Why do we need single sign on?

Many organization have many applications with different authentication mechanism making it difficult to administer because of the following reasons:

a. Need for centralizing the user administration
b. Users need not remember separate password for different apps
c. Authentication can be done from one source


The IT managers are very much concerned about the integrity of the data and they are looking at implementing the Single Sign On while seriously calculating the ROI of such implementation.

Single Sign On, provides immediate benefit of logon to multiple applications by providing a single username and password. SSO gives the end users an seamless experience of accessing the application. Administration and maintenance of their password and its relevant policy becomes much more easier to maintain too.

We can implement SSO using many ways, we will try to see the different scenarios in the Single Sign On and what are the ways we have to implement so in other article soon.

Dependency Injection

There are too many articles and blogs around the internet you can Google it and find the same, I would just like to share some of the links which would be easy for beginners. When you would like to manage lot of objects and its dependencies effectively across application you might need to think about it.

What is Dependency Injection?

If you want to book a Bus Ticket to go to Chennai from Bangalore you might know lot of ways to do it e.g., book the ticket by Redbus, booking through KSRTC website, directly going to the private bus agents and booking it etc.,

What if you don’t want to worry about all of these things and just tell a friend and give him money to book it. Wouldn’t be so simple? How simple would it be to do that without you knowing the underlying details of how your friend is going to do it? Would be awesome right?

You have learnt Dependency InjectionJ. Kidding huh?

Please refer to this link this will give you good insights on what is dependency Injection

 http://www.theserverside.com/news/1321158/A-beginners-guide-to-Dependency-Injection.

http://fabien.potencier.org/article/12/do-you-need-a-dependency-injection-container

Want to be more precise in understanding the same, please refer to http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html

Good resources to get started with MongoDB

In continuation to my exploration on NOSQL arena, after cassandra I'm following with Mongo DB which is much lightweight than cassandra which also follows the Document based approach. In the quest for finding more information about the same and learning it fast, I had come across some good resoruces, which you can refer too.

There are very good resources available at Mongly.com

Automated tutorial:

Very good one for anyone who would like to kickstart MongoDB without getting to know more about it. Learn MongoDB by doing through an tutorial which you can work through. Very interesting and good one too.

http://tutorial.mongly.com/tutorial/index

PDF Documents:

Learn from master themselves on the MongoDB User Manual from this link:http://docs.mongodb.org/master/MongoDB-Manual-master.pdf

Also you can check the Little MongoDB Book by Karl Seguin who has made it simple to learn MongoDB with analogous comparision with DBMS. http://openmymind.net/mongodb.pdf

Powerpoint:

Thanks to Chris Kite for sharing wondeful presentation on mongodb in this URL: http://www.slideshare.net/chriskite/intro-to-mongo-db . very good one for begineers.

Client Interaction key to success

In continuation to one of my blog on communication tips, I'm trying elaborate little to more on the aspects related to client interaction.

In our day to day to business activities irrespective of industry we tend to interact with the client or client representatives many many times. I'm just trying to put across some tips which might be useful for people who are new to client interactions.

Start the conversation by thanking him for providing his valuable time. This may not be necessary if you are meeting them often.

a. Listening what the customer says

Always listen to what the customer is trying to say, please don't run the process in back of your mind about what to respond, be patient and listen to what the customer's intent ? what is he trying to say? what are all the expectations? so on and so forth.

b. Notes very important

Make short notes of the important points you discuss with him, always try to have a pen and paper handy with you when you are meeting the customer, the customer might be giving inputs on his requirements, changes, concerns, issues while you interact. You need to take good note of that and deal it with care and communicate accordingly.

c. Make the right response

Always try to respond in patient manner, please don't commit something which you are not responsible for. Seek additional time when you are supposed to respond to such questions. You response needs to concise and precise. 

d. Summarize

Try to summarize the overall conversation you had with him to outline the action items on both the ends. That will help the customer to have a clarity that you tried to understand his requirements and very caring towards your views.

Last but not the least, if you don't have the time to summarize your understanding followup him with your email outlining your understanding on the meeting.

NO SQL with Cassandra: Step by Step with Cassandra CLI

Step 1: Please navigate to the folder in which you have installed and configured Cassandra\bin directory in my case it is E:\software\cassandra\bin. Then please execute the batch command Cassandra-cli

 Step 2: Now you will see the following screen which will show the prompt related to Cassandra after connecting to the server.

 Step 3: Let us create the Keyspace for working as “Test”

Step 4: The message will get into an agreement with the cluster and it creates the keyspace, please assume that keyspace is analogous to Database in RDBMS. Now let us use the keyspace using the command “use test;”

Now you will get a message such as Authenticated to keyspace: test

Step 5: Creating the User column family.

As per the screenshot we have created the column family with the columns full_name, email and gender.

Step 6: Now let us see how to insert values in to these columnfamily we have just created.

In the above given screenshot you can realize how we have inserted value to the column family in Cassandra.

Step 7: Now let us see how we need  to read the ones which are stored, that’s pretty simple just give List Users;

In this you can realize that each of it has column name, value and its timestamp. Wonderful isn’t? Now I have added a new column called birth_year to the user kumar with the value 1980, as given in the following:

Now let’s list the users and see what impact it has made.

Now it has listed two users  one user with 3 column values and another user with 4 column values. hope now you have realized how we can add columns dynamically with Cassandra.

Step 8: Let’s try and get value for a specific user.  Now you need to user GET.

The command will go like this GET users[‘siva’];

Step 9:  We will try to retrieve the value for specific column for the specific user’s email id.

The command will go like this GET users[‘siva’][‘email’];

Step 10: How to delete a particular column for the given user?

This ends my preliminary exploration of Cassandra for NOSQL. Will try to come up with more experiments in the upcoming days. Thanks.