As most of us ready ourselves for the coming week after the holidays, I only think it fair to review what I have done and gained in this time and why my project have not been completed instead. After all it was the holidays and when on leave, one should take it and use it to the full. It's not as if it's something that you get every other month.
I used to focus a lot on Linux topics only and as a result my Java/coding skills stayed down there at the bottom. A friend of mine noticed that at some stage and suggested I try to focus on developing my coding. At first I did not want to believe him, but subconsciously my focus gradually shifted from Linux to Java. As a result I can see an improvement in my thinking and gaining experience as to use what when and where.
I took my books by storm and tried to review a lot of stuff that I already forgot. Google was a great friend too in helping me find the latest changes. Now I don't say everything is suddenly perfect, I just say that by reviewing my brain absorbs what it previously failed to do. Areas that needed serious attention were access modifiers, class and interface declaration as well as digging around into Factory Methods and Reflection.
While working on the Samsung Widget my knowledge on Factory Methods was taken care of and I learned about Reflection. The only problem is that one cannot use reflection in JavaScript and as a result GWT (Google Web Toolkit) uses a method called deferred binding whereby you can use types in your factory methods. I still need to understand GWT better, but that knowledge is coming in little by little.
Another little project that has seen the light is my PircBot based bot, BotMW, which doubles for a bot name and an acronym for "Best of the Mobile Web". Thumbtribe's slogan as well. :) My aim for BotMW is to create a news-bot for IRC that will later on integrate with the Thumbtribe's feed system. It's only to play around with for now, but if I receive the freedom to continue with this, I will surely like it! I think that there might be potential in reaching IRC members.
What I have done so far is to play around with the framework to figure out how everything works together. I also worked on a factoid functionality that let you add facts to a database and retrieve those facts, all by communicating with the bot on IRC. The reason for this was to see how one would go about implementing different systems/objects. That's what OOP is about right? So in the process I used PircBot as my bot framework, and JavaDB/Apache Derby for the database layer. I am using the Embedded mode so there is no need to set up the database!
While tinkering with the bot and JavaDB I came across JDO. I did not look into it that much yet, but in the nearby future I will get down and dirty JDO, JPA and ORM/DRM (Relational Mappers) like JPOX. It's a lot of information that comes all at once, but they are quite integrated and therefore I think it is just a win-win situation.
This morning I played around with Apache Log4J and it's something that will come in handy. I do not know much about it at this stage, but it seem to be something simple (or may it be that I gained a lot of knowledge?).
Come what may, 2010 already feels like a great year!
