Saturday, August 30, 2008

iPhone, Employee Module

So I got my iPhone a couple weeks ago and wow this thing lives up to all the hype!! There isn't much iPhone can't do... from surfing, music, video, GPS, fabulous email you name it has it! About the only thing I have a pick about is it needs a turn by turn navigation app (which is supposed to be coming). It does have a google map app so that will suffice for now. I amazed at the App Store.... there are just so many applications on there pretty much anything you could want! I give this phone 2 thumbs up!!

As far as work I'm rolling on the Employee module for the accounting system. It looks like it's gonna be a tough one to program. I think it's going to be more complicated than the rest of the application combined. I've started on the essentials... CRUD for an Employee. After quite a long time of part time programming on this I am full bore on this app all the way to end of the Employee module.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Lazy Fetching, Sequences, iPhone

So life is very busy right now at work... so many things to do, not enough people to do them. I've been working very hard on our Accounting system lately. I've largely gotten this application converted to Hibernate but there are still areas that need to be converted. One notable change this week was my strategy on handling hibernate sessions.... after realizing that I had to enable lazy fetching the question was how do I manage the sessions so that the data can be retrieved whenever needed? I decided to take the route of one session per panel and that seems to be working. It was a lot of work, all data action methods needed to be changed to accept a session parameter among tons of other changes. Another cool thing I did related to lazy fetching is that on Vendor/Customer list panels the the addresses and contacts are retrieved as the user scrolls down the table! This is achieved in the table model by setting the address & contact column values in the getValueAt method. Therefore only the displayed rows are set and then when the user scrolls the getValueAt method is called which sets the address/contact columns for the newly displayed rows. Very cool huh?

Another notable task this week was sequences.... I wrote a pretty complex method which gets the last reference number for a document, finds the last run of numbers in a String (the String can have any characters), increments this number, and then reinserts this number back into the String replacing the old number without misplacing any other characters.

I'm getting an iPhone this week y'all!! It shipped today and hopefully should arrive at the AT&T store on Saturday. I like my iPod touch but I'm looking forward to having an iPhone where I can get email, surf, etc from anywhere, make calls, you name it. The iPod touch is fun till you don't have wifi and then to it gets kinda useless.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Android Mobile Platform

Wow this Android platform has me really wound up... it seems like so far it would be the best platform to write a mobile application. Check out this link: http://www.developer.com/java/j2me/article.php/3763991. Of course what I like best about this platform is that it is written in Java. What I've always hated about writing applications in Java for higher end mobile (CDC) devices is the lack of support for Java. I've gotten Java applications to run on Windows Mobile 5 but the look and feel totally lacks and if you want to tap into native API's such as the GPS API it would be a real pain. With Android, Java would be the native language! Also there is no distinction between native applications and developer-created applications. They all have access to the same API's so if you didn't like the applications that came with it you could just build your own! I'll be watching this platform very closely!