Independent Software Consultant

As of October 2009 I am (drum roll) an Independent Software Consultant. The "Independent" part is because I am not attached to any particular business entity and I will be marketing my skills as an individual. See my website at www.rogerdiller.com. I have chosen the independent route mainly because I am a full-time student... it's just not possible to hold down a full-time position and still have adequate time to study. I don't know exactly what route I'll take after finishing my degree... it depends on a variety of factors.

As far as work, I have had the privilege of working with some great new clients in the last couple months and have been expanding my skillset much to my delight! :-) Most of my new work in the last couple months has involved the ZK Ajax Framework. Of course I am very pleased being that I am a big supported of ZK (when is the world going to wake up to ZK?!). Here are some new things that I have been delving into: Web services (Axis2,GroovyWS), Spring, and ZK Web Flow.

School (WGU) has been going great as well. I love the competency based model of WGU. I am able to simply study the areas that I am not as familiar with and upon passing some pre-assessment exams I can take the final exam and move on. Currently I am scheduled to take my first 2 exams next week. Hopefully all goes well. :-)

Overall I have more than enough to do. Between juggling projects and studying as much as possibly there sure is plenty to do.

ZK & AJP

Wow so I haven't posted in like forever... so much has happened since I last posted... so much saweet new technology learned... it's just to bad I haven't captured all that on here. So one of the saweetest technologies I've been learning recently is the ZK Ajax Framework... if you never heard of it at least check it out!! www.zkoss.org. It makes building dynamic web pages so cool. Primarily it's a presentation layer technology... what Swing is for Desktop J2SE apps, ZK is for J2EE web apps. You can bind ZK components to your Beans very easily, fetch data dynamically as needed, etc. All the server communication is transparent to the developer... you don't have to worry about ANY server communication stuff. Anyway so we are developing an application with this technology and therefore needed a container to run it in. To make a long story short we ended up using Apache webserver & Tomcat together using the AJP protocol. I spent all day today getting it all figured out (trust me it's no walk in the park) but I successfully got Apache & Tomcat working together!! Yah!!

Update: I believe I used this document to get things configured... hopefully that helps.