The Hindu Business Line : Bridging digital divides

Did you know there are four digital divides to be taken care of? And how do you bridge them? By committing to that goal "the same intelligence and imagination that have gone into creating the technologies themselves."

VIP convoys criss-cross the country on highways but not everybody is able to see their favourite leaders. Likewise information technology has been proclaimed as the icon of the current age, but it doesn't touch everybody's lives. "Despite all utopian drams, the Information Age has so far touched only a tiny majority of the world's population," write Kenneth Keniston and Deepak Kumar in IT Experience in India, published by Sage (www.indiasage.com) . "If we define household access to the World Wide Web as a criterion for joining the Information Age, less than 5 per cent of the world's population of 6 billion had gained access by the year 2002."

Therefore, we need to bridge the divide. But there are "four digital divides", not just one: "The first is internal - between the digitally-empowered rich and the poor. The second is a linguistic-cultural gap between English and other languages and between `Anglo-Saxon culture' and other world cultures. The next gap is underscored by disparities in access to information technology and between rich and poor nations. Finally, there is the phenomenon of the `digerati'. This is an affluent elite possessing the appropriate skills and means to take advantage of the ICTs."

There are daunting statistics: That only 1 per cent of the country's population have home access to computers; of that, only a half has Net facility; more than 40 per cent of the one billion are illiterate; one in two newborns is below ideal birth weight; and only around 3 per cent can afford a telephone. Priorities could be different: With 60 million Indian children not in school, "for the cost of a computer, you can have a school."

Yet there are bold initiatives. An example: Veerampattinam, a coastal village with 98 per cent of the families involved in fishing, receives information on wave heights in the next 24 hours, downloaded from a US Navy Web site. "The information requirements in that village are focussed on the safety of fishermen while at sea, on fish/shoal occurrence near shore, and on techniques for post-harvest processing."

Reverting to the divides, how do we bridge them? By committing to that goal "the same intelligence and imagination that have gone into creating the technologies themselves." A simple reminder that nothing is impossible, nor any chasm that is uncrossable.

Management beans, nuts and bolts

WHAT you specify is what you wanted yesterday. That's the pace that we're faced with. "Increasing demand for faster development cycles combined with the desire for more functionality has left less time for building adequate application configuration and management into Java applications," write Ben G. Sullins and Mark B. Whipple in JMX in Action, published by Dreamtech Press (www.wileydreamtech.com) . There are the `property files' to help programmers in specifying a set of parameters. "With more and more configurable attributes, you will quickly find yourself stuck in a mire of property files," warn the authors. Here's where Java Management Extensions (JMX) is relevant. "Using JMX, you can expose your application components, attributes, and configuration to management tools in a process called instrumentation." Chapter 1 guides readers through basics: That today's management solutions can be divided into two categories, viz. network and application; management information base (MIB) is a hierarchical representation of information about devices; and so on.

If you were a bean counter, you'd come across a special type of bean, the MBean. It is the managed bean, "a Java class that meets certain naming and inheritance standards dictated by the JMX specification". There are the standard ones and the dynamic MBeans. A chapter in the book explains how you can manage Jini service with a dynamic MBean, and also work on a super class "to provide some code reuse for generating the metadata descriptions of future resources."

In a chapter titled `MBeans on-the-fly', there's the Model MBean that has as its valuable feature the ability to persist itself.

It can "survive the cycling of the JMX agent that contains it. Using JMX relation service, you can create and remove relations, not relatives."

Relations are objects that contain information describing the relationship between two MBeans."

Combining Java Message Service (JMS) with JMX is discussed in a chapter on building a home theatre system.

JMS supports two models of messaging, notes the book. "Point-to-point and publish-subscribe."

A book that can teach you a lot about management - beans, that is, if not nuts and bolts.

Hone your language

SUMMER vacation is on and you want to try out a new language. How about C++ Power Packed, by Kabir Khanna? The book, published by Tata McGraw-Hill (www.tatamcgrawhill.com) , is aimed at software professionals programming in C++, not rank novices. Try this: "A popular interview question for aspiring C++ programmers has often been, `What is the return value of a constructor?' Promptly most people answer it correctly by saying, `none'. This is then usually followed by the question, `How does a constructor then indicate failure in creation of the object?' That's a relatively tricky one."

To explain, Khanna gives a code fragment that defines class Mortal, and within curly brackets sits the line, "Mortal Earthling;" Thereafter, come philosophical questions: "When does the life of an Earthling begin? When does it end? What is the status of the Earthling before it comes alive and after it dies?"

The book is an engaging dialogue for the astute coder who will be able to read between the lines and make sense. For the rest, however, meaning may lie only in those simple lines such as: "The stack is probably the busiest memory area in any program. Misuse of templates can usually cause very hard-to-read error messages on most compilers. Never mix exception logic with normal flow logic. An exception can be thrown and never caught." There is a C++ test at the end of the book with questions on `things you ought to know' and those `testing deeper waters'. An appendix is devoted to the new kid on the block, C#.

Khanna is not for the weak-hearted who think that Greek or Latin could be a better choice for the holidays.

Books2Byte@thehindu.co.in

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Early on the scene

Some help with the password

Erasing temporary files

Looking for a head start

Customer's cash calls the shots

Quiz

Bridging digital divides

Cartoon

For a smooth talk