For the past few months, Yurie has been helping me out big time. The JLPT is looming around the corner, and with just 2 weeks left it's nice to know that I'm in a much better place than what I would have been without the help of my volunteer teacher. After a year and a half, she's returning back to Japan and so we had to have a little going away dinner.

Down we went to Guu Otoko-mae to dine on some gyuu tataki, gyuu tongue, salmon, maguro and avacado, satoimo and tons of other good stuff. We had a few drinks and a lot of good laughs, while doing some serious damage to the wallet (as is always the case with Guu). All in all, one of the few times where I've really gotten to relax and hang out with friends over the past few months. To Yurie, best of luck back in Saitama!

Its been much too long since the last time I posted. . .

Things have been busy but at a managable rate. The pressure to line up a job for graduation has been building as of late. Luckily the industry seems to be a tad bit more thirsty for new grads then it was before I left on my internship abroad. There's a new energy surrounding IT in vancouver (and down south) and with some luck I'll line up something sooner rather than later.

The information sessions have mostly come and gone for the first term. Apart from getting a good idea of what to expect at the companies, the info sessions are a great way to get a free meal. Sure its pizza or sandwiches, but for all the starving students out there, you can't beat it. . .

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.