Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The next big thing...

Some time ago, I managed to build up a sufficiently large ego as to think that I would be able to write a good accounting system from scratch.

I went ahead and started a project on Google Code called 'accsys'.

Soon after creating the project, I became overwhelmed with life and work - and my dream of a good, free, web based accounting system that would also be accessible through web services fell to the wayside.

Life and work have not calmed down since then - they have probably only gotten more hectic. But, I don't want to put off starting this any longer.

So, I'm not going to. Today marks the beginning of the design phase of my project. Over the next two weeks, I should have enough time to work out the general framework and the data structures for the first module (general ledger).

If you would like to keep up with the progress of my new baby - here is the URL of the project home page: http://code.google.com/p/accsys/

I will also make updates here to track my progress.

My last 'new favorite thing' of 2008...

I am not sure how long it will last, but I have a new favorite thing:

Stateful session EJBs (SFSBs)

I have been working with some fairly massive (and complex) data structures that I have been reloading from my database every time I needed to do a query or modification. And now, it looks like I may be able to stop doing this!

There will be some fairly radical changes necessary to really take advantage of SFSBs - but I am expecting the speed improvements to more than justify the work.

Yay! I like new toys.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Trying out new toys...

Up until now, I have been perfectly happy to only use stateless session beans in my application.

And, I have been able to do a lot of optimization to speed up the user's experience.

But, if I can avoid reloading large data structures every time the user is making a change to them - then that should be an additional (and possibly very large) speed boost.

Plus, I would be able to make changes to the data structure separate from the back end database without trying to cache it on the browser - which would be a nightmare!

So, I am finally going to try to use a stateful bean. If it works (if I manage to make it work) then I'll get to rewrite a -lot- of code to take advantage of stateful beans.

If it doesn't work, then at least I already have everything working with stateless.

Friday, December 19, 2008

OMDB!

I never mentioned it, but I did manage to do an initial stab at making an AppEngine version of my origami model diagram database (omdb).

For grins, you can try it out.

Here are the address formats to request information:
http://omdb.appspot.com/getDesigner?designerFirstName=&designerLastName=

http://omdb.appspot.com/getAuthor?authorFirstName=&authorLastName=

If you enter something that does not exist, then it creates it and adds back to the data store. If you have the record ID, then you can replace the names with designerID= or authorID= - respectively.

There are pages for origami models and books, but there is no nice way to find something unless you already know everything about it - not very useful yet.

This is harder than it looks...

I'm not sure where I got the idea that doing a blog would be easy.

I have enough 'life' going on, that there is no natural time for blogging.

So, I am going to try (or at least try to try) to do a minimal amount of blogging by forcing myself to enter -something- on a regular schedule. And then, if something noteworthy comes up, then I'll blog it as it comes up.