TaF Public release

We are now releasing Tell-A-Friend widget for public use.

One of the features that makes this widget stand apart from rest of the widgets is that, if you wish to change the design of the buttons (be it the color, size or appearance), you don't have to embed a new or modified code in your webpage/blog. This helps save a lot of copy-paste exercise, which is kinda a welcome feature for lazy bums like me. All one has to do it to go to the accounts page, choose the kinda button they like, save the changes and then its all Eureka. All the changes are instantly reflected in the blogsite/webpage where TaF is embedded. Now, isn't this something cool ??

Apart from wiring a few connectors in the TaF widget, I worked on the analytics collection module. This was a pretty good learning exercise. I got to know more about the Apache log4j utility. These Apache guys are real bonds. They write some pretty good stuff.

For analytics collections, I wrote a custom JDBC appender to log all data. This has many advantages.

1) It consumes only a limited database connections.
2) Requests are served on first-come-first-serve basis. So, everything is sequential in nature in accordance to time. (log4j uses a queue)

But then, there are possible pitfalls too !!
Imagine that there are many requests, this will increase the queue size, thus increasing the response time. As of now, we have tested our infrastructure for traffics much more than we are expecting. If anyhow, response time does gets a beating, switching to a distributed system would be a possible solution which I suppose would require a bit of tweaking.

May be I will soon write another post on how to write custom JDBC appender and on analytics collection framework of works.

Tell-a-Friend

Tell-a-Friend or TaF (as we developers call it) is a new product from Pramati Technology, Hyderabad

Its something to aid 'spread the word around the world'. Just click on it and instantly announce things to your near & dear ones. So, you can announce your blog posts, articles, products on sale etc. through IM, Email, Blogs and Social Networks(like Facebook and Twitter) through a single integrated interface. So, its kinda like a single window to multiple channels to make a million announcements. So, it will bring more clicks to your weblog / website and help market your articles/products.

When Sunny showed me the TaF button embedded in Nina's blog (ya...thats our test blog), I could see foretell that this product could actually become a rage. Intel Mashmaker, CatchFlix and BigScreen are already using it/used it. But, now any one can integrate TaF in their website/blog for the following 2 divine reasons:
1) The free version is absolutely free :P (and one day beer shall also be free)
2) All it takes is embedding a code snippet in the page where the TaF icon is to be displayed.

Hope I see the TaF icons weblogs alongside dig.com, stumble upon etc. icons. After all, it always feels nice to see people use and talk about something that has your code :P.

TaF extensively employs JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, DOJO and AJAX. The widget opens up in an iframe and seemlessly gives a web2.0 feel to the page. We are working to further boost its performance by using CSS sprites, decreasing the number of http request/response and fine-tuning the backend. A rework on its look-and-feel is also being undertaken. So, with time, its gonna become all the more difficult to ignore it and impossible to resist not having it on your page :)