Credits: Dzone

While developing Spring Boot Applications using Intellij IDEA, it was so annoying to restart the Spring Boot app after each and every change. Spring Boot provides live reload (hot swap) of application out of the box using the following dependency.

But it didn’t live reload the application/container, and the hot deployment didn’t work for changes. Further researching found that following changes needed to be done in order the hot deployment to be worked correctly.

1. Open the Settings –> Build-Execution-Deployment –> Compiler

and enable the Make Project Automatically.

2. Then press ctrl+shift+A and search for the registry. In the registry, make the following configuration enabled.

Credits: Htxt

Here’s a pro-tip for those leaving tertiary studies who are still undecided about their job path: study to become a Java developer.

Job search engine Adzuna recently conducted a study to find out what are the most sought-after skills in the country, and ‘Java Developer’ topped the list. It’s also not that surprising to find an incredible amount of jobs in the technology space.

“While not every job in demand is posted online, the trends shown by the sample data are clear and meaningful. Companies must dig deep to explore new ways of attracting programming and engineering skills, as well as some of those in the financial or accountancy area. Management skills too, represent a challenge,” said Jesse Green, country manager for Adzuna South Africa.

Adzuna explained that “engineers and developers, together with financial skills, are clearly the hardest to find, with the most demand from firms, yet with the least available candidates. Interestingly, recruiters are now a hot skill with many organisations and agencies requiring recruitment specialists in their HR departments.”

It added that the technology space is definitely  the place to be working in. “Now, with finance skills showing an increasing difficulty to recruit, it will be interesting to see how companies, and hopefully the South African government, ensure that South African firms are able to hire the right people with the best competencies.”

Credits: Dzone.com

For the past couple of years, government and societies have been trying to make “Geek” cool again. Presidents and prime ministers are recommending that computer programming be part of schools’ curriculum. Politics aside, becoming a competent programmer today is more challenging than ever. Just being an introvert genius no longer suffices.

Companies and organizations are looking for people with cognitive skills to add to their technical abilities. It is difficult to put a number on this as it is very company-dependent, but the 70/30 rule could be applied here. That means that people should possess roughly 70% technical skills and 30% soft (cognitive) skills. A “hardcore” developer hardly moves into management if he/she lacks the soft skills required. I have managed many teams across multiple verticals and developed some job descriptions and career progression paths along the way that are in use in some of the largest companies in the world. Let’s try to sum up a few aspects of what seems to be the pattern when companies are recruiting or promoting.

Technical Skills

Well, this is a no-brainer; your technical skills will get you the interview. When recruiting a Java developer, companies are looking for several factors.

The Fundamentals

An understanding of the fundamentals of the Java programming language.

It is good to know how to write code, but knowing the reasoning behind your code and/or your chosen algorithm will make you stand out from the crowd.

Mainstream Programming Tools

Today, the fact is that you cannot be a jack of all trades (master of none). You have to pick which tool you are going to master. This is sometimes dictated by the environment you are working in, but let’s say it is a good bet to go with the following:

• Build tools: Maven or Gradle.
• SCM: Git (not GitHub. Big difference).
• Build automation: Jenkins.
• IDE: Netbeans or Eclipse – not just for writing code, but also code refactoring and debugging from the IDE. I came across plenty of developers who did not how to debug from their favorite IDEs.
• Bug tracker: Bugzilla or Jira.

Mainstream Programming Frameworks

• Spring MVC for web development
• Knowledge of JSF

Application Servers

• All Java developers should know how to deploy in Apache Tomcat.
• As Glassfish development is halting, the next best thing is JBoss WildFly.

Cloud Development

• Get a free account on Amazon EC or PaaS.
• An alternative option to Amazon is Red Hat OpenShift.

Cognitive Skills

It’s great that you have a deep knowledge of the Java programming language and various tools, but your employer/clients will also be assessing you on the following aspects.

Communication

Communication is key to everything we do. We have to interact with the environment around us, whether it is in our private or professional lives. This is not just the ability to put words together, but how to communicate problems that we are facing, or proposing solutions to those problems. A great communicator knows how to express herself in front of various groups; remember that something that makes clear sense to you might not be the same from someone else’s perspective.

Problem Solving

Developers are problem solvers, philosophers, and thinkers. Don’t be one of those programmers who only writes code and doesn’t get involved in the discussion about how to solve problems. Don’t be the programmer who says, “Tell me what to create and I’ll create it. Don’t ask me if it is the best way to do it.”

Team Player

All developers work as part of a team, whether it’s with paired programming or a large project. You need to contribute to the team’s objectives and goals. Help mentor junior members along the way or assist struggling members in overcoming their hurdles. Don’t have an “I’m just here to do my job and then go home” attitude. Be part of the team. You don’t have to make silly jokes to become “team clown” or always go out on team events but be a team player.

Self-Learning

This is a very important skill to have; the ability to acquire new skills on your own time. Do not always wait for the company to provide you with training. You need to go out there and learn new technologies and advance in your field. From front-end development to architecture patterns, there is always something new happening. Read blogs and articles and try to join local meet-up groups. What you learn can open up new vertices for your career.

This blog post was not supposed to be this long, but the aim was to tailor it to be useful for aspiring developers — or even veterans.

Drop me a line if you want to have a quick chat or join me on one of my courses to develop your technical skills.

Credit: Techtarget

ShoutOutPlay is a mobile app built with NativeScript that lets users record personal dedications and attach them to music tracks that play in Spotify. In this podcast, developer and ShoutOutPlay creator Nathan Walker discusses his choice of NativeScript for cross-platform app development to yield native iOS and Android apps from a single code base. He also explains how the app links and syncs with Spotify and shares what he learned and how it can benefit other developers of cloud-based mobile apps.

To use ShoutOutPlay, users record a message (called a shout out), attach it to any track from Spotify and add it to a playlist. As the song plays, its volume drops and the shout out is mixed in and heard clearly. After the shout out plays, the song resumes playing at its normal volume. Frivolous fun, perhaps, but dead serious when it comes to application development.

“ShoutOutPlay could not have been built on the web,” says Walker, “because it uses Spotify, which allows only 30-second previews of tracks on the web. I had to use the native SDK in order to integrate with Spotify.” The app was built as a test using the NativeScript cross-platform app development framework.

Walker’s day job is as a senior software engineer at Infowrap in Portland, Ore. Infowrap is a software as a service application that allows users working on projects to collect, organize and share different kinds of content with other collaborators. Walker is investigating using NativeScript’s cross-platform app development capabilities in future versions of Infowrap.

Link and sync

The first step to using the ShoutOutPlay app is recording the shout out greeting as an .M4A file on an iOS or Android device. The second step is more complex — linking the separate shout out and music files together. To do that, another tool is required.

“I integrated [Google] Firebase into this NativeScript application,” says Walker. Each shout out is recorded locally on the phone and then synced and backed up to a Firebase database. Walker called an API from Spotify to access the streaming service’s full music player.

The choice of NativeScript as a cross-platform app development platform came about as Infowrap researched moving its platform from a hybrid Apache Cordova app to a true native app, Walker says. “I was trying to find something where we didn’t have a pure Objective-C or Java app because of the time involved.”

As an experiment, Walker wrote several plug-ins in NativeScript that found their way into production. ShoutOutPlay uses 16 plug-ins, all of which passed app store scrutiny from Apple and Google. Only one issue popped up: Spotify’s spotty support for IPv6.

Ultimately, Walker chose NativeScript because developers can write both iOS and Android UIs with one single, concise XLM language, he says. “If you have ever looked at an Apple app versus an Android app and looked at the UI construction, they’re not the same at all.”

In the remainder of this podcast, Walker discusses using NativeScript to leverage Angular 2, avoiding Objective-C and Java code and sticking with JavaScript. He also comments on the profound changes wrought by Angular 2 compared with its predecessor, including its ability to be used with multiple platforms.

The ShoutOutPlay mobile app is available in the Apple App Storeand on Google Play.

Credit: Dzone.com

How’s your career going? how do you think it’ll go? Read on for some tips to help prepare yourself for the future.

So… quick but powerful question: What’s the future of software development?

A lot of people ask me about the future of software development. What the future holds for software development and for new and old programmers? Are there going to be new programming jobs in the future? Are there going to be new and exciting job creations when it comes to software development?

All those things really need to be discussed because we really don’t know how things will turn out in the future. So, what is it going to be? How are we going to face these changes in software development?

Watch this video and find out!

The Java Zone is brought to you in partnership with ZeroTurnaround. Check out this 8-step guide to see how you can increase your productivity by skipping slow application redeploys and by implementing application profiling, as you code!

Credit: NDTV

Media reports about the demise of the Indian software industry are grossly exaggerated and very premature.

Let us take stock of the situation today. The Indian software export industry is about $110 billion. It employs around 4.25 million people. It has a 60 per cent market share of global outsourcing and is globally dominant. Of the 10 top software service companies globally ranked by market cap, five are Indian. Of the top five, three are Indian. All of them have a massive presence in India. Of the total number of employees, amounting to nearly 2 million, in these top 10 companies, about 70 per cent are based in India or travel out of India. The Indian offshore software industry dominates the software services world and has no parallel.

Concern has been expressed by certain observers saying that the software industry died on Friday after a short battle with digital technologies. If you look around, only one company has done well in the last one year, and that is Accenture. This is primarily because Accenture engages in enterprise transformation and at a pan-project level. With no proprietary technology to support, unlike an IBM, it is not tied down to specific solution sets, and so it has a lot more lateral flexibility than most other companies in its space. However, this does not imply that every other large company in this space is doomed.

At a time when the developed world is growing between 1.5 to 2 per cent a year, this globally competitive industry is growing between 7 to 9 per cent, more than three times OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) growth, and with most of its business coming from there! Despite Brexit, the banking crisis, and the threat of increasing federal interest rates, this is certainly an extraordinary achievement by any standard, especially when the industry has become massive and a universe in and of itself. When an industry is this large, it begins to reflect the growth of the economy and to grow 3/4 times the rate of economic growth is a significant achievement. To believe that a large industry can grow at 20/25 per cent a year in services with very low inflation is an unrealistic expectation.

Some commentators have stated gleefully that the end of the industry came when the business stalled in the last quarter and because they were unable to adopt a new stack of digital technologies. These all-knowing commentators seemed to lack a fundamental understanding of the industry because they made statements that the Indian industry would not have tanked if we had been able to embrace SMAC or Social Mobile Analytics and Cloud-based technologies early. The Indian industry has done very well on the legacy side of IT services. Web-based technology, which was cutting-edge not so long ago, is also now legacy! Indian IT also has a growing practice in SMAC.

While clearly dominating the global legacy segment, in the newer segments like SMAC, there is still plenty to be achieved. There are too many smaller players locally available across developed markets, while a few bigger players have also emerged. SMAC is certainly going to grow because it is all-pervasive and it permeates all technologies and most of the solutions have become horizontals. This is a natural evolution of the internet economy.

When the internet first burst forth, smaller companies in the United States enjoyed high valuations, took the lead, and then soon after that the Indian IT companies grew and took over in a very large substantial manner. Similarly, in SMAC, the Indian companies are now growing their skills, talking to their customers and evolving their practices. SMAC is permeating the entire offering across services, and in two or three years, SMAC will become the new horizontal layer.

Yes, in the last two quarters, growth has stalled – especially for the larger companies. But when you are an 18 billion dollar company with more than 370,000 employees, you are global, and you are growing at 6 to 7 per cent, in most countries of the world, they will applaud you for still creating jobs and for still growing. If you are a 10 billion dollar corporation working globally and growing at 7 to 9 per cent, and enjoying profit margins in excess of 20 per cent and generating free cash flows when the world’s growth is so slow, in most countries of the world, people will applaud you and buy your stock.
What is happening to the IT industry in India is a mismatch between people’s expectations of high growth on a very high base and the hostile external environment with rapid technological change. Certainly, the growth rates of the past are no longer feasible, and most of the large global IT service companies will grow in the range of an estimated 2 to 10 per cent. The Indian offshore players might grow at rates in the range of 7 to 10 per cent. One must understand that the growth in revenues of 7 to 9 per cent with an offshore model actually implies a growth of 11 to 13 per cent on a comparative basis for a purely onsite oriented company, in terms of hours that are actually utilized and billed. The use of revenues alone to map the growth of Indian IT is not the right measure, and neither is it right to compare the growth rates with companies in the West which are more or less local companies with local practices. The total hours billed is the pre-eminent parameter when the billing rates can vary from an offshore rate of 20-24 dollars an hour to an onsite rate of 70-90 dollars an hour for the same kind of work.

As far as technology is concerned, such shifts have happened before and Indian companies have done very well when faced with change since they have a younger and more trainable workforce and are much responsible with costs. They are the only companies that can handle the entire gamut of technology work in large global enterprises from main frames, AS 400, Cobol, UNIX, and C++, to web-based technologies and now SMAC. You will be truly surprised by how large these legacy systems are, and how much of the world’s largest economies still rely on them. The total installed base of software on which global corporations operate is around $4 trillion, and this is not going to disappear tomorrow. Yes, the nature of work will slowly evolve, as it has often over the last 20 years, but Indian IT companies will understand this evolution and will manage the change.

At the end of it, Indian offshore companies are poised to assimilate new technologies. As when the internet economy first burst onto the scene, these companies are slightly behind the curve because they are still handling large complex systems. However, the skill levels here are tremendous, the management is extremely robust, the quantum of cash on the balance sheet is gargantuan, and they control high market caps that allow them to make acquisitions. This will make sure they continue to dominate the industry for at least the next 3 to 5 years.

All talk of demise based on a quarter or based upon a lower growth rate are figments of overactive imaginations.

(Mohandas Pai was the CFO and then the head of HR at Infosys. He is now Chairman, Aarin Capital Partners.)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

Disclosure: Mohandas Pai is an investor in NDTV Convergence’s e-commerce site, smartcooky.com

Behind every great product, there is a great man or woman. Ditto for the programming languages. Each programming language was developed by a man/woman who sought to think different. Some made it to the top of the charts while other fell by wayside.

Here are the top 10 programming languages and their inventors :

1) Java – James Gosling

Java is one of the most popular programming language making to the top of the charts for six years running. Java was invented by Dr. James Arthur Gosling who is also known as the father of the Java programming language. Dr.Gosling developed Java when he was working for Sun Microsystems between 1984 and 2010. Before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multiprocessor version of Unix for a 16-way computer system while at Carnegie Mellon University

2) C – Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, an American computer scientist, created the famous C programming language between 1967 and 1973 while working AT&T Bell labs. Though it is past its heydays, C is still very popular and used extensively in system programming. It’s older than Java but is still popular among old programmers. The C Programming Language is also referred to as K&R C, after its authors and Ritchie was the “R” in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr.

Dennis Ritchie is also credited for the creation of world famous UNIX operating system  with his long-time colleague Ken Thompson. Though not as popular as Microsoft’s Bill Gates or Apple’s Steve Jobs, he is known as the doyen of programming. In fact, he was in news recently when tech celebs wrongly tweeted his obit despite the fact that he died 5 years ago in 2011.

3) C++ – Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup is the inventor of famous C++ programming language. He was born on 30 December 1950 in Aarhus, Denmark and most noted for the creation and the development of the widely-used C++ programming language. Stroustrup has a master’s degree in computer science (1975) from Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Ph.D. in computer science (1979) from the University of Cambridge, England. His thesis advisor at Cambridge was David Wheeler

4) Python – Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum, born 31 January 1956 is a Dutch programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a “Benevolent Dictator For Life” (BDFL), meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary.

Python is the favorite language of hackers, security researchers, and pentesters because of its structural stability and usefulness in developing exploits and tools. Hackers like it because its syntax is clear and expressive. Python is designed by Guido van Rossum of CWI. You can learn Python with a single image here.

5) PHP – Rasmus Lerdorf

Rasmus Lerdorf (born 22 November 1968) is a Greenlandic-Danish programmer. He created the PHP scripting language, authoring the first two versions of the language and participated in the development of later versions led by a group of developers including Jim Winstead (who later created blo.gs), Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski. He continues to contribute to the project.

PHP is not considered as a programming language but it is used extensively to power the web. PHP was originally created by Lerdorf in 1995. The main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the formal reference to the PHP language. PHP is open source and used by internet giants like Facebook and Wikipedia as well as for CMS like WordPress and Joomla. The full form of PHP is Personal Home Page.

6) Perl – Larry Wall

Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a computer programmer and author, most widely known as the creator of the general-purpose, and dynamic programming language. Perl rose to fame because of its excellent text processing capability. It is still the primary language used to develop reports, scripts on UNIX systems.

Besides Perl, Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the widely used patch program. Wall developed the Perl interpreter and language while working for System Development Corporation, which later became part of Unisys. He is the co-author of Programming Perl (often referred to as the Camel Book and published by O’Reilly), which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers; and edited the Perl Cookbook. He then became employed full-time by O’Reilly Media to further develop Perl and write books on the subject.

7) JavaScript – Brendan Eich

Brendan Eich (born 1961) is an American technologist and creator of the JavaScript programming language. Besides inventing JavaScript, Eich also co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and served as the Mozilla Corporation’s chief technical officer and briefly its chief executive officer.

Purists would hate if I call JavaScript a programming language but it has been immensely popular for its wide range of applications. The best feature of JavaScript is its immense libraries like jQuery and node.js. JavaScript was designed by Brendan Eich and developed by Netscape Communications Corporation to power Netscape Navigator web browser. Having originally joined intending to put Scheme “in the browser”, Eich was instead commissioned to create a new language that resembled Java, JavaScript for the Netscape Navigator Web browser

8) Ruby – Yukihiro Matsumoto

Ruby was first designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in Japan. Besides being the chief designer of the Ruby programming language he also developed its reference implementation, Matz’s Ruby Interpreter (MRI). His demeanor has brought about a motto in the Ruby community: “Matz is nice and so we are nice,” commonly abbreviated as MINASWAN.

Ruby is influenced by Perl, Ada, Lisp and Smalltalk and designed for productive and enjoyable programming. Ruby is mostly used for web application development and used by major websites like Twitter, Hulu and Groupon.

9) Lisp – John McCarthy

John McCarthy is credited with developing the second oldest high-level programming language, Lisp. Lisp stands for List processor.

Besides developing Lisp, he coined the now famous term “artificial intelligence” (AI). He also developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing, and was very influential in the early development of AI.

10) Pascal – Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing Pascal programming laanguage, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering.

Wirth was also the chief designer of the programming languages Euler, Algol W, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon, Oberon-2, and Oberon-07. He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the Lilith and Oberon operating systems, and for the Lola digital hardware design and simulation system.

Credits: Tech.co

Due to technology like Photoshop, jQuery and other related proficiencies, web designers’ skills have become a major concern nowadays. Becoming a leader in web designing arena is not a piece of cake for everybody: The process demands a hands-on grip on every step of the web design. The website designer is familiar with all the newest market trends and strives to bring innovation while developing more productive solution.

Helping people is our primary aim. Thus, this post holds all the useful tips that can help you become a successful web designer, if you manage to master all of them. Let’s proceed with the handy website designer tips:

Photoshop

As the most demanded option for the designers, Photoshop has been utilized for many years now. Many expert front-end developers being acquainted with this software program know thoroughly that how to play with it to extract the utmost graphics from the number of PSD files. The execution of different tasks with Photoshop has become simpler and the credit goes to all 3rd party plugins who made it possible.

Start Designing With HTML/CSS Code

The designers acquainted with HTML & CSS code try to initiate designing process in the browser and this is all they do bypassing their Photoshop process. HTML design is needed for the coding. Before you tackle all that, you should know HTML & CSS basics.

CSS Frameworks

Some prominent frameworks like Foundation, Bootstrap, and other related frameworks can help you to attain expected results exact to the imaginations. These credible sources come up with numerous friendly features and advanced programs required to form the applications. Their presence in the web designing realm has proved to be the useful choice for the web designers especially when it comes to constructing applications.

Right Color Utilization

Never go with the copied color scheme which other designers have already used. A lot of research over the web is necessary to build the appreciable color schemes, so take some time and choose the best option to fulfill your project needs.

Go With Responsive

The responsive design or layout is also referred to as media queries, flexible images, and fluid grid. Hence, you must be aware of all these terms and what they actually represent to ensure the decision you have taken is actually right or not. Ultimately, responsive design offers a remarkable compatibility with almost all smart devices, their supported browsers, and platforms without losing the real existence of images or text. This is a needed approach these days to get more and more traffic, so avoiding it may take you closer to the risk.

Promoting Yourself Is Also Imperative

Now, the question is how to promote your business and which mediums will help you easily execute these tasks. We are here to help you know the right ways via this post, wherein we are going to explain a few indispensable yet effective things beneficial to promote yourself globally:

Add Portfolio

Adding this section to the website is exemplary in order to display the successfully accomplished work done in the past or recently. It’s good to show your proficiency across the world. If you haven’t dealt any great work in the past, then also you should continue thinking about it to insure that you are ready for all project handling needs, simple or complex.

Get Ready for Social Media

Social networking sites have a broad network these days. Hence, these are the perfect ways for the seekers to find relevant jobs exact to the expected demands. Regardless of social media platform, it’s better to confirm that the created profile over there is summarized, clean, and attention-grabbing so that viewer can easily impress and contact you soon.

Include Your Potential Clients

Almost all interested clients ask your previously achievements and work that you have successfully delivered. So, prepare a list of your reliable clients and add them to your site so that the new users can understand what kind of work you have completed in your past journey.

Conclusion
In the cutthroat digital world, technology is ever-evolving. Hence, any web designer should be familiar with all the latest changes and strive to learn new ones in order to remain ahead of the pack.

Credit: Livemint

What will the endgame look like? This question is probably keeping Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Amazon awake.

We have seen globally that e-commerce is a winner-takes-all market. Since there is little differentiation or customer loyalty, only one thing matters—discounts. For the most part at least. Which in turn boils down to “who has more money to give away”. That simple. The one who lasts longest wins. Everybody else loses, and likely does a fire sale.

In the past, Flipkart and Snapdeal were able to raise huge sums of money, presumably promising investors that Nirvana (aka breakeven) was just around the corner. However, despite the huge capital raises, we all knew that access to funds was not unlimited. Investors, howsoever optimistic, would’ve to be convinced that they will get an attractive return. There was no “I will back you till you win” scenario, and we were waiting to see who lasts longest.

All that changed with Amazon’s entry. It is not just that Amazon has access to large amounts of capital, which it certainly does. What changed is that the parent (Amazon.com Inc.) is willing to back its Indian entity till it wins. And that is the key point—“till it wins”. Not if it makes sense, but till it wins.

That changed the game totally. First, the new investors in Amazon’s competitors will find it much harder to convince themselves that they will be able to outlast Amazon. In other words, if you know you are going to lose, why even try?

That explains why Amazon.com Inc. keeps announcing that they are backing the Indian arm with billions of dollars. And that they will continue to do so. There is no other reason why Amazon would publicly announce its investment decisions. After all, US companies are known to be tight-lipped about their investment plans. So when Amazon said that it was investing $5 billion (in two recent announcements) in the Indian arm, it was not an innocuous thing. It was a message to investors in Amazon India rivals: stay away from investing or be doomed.

So is the goose for Flipkart and Snapdeal cooked? Well, things are rarely that simple in business. So here is an alternative end game: what if they manage to get an equally deep-pocketed investor who will invest till they win?

That is what makes the deal news of a potential investment by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in Flipkart so interesting. It is not just about the investment. It is about the signal you are sending: Flipkart will also fight till it wins.

Right now, this is speculation since we don’t know the status of a Walmart-Flipkart deal, and what the contours are. Is Flipkart going to be Walmart’s horse in the race against Amazon? We don’t know the answers, but we are pretty sure these are the thoughts in the minds of Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal.

This is what game theory is about: how you make moves in competitive situations where the outcome depends critically on your competitor’s moves. Here, signalling is just as critical as the actual action.

Walmart is quite familiar with these ideas. Here is an interesting example of how it uses these ideas. Walmart positions itself as a ‘low- cost’ player and would not like another player to sell cheaper. But it also wants to make profit. So, how can Walmart prevent competitors from pushing the prices down too far?

Any attempt to do that would appear unsavoury and be possibly illegal. It does that with its benign-looking “Price Matching Policy”, which states that Walmart.com will match the price of any online retailer. That removes any incentive for a competitor to try to be cheaper than Walmart. Ironically, this “low- cost promise” effectively prevents prices from sliding too much.

Will a savvy player like Walmart give unconditional backing to Flipkart? It’s hard to say. What happens in a scenario where it matches Amazon’s assertion that it is here to win? There is no clear endgame, as many scenarios are possible. At some point, if Amazon believes that the price of a scorched earth battle is too high, it might sue for peace and move to merge with Flipkart. If that happens, both parties will win.

But not everyone will be happy. What if the acquisition price causes losses to the more recent investors? How much say will they have? Will they prefer it to be a long-drawn battle.

It will be interesting to see how the e-commerce battle shapes up. In the interim, as consumers, you would be well-advised to make the best of the big sales being run by online retailers. The sale will last only till the money lasts. Or, as retailers like to say, “only till stocks last”.