Crazy Lately

Things have been really hairy at work lately. I haven't had much chance to write. Here's what I've been up to.

JCAPS

One of my goals this year has been to make JCAPS more usable. A tall order indeed. I'm going to hit on the details of some of these items in later posts, but here's a bullet list of some of the issues I've been working through.
  • My organization uses some non-standard x12 EDI messages. The way to get JCAPS to process these messages is by creating an OTD from an SEF file. I had no luck finding someone to help me create such a file and there are surprisingly few Java libraries that support these x12 messages. I wound up writing my own parser. It works pretty well and can be extended to support other message types.
  • I've developed an approach that provides an automated way to test my JCAPS collaborations using JUnit. I'll describe this approach in future posts.
  • The company I'm working for has a change control process that is completely foreign to me. I'm even questioning if it is an actual change control process. I'll describe this approach in a future post, what I perceive to be it's shortcomings, and describe how I think it should work.

Podcatcher

Lately, my free time has been pretty busy as well. I haven't made any progress on the podcatcher lately. I have decided to code the podcatcher in Java, using the prebuilt Netbeans plugins to create the user interface. Once I get something working, I'm going to pick up a copy of Filthy Rich Clients to dress up the interface. From a purely academic standpoint, I wanted to use Ruby and Air to get experience with these technologies. On the other hand, I want the tool to be usable. I think that given the unknowns and "newness" in creating a client-side UI in either Ruby or Air technologies, the Java approach is a safer bet.

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