We developed a race-management system for Coach Rio, involving RFIDs and iPads. :-) See the article here.

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Now I’m back in the Philippines and an update has been long overdue. The week of May 9-14 was spent with much enthusiasm and enjoyment meeting with and getting to know the other names in the Boost C++ Library developers mailing list. The community is alive, well, and growing — lots of first time attendees and veterans of the C++ scene. This post is just about a quick update on the cool things and the goings on about BoostCon 2010.

Day 0

Arriving at Aspen, Colorado in time for the May 9th registration and informal get together marks Day 0 of BoostCon 2010. Lots of familiar names and not so much familiar faces. The good thing about seeing names and associating faces with them is that it makes the statement “I know <insert person’s name here>” more believable. Just sending emails back and forth is one thing, but there is definitely something else that goes on when you get to meet in person.

Day 0 was uneventful except for meeting for the first time the names and the people behind the conversations that happen typically in the mailing lists.

Day 1

There are two tracks and day 1 was filled with very interesting presentations about a myriad of topics. The list of talks I attended is below:

• “Clang: An Open-Source C++ Compiler Library” by Doug Gregor — a high level view on what Clang is and why it’s worth watching and supporting. It’s a very interesting talk about the possible future(s) of C++ programming and language evolution as an alternative to GCC.
• “Generic Programming And the Boost Graph Library” by Jeremy Siek — a high level introduction to the generic programming practice which also led to good discussion around concepts and why they matter; the discussion on Boost.Graph was a bonus with very relevant and interesting applications of the myriad of algorithms available in the library.
• “A Framework for RAD Spirit” by Hartmut Kaiser and Joel De Guzman — a very nice look into the practical (and wacky) applications of Boost.Spirit to do many different things that you otherwise would only dream about doing: Scheme compiler anyone?
• “Is Boost Broken?” by Robert Ramey — a thought provoking and controversial (by design I think) presentation on the problems with the development process from Robert’s personal observations and perspective.

My general impression on the first day of BoostCon is that it’s one of those “this is really happening” moments. I got to meet and talk with people I’ve always wanted to meet, some of whom I already worked with in my own libraries. Day 1 set the tone for the next few days, where the sessions are focused and the questions are very good with answers that prove to be better.

Day 2

This day was marked by the first time I’ve ever encountered snow in my life! So this is definitely one for keeps as far as I am concerned. The list of sessions I attended are below too:

• “Data Structure Visualizers in Visual Studio 2010” by Stephan Lavavej — an interesting hacker’s eye view of how to extend the data structure visualizers in Visual Studio 2010, something that has opened my eyes to giving more value to the IDE’s that people use to get things done in C++.
• “C++ Tool-Builders Workshop” by Doug Gregor — an afternoon-long session on using Clang to do some funky things with a C++ compiler and extending the compiler to add your own diagnostics. It’s a very interesting look into writing tools that deal with C++ programs using a cool set of tools in Clang and Clang itself. This is where I wished I had a Mac that was powerful enough to build Clang so that I can go hack on it too. I’m extending thanks to Marshall Clow for letting me watch him make the changes during the workshop.
• “Ryppl – A New Platform for Boost Development” by Dave Abrahams — a sneak peak into a proposed new way of developing Boost using Git, CMake, and Pip. It’s opened up the discussion again on the Boost C++ Library development process and the tools involved. Much discussion went on around the topic and I think a fresh new look at how to move forward was encouraged in Dave’s presentation.

In this day I got to walk from the Aspen Meadows Resort to the Aspen Center for Physics at night alone while snow was pouring down from the sky. Definitely an experience that I will not soon forget. The main takeaway for me in this day is the importance of tools in the development of C++ applications and libraries. Without the great tools C++ developers have access too, it will be hard to imagine to get anything substantial done with the language.

I am looking forward though to a presentation on having better cross-platform C++ debuggers that understand the idiosyncrasies of the C++ programming language better — like exceptions, static initialization, and non-malloc allocators. Because C debuggers can be very C-centric, tacking on a C++ debugger on top might not be the best approach. Maybe clang would go into that too, but that’s me wishing aloud.

Day 3

This day I got a chance to go swimming at the Aspen Meadows Resort Health Center which had a 25m outdoor heated pool. It was perfect to let me acclimatize to the altitude and to get my blood pumping. The lineup of talks I attended this day is short but definitely worth the wait for me:

• “An Asio Based Flash XML Server” by Michael Caisse — a look at how to use Boost.Asio to make asynchronous servers combined with Boost.Thread and other things.
• “The Meta State Machine Library V2” by Christophe Henry — a presentation on the (excellent) Boost.MSM library that I cannot wait to start using as soon as it gets integrated into the Boost SVN trunk (which I hear should be anytime now).

There was also a picnic at night where the excellent cooking of some of the attendees made for a very nice way to end the night and have a good day the next day.

Day 4

This is the day I gave a presentation titled “Techniques in Flexible Header-Only C++ Network Library Implementations” which went into the details of the internals of cpp-netlib. I also attended other talks in the day which I have listed down below:

• “A MIME library for Boost” by Marshall Clow — a library that is hosted by cpp-netlib too and is being developed to be made part of the Boost C++ Library as well.
• “Practical DSEL Design with Proto” by Eric Niebler — a look at what the new stuff coming in Proto would be and how to take advantage of them. This was a great look at how I can use Boost.Proto to implement some of the libraries I’ve been meaning to do but got turned off with the prospect of having to do expression templates myself. Now that Boost.Proto would make my life easier, I just might make these library ideas into realities soon enough.

Day 4 was really a good day for me because I got a lot of interest from the participants who were looking forward to some of the promised changes coming to cpp-netlib and the eventual submission for Boost inclusion — which I’m targeting to be the end of this year. Hopefully there will be more for me to talk about in BoostCon 2011 about cpp-netlib.

Day 5

The last day of the conference included a talk about “Cross-platform development with Qt and Boost” by Joao Abecasis which I also attended to find out more about GUI programming with Qt. Because of that talk I decided I would take a look at doing some GUI programming with Qt and seeing whether I can expand my horizons to develop useful user-oriented applications too aside from developing developer-oriented tools. The final day also hosted a panel about the future of Boost and I would write another post about what I thought the future of Boost should be like, as well as the discussion that sticks to my mind after that day.

All in all BoostCon 2010 is a success if I may say so myself and I definitely look forward to BoostCon 2011 for more of the cool C++ community talks.

Update: Due to insistent public demand (and some free time) I’ve updated the links to the sessions. Thanks for the patience guys!

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We're now an official Google Apps Reseller!  Google approached us last year to represent them for Google Apps Premier Edition here in the Philippines.  We worked out the details with them for a while but since it fits in with our current skills in developing applications in Google App Engine and Android we decided to take this on.

The timing is perfect since Microsoft is currently pushing its 2010 versions of its software like Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Microsoft Sharepoint 2010.  Google Apps Premier provides much cheaper alternative to these Microsoft products, plus a lot more features, and a heck of a lot less administrative headaches.  

If your organization is looking at updating its email, document-management or collaboration systems, talk to us about the option of Google Apps.  

Check out this video to get an Overview of Google Apps for Business. 

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The iconic Linux services provider of the '90s, Linuxcare, is back with a vengeance!  And guess who's providing the technology and services behind the company? ;-)

Orange & Bronze is providing the technology and talent behind Linuxcare.  Linuxcare's initial focus will be on providing services around Amazon Web Services, but will eventually grow into other services mainly around cloud computing.  

Orange & Bronze Software Labs, Inc. is proud to present the latest issue of the ORANGE ORCHARD, its official quarterly newsletter.



In this issue, find out all the good news that came O&B's way at the onset of 2010, including inspiring testimonials from our loyal clients and new endeavors like a fresher, friendlier website, a representative for Europe, new office tools to play with, various advocacies to give back to the community, and many others—all are SUMPTINK new under the sun.

You may download the pdf version here.

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What the Philippine start-up scene needs is its own version of TechCrunch.  We have our tech press but they're focused on news from big vendors and established companies.  We need a news organization focused on start-ups!  This will get the local start-up community excited, and help venture investors find interesting ventures to invest.

I'm hoping the Filipino blogger community will step-up, by creating a Philippine start-up news blog or by contributing Philippine start-up news to TechCrunch.

Philippine-based VCs, maybe this is something you should sponsor?

I found an online community that's all about teaching open source, especially in universities.  The organization is called TeachingOpenSource.  They've even created a text book, and the text book content is open source as well.

I think this is just awesome!  And I hope this catches on in universities and science high schools the Philippines.

A Swedish company just launched an Android-based TV.  By next year, you're going to see thousands of wildly-different types of devices running Android.  I'm talking about everyday appliances, office equipment, factory machines, POS terminals... every sort of device you can imagine.

Meet Manuel "Sanka" Oudin, O&B's energetic new representative for France!  Sanka was a freelance IT consultant in France before working with O&B.  Sanka will be doing sales, account management and requirements elicitation in his home country.

He's currently in the Philippines for two months.  He's been attending training in Agile Software Development as well as getting oriented in our technology specializations Grails, Spring, Hibernate and Android.  

He's already brought in a torrent of leads from France and has been collaborating with our development team for the proposals.  He's also been translating our website to French!

Welcome to the team, Sanka!

Here in the Philippines it’s the beginning of the holy week. I’m now looking at a lot of things to do to catch up with the backlog of things that I’ve got lined up. I’m sharing the list of things I’ll be working on and doing this weekend just so that I have a public list of things that I can point to and hold myself accountable to. If you have any suggestions please don’t hesitate to comment on the list too, I’ll update as soon as I tick off some of the items.

• Memcache++ Updates:
  • Support the new noreply commands with memcached
  • Add support for UDP commands
  • Add support for more administration and stats commands
  • Better error handling, consider non-throwing interface
  • Asynchronous API
  • Support for ‘cas’ and ‘gets’ for memcached protocol
  • Release 0.12
• C++ Network Library
  • Asynchronous HTTP Client Interface
  • Streaming support
  • MIME integration
  • BoostCon 2010 Paper and Presentation
• Spec C++ Library
  • Support for more Boost libraries
  • Integration with Boost.Test
  • Documentation and Release

I’m starting with updating memcache++ because there’s been a recent uptake in the number of users and emails that I’m getting from users. A few friends also requested a few features to be supported and I’m looking at improving the implementation a tad bit more. I was also thinking about adding support for a non-persistent version that uses asynchronous IO operations to connect to the correct memcache server. Another thing that crossed my mind is the implementation of consistent hashing to somehow support dynamic addition of new servers. I’m now taking this opportunity to go ahead and say I need help with memcache++!

The C++ Network Library is also shaping up to be a community driven project. We’d love to get more user feedback too. I’m thinking of moving the discussion out of the Sourceforge mailing list and to a new Google Group too. If you have specific requests, we’d love to see them on the cpp-netlib issue tracker on Github.

So that’s it for now, expect to see some of the items up there crossed out and stuck down before the end of this weekend.

Update: I’ve implemented support for `cas` and `gets` for memcached and released version 0.12 of memcache++.

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I'd like to announce the release of our first Grails product, Track My Applicant. It's a recruitment management system that we're targeting at companies with high-volume recruitment requirements, such as call centers. This product was a joint venture with HK-based Synerbyte.

More Grails (and Android) products are in the works.  Stay tuned! :-)

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This is based on my talk at the Innovation Summit organized by John Clements and Harvard Business Publishing last month.



There are five trends in the software and internet space that every businessperson and entrepreneur should be aware of, since they're going to shake up the business landscape dramatically.



Trend #1: Accelerating pace and cost-reduction of software development



My company engaged in a joint-venture last year to develop an online product. The JV partner has been trying for three years to develop the product with different partners with little success, even as he employed some of the top developers in Philippine software industry.



Since the project was R&D with an unknown future revenue, we said that we could only commit two or three junior people at a time plus some interns, though the project was overseen by our CTO and we used the cutting-edge Grails framework. After two-weeks, the team presented its initial work, and the JV partner exclaimed, “You guys accomplished more in two weeks than the other teams did in six months!”



I could attribute this success to the Grails framework, and example of the rapid-development frameworks available today that weren't available to programmers just three years ago. The productivity jumps with these frameworks is literally and order of magnitude. And the best part is, most of these frameworks are free and open source!



This is a trend that will only accelerate – Software can be built faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper, because of rapidly improving frameworks, tools, components and free web service APIs. What does this mean for business? It means that big software companies will increasingly face competition with smaller companies with smaller teams of developers. Size and financial muscle will be less and less of a requirement to build powerful software.



Trend #2: Everything is going on the internet



When was the last time you went to a store and bought packaged software? Probably not in a while. More often we download software and install, but this too is getting less and less. Lately, web applications are getting so rich in functionality and feel that they are getting close to the richness of installed applications. This trend will continue with HTML 5. Not only will we experience even richer web applications, these web applications will have the capability to operate even offline and to store data on harddrives.



Software-as-a-service will increasingly be the primary way to distribute and access software. What does this mean for business? It means that the cost of distributing software is coming crashing down as well. You no longer need a massive manufacturing, packaging, distribution and retailing operation just to deliver your software. Even the cost of hosting software on internet servers is coming crashing down, with cloud computing. Again, the playing field is increasingly being leveled for smaller, more nimble software companies to compete against the giants.



Trend #3: The internet of things



In January 2010, scientists from Yale University and South Korea announced that they had created a transistor made out of just six carbon atoms! Does Moore's Law ring a bell? Moore's Law not only means that microchips will get more powerful, but they will also get smaller and cheaper at an accelerating pace.



What about Gilder's Law? Gilder's Law states that the bandwidth of a communications network triples every year.



Throw in nanotechnology, IPv6, self-configuring wireless networks and low-power wireless protocols and what do you get? The internet of things.



The internet of things means that not just PCs, mobile phones and servers will be on the internet. Increasingly, it will be things. Since computer processors and wifi adaptors are increasingly getting smaller and cheaper, we will increasingly have them everywhere – on our clothes, vehicles, appliances... even on crops and livestock. They will all have computer processors and be connected on the internet!



Again, what does this mean for business? It means that computer programs can be created that are even more powerful than previously imagined, since now they can reach out, extract data, or even control, a plethora of things that are all connected to the internet. And since software can be created cheaper and faster... software developers are becoming increasingly powerful.



Trend #4: Microsegmentation



Why is so much investment money going to search engines and social networking applications, which users are able to access for free? These are data-mining operations, for the purpose of highly-targeted advertising. Their goal is to learn as much as they can about you in a detailed manner, so that when advertisers need to reach out to someone like you they can do so without wasting their money on those they don't want to reach. For advertisers, it means it's now affordable to reach out to that needle in a haystack, without having to spend advertising money on the hay.



What does this mean for business? Again, small companies get a more level playing field against the big. Even with limited funds, a small company can dominate a small and dispersed niche, since it can target its advertising only on the people who'd be interested in its product.



Trend #5: Rise of the MicroISV



MicroISVs (Micro Independent Software Vendors) are software company made up of only one or two people. They've been gaining in popularity in the US in the past few years.



This phenomenon is simply the result of the previous trends I just talked about – It's so easy to develop, maintain, promote and distribute powerful, desirable software such that even just one or two people can do it. This just validates in the most extreme way that the playing field is leveling towards smaller, more nimble software companies.



What does this all mean for business in the third world?



The advantages that MicroISVs enjoy are the same advantages that software companies in the third world have access to. The level playing field being created does not just apply to size, but geographical location. Companies in developed countries do not enjoy significant advantages over those in developing countries.



This means that innovation and technopreneurship will continue to shift to the third world. We're seeing a lot of new technopreneurial enterprises emerging from China and India – not just outsourcing but the creation of intellectual property. I'm sure we will see innovation coming from other developing countries like the Philippines soon, for as long as these countries maintain the technical, business and cultural skills in needed to foster these innovations.



What can we do so that our country can compete in this new level playing field?



The first is to support education. I mean not just for tertiary education in computer science and business. I also mean basic education in science, math and communication. Brain power wins in the new era and a country needs to cultivate its intellects to compete.



The next is that we need to build communities between technologists and businesspeople. There's just not enough interaction between these groups of people. Business people understand markets and their needs but not how to create solutions to fulfill them. Technologies know how to create solutions, but not what markets need. We need to get these people in the same room often enough so that they can start exploring ways to fulfill market needs.

For most of the later part of January and almost the whole of February I’ve been pre-occupied with some of my consulting work. There were some huge news that I wanted to share but didn’t find the time to share with the world through my blog. Here’s a quick run-down of the things that have been going on that I wanted to write about but didn’t find the time until now.

• My proposed BoostCon 2010 talk was accepted, and I’ll be presenting at Aspen, Colorado on May 13th if the schedule doesn’t change. If you’re going there too, I’d love to meet you face-to-face.
• The cpp-netlib team has released version 0.5 to the wild and contains some funky C++ HTTP client and server support. There’s more coming from that front and look out for another release really soon.
• I’m winding down work with my latest consulting gig and now I’m looking out for interesting C++ related projects to work on. For sure I’ll be spending a lot more time working on my open source libraries, but I’m now available to do consulting for funky C++ projects you might have.
• A handful of friends and I have just incorporated a consulting firm that specializes on highly scalable web applications development. I personally am playing the role of Chief Operating Officer of that company, but I will be doing some system architecture and design for the products we will be launching soon as well as system architecture guidance for clients of the firm. I’ll definitely link to our site as soon as we finalize the look and have it hosted.

So there you have it, just a list of quick-fire items that has taken a hold of my time for January and February. I’ll be covering some of the other C++ related news that happened during the past few weeks in the hopes that I can start a conversation with readers of the blog and the public as a whole. It’s been a good couple of months for C++ and I think it’s just going to get better and better.

Filed under: updates

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