Work and Work

Work has been frustrating me lately. I work with some people who have big ideas and not that much technical knowledge. Well that isn't the problem more then I have been working on things for multiple departments (outside of my core area) and they seem to all keep coming up with ideas for their respective projects. My boss is a nice guy and likes to please everyone, but that is pushing me towards feature creep hell. Ok, I'm exaggerating, but if you have ever had a job in software development you know the feeling.

On a side note, I've been thinking more about the idea of my own software/web related business. I started looking into Code Igniter (codeigniter.com), which is an open source php framework that should help me save time in personal projects. Sure, I have a multitude of ideas, but getting that effort after work or on the weekends to actually accomplish something is difficult.

頑張るよ as they say in Japan (will try my best!).

Javascript Rant

I've been working on something recently where I decided to have most of the program run in a client's browser. It's basically a blog system that works with that asp- xml-to-access-db class I released on here as an LGPL piece of code. The clients browser sends/requests information in XML to the server script and everything turned out peachy. I'm overall extremely happy with it.

Now that I'm done writing the script. I learned quite a bit more about Javascript that I didn't know in the past. The initial few days of working with it were tragic. I'm not too fond of Javascript's "object" model and lack of a standard class model. While javascript works and provides a good deal of functionality, it feels "dirty." Maybe my fellow "old school" programmers can understand.

Besides the object model, the DOM in general is a pain to work with, and hard to find information about (that works in multiple browsers). Inconsistencies, things that logically should work don't, and, trying ~5 different suggested methods to do something, but finding out that only 1/ 5 seems to actually work.

If you don't agree with me, have you ever tried encapsulating XMLHttpRequest in a "class" object? There are a few gotchas that I stumbled on, which I hope to talk about in the future.

My tip of the day about Javascript: Objects are functions are objects can be variables with no data hiding what-so-ever...