Experiences (Reloaded)

Happy Birthday To Me! Just hit 25 ;-)

It's a long time I've not written anything here. Busy enough not to read any news or blog recently... I'd planned to write about many things I've had experienced but time didn't allow me ;-) Ah, I've really missed my Blog. Hard not to write or share any thought:
The long story about upgrading to recent XWork / WebWork / SiteMesh with all those changes had occured during these 3-4 months. It was a complete rewrite of the project with the whole test cases somehow related to WW/XW ;-) But fortunately there were many kind people who helped me to do this upgrade... Patrick, Jason, Mathias, Matt and Joe were one of those guys and I would like to thank them all for their great support. It was not all painful upgrading process as I learned a lot too and now I have better view of these great products! Specially I like the new unified validation framework of XWork as well as how WebWork is dealing with the UI [velocity] components and the new action method accessor ($action). Man! I was also going to prepare an upgrade tutorial for WW/XW/SM (and still in my todo list) and write all of the mentioned points plusmuch more there but frankly have got no free time yet.
Not to mention the Spring framework we've newly integrated into the project as our new lightweight container which is doing via IOC indeed :-) Nice, neat, simple yet powerful and flexible resource management/access as well as good implementation of IOC make it a layer with no overhead or obvious impact. Even no "Aware" interfaces like how XWork was dealing with... Once you applied Spring on your project, you can easily forget this layer as of being a super invisible one with no interface or even style forcing! All you have, are some XML configuration files describing the component graph and dependencies... Nothing More ;-)

As I'd mentioned in my previous postings, BluPlusPlus is my little skin for JAlbum which I'm working on as an entertainment and I love it! :-) Definitely I'm using it to make digital album of my photos here. Quite a lot of fun to eat from my own dog's food! Well, no need to mention the java based scripting language it's using - BeanShell and perhaps the main reason to keep me going on! It's a totally different experience.
The good news is that BluPlusPlus is not only the top most downloaded (around 2000 downloads so far) and the highest rated skin available on JRepository but recently has found the way to get pre-bundled with JAlbum. It has got a lot of attractions on open community too and officially a community is working on it (both on implementation part as well as the documentation!)... I could never imagine such a progress on day one I started it as it was totally a personal and entertainment project was being done in my spare time (if I could get any!).

Ahhh, I had lot of unwritten stuffs in my mind that I totally forgot my birthday and why I've started to write this post! Yes... it's the second of December and I've hit 25 which is hard to believe. Over the past year, I experienced many fundamental changes both in my private and business life :-) Most of them were positive hopefully and I'm happy with them! More friends as I've got involved in new communities and virtual places as well as the new company I started working for, better opportunities, more chances to learn and experience both in my technical and nontechnical lives, were all brilliant! And perhaps the best prize which could satisfied me although there is a long way to the ideal and the story still goes on and on and on..........

H A P P Y----B I R T H D A Y----T O----M E

Armond

Posted by armond at December 2, 2003 04:59 PM