agile. Then, why is there such a gulf between the people who evangelize agile processes and those who look at them with great suspicion? Any application is built to satisfy a business goal. The process has two major steps where the step one is to define the application behavior which will help in meeting the business goal and the step two is to... (more)

Write Once Run Anywhere or Cross Platform Mobile Development Tools

To build and maintain applications required to reach out to you customer through Mobile & Smart phone is expensive. Why? Because of platform proliferation. Because of quick technology obsolescence.  (See this) Management perception compounds the problem. Anybody, not intimately familiar with this technical challenge, perceives that the effort of developing a mobile application should be proportional to the size of the screen. In other words, since mobile screen is much smaller than a PC or a Laptop screen, the effort required for developing application should also be proportiona... (more)

Twelve New Programming Languages: Is Cloud Responsible?

Do we need programming languages? You may think that the answer is no. But, if you go by the recent trend you may need to change your mind. Why is Google working two (GO, DART) new programming languages? Why has IBM (X10), Cray (Chapel) and Red Hat (Ceylon) working on creating a new programming language of its own? Why have the attendees of the QCon London have selected 5 (HTML5, DART, Scala, Clojure, Node.js) new languages as the most important software development trends for 2012? What does Neil McAllister mean when he says that these 10 (DART, Ceylon, GO, F#, OPA, Fantom, Zim... (more)

Architecture Governance – the TOGAF Way

If you are clear about what governance means then you can skip the next section. However, if you have heard the term – Corporate Governance, SOA Governance, IT Governance – but you are not exactly sure about what it really means, then here is an explanation. Suppose you are interested that an entity works in a way you want it to work. If you are managing the entity then you have the necessity authority to ensure it. However, you don’t manage the entity directly then what do you do? To do anything you need to have some authority or influence over the entity. You can discuss with ... (more)