blog@Yantrajaal

image : getcareerkhabar.in Distance learning is a concept whose importance is growing by leaps and bounds everyday. We all know that there is nothing that can beat the physical presence of a teacher in the class but the exigencies of delivering educational services at an affordable price point is forcing everyone -- both students and teachers -- to accept the reality of this technology. In fact it boils down to the ROI, the return on investment : we all know that it would have been far better to have been at London and watch opening ceremony of the Olympics but the cost of the travel and tickets forced all of us to watch it on TV and I am sure that the Organising Committee earned more from TV rights than what they could have got through ticket sales. So it was a win-win for all to have the show broadcast in a virtual medium even though the experience was sort of degraded by the small screen. So is the case with distance learning. Most distance learning platforms use a combinat...

  All these applications were built using Zoho Creator , the amazing environment for building your own Applications in the Cloud.

As a concept, Cloud Computing is neither new nor anything unique -- in fact the business proposition  around this model of system architecture is so compelling, that one wonders -- as I have explained in the Economic Times --  why people do not see it as an inevitability ! Of late the idea seems to have exploded into the public psyche with the unstoppable force of an idea whose time has come and we in the Vinod Gupta School of Management at IIT Kharagpur have included this into our curriculum. I have been exploring Cloud Computing on the Zoho platform for the past couple of years and this year our students have built some very smart applications -- in fact a nano ERP if I may say so -- that were evaluated by two executives from Zoho itself. I am grateful to Mr Aravind Natarajan for helping me with this evaluation. You can see the three top applications here on this page, or you can follow the links to the actual application <p><br /...

Onward Software Soldiers, marching as to war, With a Chrome-on-Linux going on before, Google, the loyal Master, leads against the foe; Forward into battle, hear its trumpets blow. Predictions are hazardous and emphatic ones even more so -- for the credibility and reputation of the predictor -- but let me stick my neck out anyway and state that Google Chrome might just as well drive a stake through the heart of the proprietary and paid-for software story. The ethic of reciprocity also known as the Golden Rule is an ethical code that states one has a right to just treatment, and a responsibility to ensure justice for others. One of the many ways of expressing this ethic is "do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you". Microsoft violated this code when it killed Netscape by bundling a "free" browser with its dominant operating system but having sowed the wind, they now reap the whirlwind as Google plans to ship a free operating system along with th...

In an earlier blog post I have written about Zoho Creator , the truly amazing platform for developing applications and deploying them on the web using the metaphor of Cloud Computing. I have introduced this platform in my Systems Engineering course both at the Praxis Business School as well as at the School of Management at IIT Kharagpur and the product has been very well received by students at both places. Management students who had in the past felt that programming was beneath their dignity ( though in reality it was more often beyond their ability :) have now started writing real programs. As a part of the course, the students have to develop a basic order collection application that has a few slightly complex concepts like referential integrity and updating multiple tables and to help them I have created a presentation that shows the various steps that are involved. Being an open source enthusiast I had created the presentation in Open Office but then I found to my dismay that ma...

I believe I have found one of the most complete as well as easy to use Application Development platform. Why do I say so ? Consider the following features : A relational database for the persistent storage of data. A total GUI drag-and-drop front end forms builder with the ability to extend the logic with a scripting language. The database supports multiple tables linked through foreign keys and updateably both directly and from the application Easy integration with internet ( send mail ) and web. But the real icing on the cake is as follows There is NO SOFTWARE to buy and install. Both the RDBMS as well as the IDE are web based. The final application can be embedded into any website that allows Javascript. No support required for CGI / Perl / PHP whatever on your webserver. The entire service is currently FREE !!! and I really hope that it stays that way To see the kind of applications that can be built .... see Contact Manager Application or the Bank Transaction Application The two ...