dtan's blog

Just a few quick links for others who might be starting out with the Spring Framework

• Introduction to Lightweight Architecture
• Spring MVC Step By Step
• IBM Spring Series

You gotta love buzzwords. AJAX has been everywhere in the past year or so, and is undeniably an exciting technology with respect to user experience. Over the next few months I may finally get a chance to take it for a spin.

The project for this terms advanced software engineering course at UBC has landed us in the lap of the Spring Framework. We've decided to build a gaming system where people can meet and play games of Reversi for money. Of course this should be scalable and extensible enough to include different games (relying of course on an efficient decoupling of the modules). The problem of implementing a game through a web based interface is that we can't push data from the server to the client through HTTP. Instead we have to rely on a meta or javascript refresh to poll the server for data. This is where the benefit of AJAX comes in. We can poll based on the xmlhttprequest such that only parts of the interface are loaded; thus giving our app a little more spice in the chai. Luckily for us, there is already work being done that integrates well with the Spring Framework and J2EE.

Last Saturday marked the 25th anniversary of my birth. That sounds even older writing it than it does saying it. . .

To celebrate I was off to the doctors on the morning of the 17th. In the few days prior, what seemed to be a small lump on the back of my neck grew to be about the size of loonie in diameter. The pain from the pressure and inability to turn my next comfortably in either direction sent me to the doctors (with no MSP coverage at that!). Within a good second, the doctor waved it off as nothing more than a boil and then calmly took out the needle and knife. Getting sliced open was a first for me and not something I'll forward to ever going through again. Good times. . .

Well it arrived yesterday, just over a week since the release form was returned - a shiny new Ipod shuffle. Thanks Apple and RFD