Things have been very busy recently as Fall/Autumn usually is. October is the month of Birthdays, Halloween, visiting relatives and plenty of leaf clearing. November was the same except it had Thanksgiving and a bad cold and a trip to the Emergency Room thrown in for good measure. Also, I’ve been trying to complete my piece comparing the Seam and Spring Web Flow (SWF) frameworks, as well as finalizing my JTexture procedural texture library, and writing a Depthcharge clone in Java, all while trying to read the books I got for my birthday in October. Hopefully, the fruits of my labor will materialize here over the next few weeks or so.

My Seam vs. Spring Web Flow article has been almost complete for a while pending one or two final readings. It’s currently at 70+ pages in the PDF version and I’m down to a final read through before I put them out there. I’m hoping to put them out over the next week or so as time permits. I’ve also been getting some experience with docBook which,
while it is a neat tool, it can difficult to wrangle with.

I’ve also been reading Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch which is a cracking good read. Sometimes it’s easy to skip over the basics of a language, so it’s good to go back and really look at them with a professional eye and learn some really good tips that can have an effect throughout your code. For example, my procedural texture mapping framework will be undergoing some changes based on ideas I have read about in Effective Java, particularly Item 2, using a builder class instead of a complex constructor. Some of the texture classes have many parameters so I’ll switch over to something more manageable than 8 parameter constructors.

As Christmas is nearly upon us, I have shifted into my retro computing mode, where I start reminiscing about the days of computing long gone so I decided to write a quick game. I’m nearly finished writing a Depthcharge clone, and decided to make it a learning exercise. Rather than plan every detail out beforehand, I thought I would play it all by ear and see how easy it would be to refactor at a later date when I discovered my design mistakes. At some point I’ll document my findings.

Anyway, I’ll hopefully be getting a few posts up between now and the end of the year. I have some more projects I want to start looking at once I complete my current ones.