float on alright
August 26th, 2004 by boon
Today is quite relaxing. I’m trying to build the user-rights configuration module for the web application I’m working on. I’ll fill in a few details of what I do at work.
At the moment, I’m working for Unified Communications, a telecommunications solutions provider. Some of the products we have sold to our clients are Calling Card platforms, Leased Call Routing platforms, SMS gateways, platforms for value-added services such as the location-based service, personal ring back tones, and so on.
I was initially hired as an ad hoc programmer, unlike programmers who have a specific product or technology focus. Usually, I was sent in to support new features and enhancements on our ever-growing calling card subscriber platform, which is many years old. So, I took to ASP/VB quite quickly and didn’t enjoy the process, wondering why large scale applications are ever based on visual basic, but anyway.
A year passed and I got involved with some different projects, including one IVR product bought by Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, which put me in Singapore for a week. A short stint, but good for a change.
After my immediate boss left the company for good around June 2003, I was placed under a supervisor temporarily as the applications department went through a transitionary period. It was this time where I got to hate the legacy code of the calling card subscriber platform a lot. I tried to put in a lot of fresh ideas of using COM objects to simplify business processing, rather than rely on the repetitive development of cut-and-paste web scripts that looks like a kudzu forest, by now.
The result of that is that I now hate COM programming in VB. I am thankful to my previous boss who let me do the Singapore MHA project in ASP.NET/VB.NET, even though I had no previous experience in ASP.NET/VB.NET. I’m quite happy to say that the product has not returned to nip at me for bug fixes. Maybe it just hasn’t been used.
I was later called in by the department head to refocus my attention towards open-source, quoting Java, MySQL, Tomcat and so on. At the time, there were very few developers in my department who did Java development, though there were a few folks like me who had previous experience in it. He placed me in the team responsible for building the new calling card subscriber platform, and I spent time researching on various web frameworks and technologies and patterns for web applications using Java. This led me to eventually adopting a core framework using Struts and Hibernate, both of which are independent of each other.
I had no more than started development on a few modules, when I was pulled into the Missed Call Alert project to build the frontend of the product, and subsequently sent to Thailand with my 2 colleagues to deploy the thing. So, I put the framework to the test on a product that was going to go live in 2 months. I’m quite pleased with the results, I must say.
Thanks to message resources, because it makes my life easier when I want to edit label messages. Thanks to Struts controllers, giving me separation of view and processing. Thanks to Struts-layout for less lines of code and a formidable tool to build the interface, which meant I seldom had to deal with HTML and JSP cut and paste kudzu code. Thanks to Java for all that OOP goodness. Thanks to Eclipse for a superb IDE… I don’t even have to think twice about what Java IDE to use now. Thanks to CVS, for the great and popular file versioning and code repository system. Thanks to CSS, for a wonderful way not to have my style code in HTML anymore. Thanks to J2EE Best Practices and Patterns for giving me great ideas of how things should work and where they should go.
There’s more, but I refrain.