A happy new year to all! May we all join in peace with the shared knowledge that for the next month we shall all be writing “20134″
The reason I put “Vacation” in quotes like that, is that when you are the sole coder on a project of your own devising for your own release for your own product for your own (intended) revenue. The only think that delays said revenue is said sole coder. So you find yourself working even when you say you won’t.
This week was predominantly learning Java and Servlets. I would be a fool to say that I’ve learnt it all. But, I seem to now have enough under my belt that I am successfully using Eclipse, making a minimal number of Syntax Errors per revision, pushing the class to the Tomcat server, and seeing the fruits of my work.
And what are said fruits?
Originally my client was pulling data from a JSON file that I belched out from a program that made the data than I entered by hand. This JSON file was a static resource that had to be kept up and verified with each data modification. This was a painful process.
Google-r Bruno Oliveira puts this very well: (click for a larger version)
When left to our own devices, we will try to simplify long and annoying process. We may do so through some even more annoying process, but the payoff is ginourmous.
Last week I had a monolithic JSON file with every bit of data in one place. This week, I now have a MySQL database with the data broken into different tables and a Tomcat Servlet, making the necessary calls to create only enough JSON data populate the view on the client. This is reduce some major overhead and going forwards will allow far better expandability, data management, and communications scaling.
Ain’t net tech awesome in the 2010s? This is so much better than trying to compress user level data into a few bits in a byte because you only had 400K to store your data and your BBS.
With the holidays, the usual entertainment segment of the blog has been on holiday. We do promise not one, but two post Sing Off wrap-ups. I’m pleased to announce that many of you really seemed to enjoy the Armchair Judge; so we’ll be bringing her on as permanently as she wishes to participate.
This is going to be short and sweet. But after a few days of being utterly distracted with other things on the blog and endless phone calls today; I got the live data from the server to show up in the app. It formats correctly and even sorts on the fly.
Well, it was bound to happen working on all the backend stuff today. Once I knew that I was reading the data in; today it was all about putting the data in a commonly accessible area; formatting the data for different calls; and then letting those calls bask in the glory of real data.