Scribd - the documents

Scribd - the documents avatar of YouTube is a YCombinator startup. I'm impressed by the navigational site design and of course the document renderer. This startup reminds me of one of the open source project called e-sharepoint which was built with the same vision but never saw completion. I had contributed for e-sharepoint as a developer almost two years back.

I built a Google Co-op Search for searching e-books on Scribd and here is the link for it:

http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=007158556442307674881%3Acirvbqaziqu

Some of the features that I would love to see in Scribd includes:

• Quote on a selected text and link to it from comments (dynamic highlighting)
• Facilitate more user discussions by improving comments feature
• Allow users to recommend similar/related documents
• Allow Pin-n-Publish of reading list in RSS

Technorati Tags: technology, startup, scribd, google

Personal Syndication Platform using Google Spreadsheets

I recently stumbled upon Google Spreadsheet's worksheet syndication publishing feature. Basically you can publish your spreadsheet as a RSS/ATOM public feed. Also using Spreadsheet GData Client API it is possible to add new entries to your spreadhseet. Leveraging these abilities the possibility of using Google Spreadsheet as a Personal RSS platform seems very straight forward.

Basically one can create a worksheet and set the publishing option to output RSS (or ATOM or any format of your choice) and select an appropriate publishing frequency. Once this is done whatever you add to your worksheet is available for anyone who subscribes. Also there is an option to customize and publish a select range of cells and not an entire sheet.

Now it is possible for Clickables (Google Gadget that I developed few months back) to use spreadsheets and provide persistence bookmarking of shared links. Also, integration with Yahoo Pipes! can bring about a lot of data mashup feeds.

Modular software using AOP

The adoption of Aspect Oriented Programming paradigm in enterprise software is rapid. It is interesting to look at various applications of AOP in enterprise architecture:

• Apply design patterns as modules
• Application security architecture
• Transaction, Logging, Stats, etc.
• Enforce architectural design standard for application development by leveraging AOP tool support
• JVM Clustering

AOP allows modularization of application and provides manageability and loose coupling from a software architecture perspective. From a product perspective, it allows to easily plug in features by allowing various implementation of aspects to be plugged-in quite easily.

Resources:

AOP Software Design Using UML
AspectJ Tools
Spring AOP
JBoss AOP
Clustering JVM using Terrocotta and AOP

Technorati tags: software, technology, aop, java, .net