Srirangan

Sub­rato Banerjee

Help Sub­rato Baner­jee com­plete his research by let­ting him know how you have been cop­ing with the reces­sion by fill­ing in this pri­vate online sur­vey. Results and analy­sis will be pub­lished in a lead­ing busi­ness journal.

Sur­vey: http://subrato2009.questionpro.com

As promised, releas­ing an Adobe Flex 3 com­po­nent for Choro­pleth Map. The Choro­pleth Map com­po­nent is an extension/implementation of my Map com­po­nent released earlier.

What is a Choro­pleth Map?
A choro­pleth map (Greek χωρα + πληθαίν:, (“area/region” + “mul­ti­ply”) is a the­matic map in which areas are shaded or pat­terned in pro­por­tion to the mea­sure­ment of the sta­tis­ti­cal vari­able being dis­played on the map, such as pop­u­la­tion den­sity or per-capita income.

The choro­pleth map pro­vides an easy way to visu­al­ize how a mea­sure­ment varies across a geo­graphic area or it shows the level of vari­able within a region. — Wikipedia

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The com­po­nent does just that. It plots a map and then applies a theme to the var­i­ous regions of the map. Rel­e­vant data and leg­end infor­ma­tion needs to be pro­vided to the com­po­nent. (See exam­ple attached below!)

The com­po­nent also pro­vides tooltips on spe­cific regions and pro­vides an “Active Leg­end” that lets you high­light and hide/unhide spe­cific regions of the map based on the data and legend.

Demo | Source code

Releas­ing a sim­ple, pow­er­ful and exten­si­ble Map com­po­nent devel­oped using Action­Script and Flex 3. The idea is that a map con­tains one or more poly­gons rep­re­sent­ing each sub-region. Each poly­gon can have mouse events attached to it and can have fur­ther prop­er­ties set. This con­cept is fur­ther extended in my sec­ond map com­po­nent i.e. the Choro­pleth Map that will be released later this week so stay tuned!

Demo | Source code

So its time to get our hands on Adobe’s Flex 4 tech­nolo­gies. Pub­lic beta’s are avail­able on Adobe Labs.

Here’s from the Adobe AIR Team Blog:

Excit­ing news! Now avail­able on Adobe Labs are the pub­lic beta releases of Adobe Flash Builder 4 (for­merly Flex Builder), Adobe Flash Cat­a­lyst and the Flex 4 Frame­work.

Flash Builder 4 is the next evo­lu­tion of Flex Builder, and includes a long list of fea­ture improve­ments, new data-centric devel­op­ment fea­tures, and a new design-develop work­flow with Flash Cat­a­lyst. Flash Cat­a­lyst, also now avail­able in pub­lic beta, is a new inter­ac­tion design tool for rapidly build­ing appli­ca­tion user inter­faces with­out cod­ing. Both Flash Builder and Flash Cat­a­lyst are based on the updated Flex 4 frame­work, also avail­able for beta download.

Visit Adobe Labs to find out more and to down­load the installers.

Putting an end to IBM’s quest for Sun Microsys­tems, Ora­cle has announced the acqui­si­tion of The Java Com­pany Sun Microsys­tems priced at USD 9.50 per share. For us who’ve worked exten­sively on the LAMP plat­form, Sun’s acqui­si­tion of MySQL last year was promis­ing for it strength­ened the future of MySQL. MySQL is the most pop­u­lar Data­base Man­age­ment Sys­tem lead­ing its near­est com­peti­tor Ora­cle by a steady mar­gin. But Ora­cle, through its acqui­si­tion of Sun, now also owns its biggest com­peti­tor — MySQL.

The acqui­si­tion gives Ora­cle a mas­sive 55% (approx.) mar­ket share as far as Data­base Man­age­ment Sys­tems are con­cerned. The acqui­si­tion also raises doubts of the future via­bil­ity or growth of MySQL as a plat­form for obvi­ous reasons.

Some could argue that there is space for two vari­ants of DBMS’s in today’s mar­ket. MySQL being Open Source has a huge fol­low­ing and a very attrac­tive adop­tion rate among small to medium busi­ness, per­sonal and not for profit oper­a­tions. While Ora­cle is gen­er­ally pre­ferred for mis­sion crit­i­cal, enter­prise or other high end requirements.

One thing is cer­tain — MySQL with a 30% (approx.) mar­ket share isn’t going to dis­ap­pear in a hurry. In fact MySQL could con­tinue to sur­vive as a com­mu­nity, open source project but the chances of MySQL Enter­prise Edition’s sur­vival look bleak.

Could the forth­com­ing demise of MySQL be the open­ing Post­greSQL needs? Time will tell.