Bitsmith Workshop

NFJS presentation

ejwinter — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 01:40:31 +0000

On November 12 – 14th a few people in our group had the privileged of attending the NoFluffJustStuff conference in Minneapolis.

We picked up a lot of good information that will hopefully improve our project. In particular I was inspired by the Productive Programmer lectures by Neal Ford as well as the Domain Specific Language lecture. A big thrust of the conference was Agile development which is becoming just principles in good practice.

The other big points in the conference were Dynamic Languages and in particular Groovy had a big showing at the conference. I have been trying to pickup Groovy and am trying to make it work where we can. One shortcoming in the language so far is the terrible error messages that get produced when something happens in the bowels of the JVM.

Ted Neward gave a good keynote presentation on the power and popularity of VM languages (CRL and JVM) and the boost they are giving previously “academic” language features.

I am cheesed to check out Scala more especially when it picks up popularity and some backing. I think Groovy is a good place to start with dynamic languages on the JVM however and will start there. I already know Python fairly well but I don’t think Jython is a solid implementation currently. I hope it can catch up. I would like to see it skip right to Python 3.0 which is entering alpha stages.

Anyway we are presenting the NFJS conference for others in our department tomorrow. NFJS BMI Presentation is a link to the presentation.

Embarking on Spring

ejwinter — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 18:59:07 +0000

I am looking forward to start exploring the power of Spring. There are a number of issues that we have tried to solve in our current project that I think Spring would have helped us a lot. I think we may end up getting mad at ourselves for not looking at Spring sooner. I will write more as I learn more about Spring in the coming weeks.

In college I got my feet wet with the basics of Spring but now I will look at more of the specific features. For my presentation in college I focused on MVC, IoC, and a little AOP but I think there will be a lot more use looking at specific applications.

Of the most interest to me and our current project is:
- Security (Acegi)
- Messaging (JMS) – we currently use JMS for sending requests and getting responses from services. Unfortunately we currently do this by passing serialized objects around instead of a less coupled document centric approach.
- LDAP and JNDI – somewhat associated with Security but we are interested in doing more with LDAP and JNDI in general.
- Configuration – using Spring for configuration and dependency injection with bean properties

General Resume, October 2007

ejwinter — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:32:31 +0000

Here is a general purpose resume that is general enough for most positions. If you would like me to submit a resume for a more specific position please contact me and let me know.

Welcome

ejwinter — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:29:09 +0000

I have set this up as a Professional blog for my Software Design work. This was just setup in mid-October but I hope to post on some topics related to software development and engineering.