Abhishek Srivastava 

Senior Software Engineer, Hewlett Packard ISO 

30 Cunningham Road, Bangalore 

India

[email protected] 

Current Interests

What I am doing now.

What I used to do ... before I became a Software Engineer.

Things that I find Cool !!

Things that I find UN-Cool ...( IMHO: Things that Suck !!)

Books that I am reading currently

Books that I used to read ... before I became a Software Engineer.

Some sample applications that u can check out.

My Resume .. ( under construction ....)

links to some of the cool web sites.

Some downloads from my web site 

Songs ... i still listen to them :-) even after i became a ....

Pictures of my friends.

What does Abhishek look like .

Your Feedback.

Current Interests :

1. CORBA ( Common Object Request Broker Architecture ) I use Visibroker 3.0 on Windows 2000 and MICO ( MICO is CORBA ) on my SUSE Linux 6.1 

2. COM ( Component Object Model ) : I started learning about COM just to get a feel of the technology. But very soon I liked it a lot. The IUNKNOWN interface is great and also COM solves a lot of problems that haunted the classical c++ programmers on windows. Also Windows gives a great infrastructure and frame work to develop distributed applications. I went to the Dev Days 99 and got a lot of material on COM+... once I get some free time i'll upgrade my knowledge of COM to COM+.

3. Java : I got fed up from VB ( I started my career as a VB programmer ) and decided that I need something more portable. Java is really the answer to portability. In my free time I test my applications on Linux and HP-UX. "most" of the times it is "write once, run anywhere".  Java is my Language of choice and I'll be taking the SUN certification exam on Java 2 this month end.

4. Visual C++ & C++ : I have used Visual C++ rarely but I find ATL and MFC very powerful development tools. I would continue to work on these. At work I use vanilla C++ on HPUX. 

5. XML ( eXtensible Markup Language ) I am new to XML and have started using it a month back or so. Since It's a part of my new project I have worked on a lot of parsers like SUN's XML parser for Java, IBM XML parser for java & C++. Oracle's C++ parser for Java & C++.I have also used the Oracles SQL to XMl utility. 

6. ASP (Active Server Pages )  A fast, easy and powerful way of creating dynamic pages.

What I am doing now ( November 1999)

I am working for Hewlett packard India Software Organization in the Financial Solutions team. We develop large scale solutions for the finance industry. We focus on distributed solutions.
Currently, I am working on the POC (Proof of Concepts) project for the Huntington Services Company. One of the customer's requirements is that the messaging between systems be done using XML and IFX ( interactive financial exchange). Till now I was evaluating different parsers and developing prototypes for a few simple IFX messages. I am writing utility class classes that will build, parse and search XML files. Shortly I port these classes as CORBA servers that will be capable of doing the job remotely. 

What I used to do ... before I became a software engineer

Playing harmonica was my favorite hobby. My room mates in diamond hostel ( REC Trichy ) kicked me out of my room so I took to the terrace. Soon people came to a belief that there is a ghost on the terrace as strange noises come from there in the night. Anyway, after long hours of practice I have improved "slightly". If some one know a professional harmonica trainer, please let me know. I'll love to start playing it again. 

I also used to take part in "dumb charades"...our team THE 100s (Karthik Narayanan, Shrikant Dash and myself) was pretty famous. 

Things that I find Cool !!

1. The IDISPATCH interface : I know that any COM programmer would kill me on hearing this as this is one of the most hated interfaces. However, I like it because any component that implements this interface can be plugged into the IIS and thus used with simple ASP scripts. This makes the server side development on MS platforms very powerful. 
2. SAX : The API is good efficient and easy to implement till the point you don't try to search the XML document.

Things that I find UN - Cool 

1. The DOM trees. It hogs up both memory and cpu resources and there are no algorithms implemented by various vendors to search a DOM tree. Recursively searching the tree and to the burden. I hope that we'll have a better mechanism to represent XML data.
2. The speed of Java 2 JVM. it's almost half of that of JVM 1.1.x.

Books I am reading currently

1. Advanced CORBA programming with C++ ( Michi Hennings )
2. Java and Corba ( Robert Orfalli )
3. Essential COM ( Don Box )
4. Design Patters. ( Gamma)

Books I used to read ... Before I became a software engineer.

I used to like reading books by Ayn Rand, Richard Back,Fredrick Forsyth, Ken Follet and Eric Seagel. However, I was disappointed by some of Ayn Rand's and Richard Backs's later works and stopped reading philosophy. Lost interest in fiction books too... Global conspiracies and aliens don't interest me any more.