Spring and Hibernate make Java web application development so much easier I barely remember what I did without them. Despite the steep learning curve, Hibernate especially so, they work so well together thanks to Spring. Spring is probably the most “open” open source framework out there for Java. It can and will play nice with tons of other frameworks like Tiles, SiteMesh, Velocity, JSF, as well as backend technologies like iBatis, Hibernate, ACEGI, and countless others.
I have begun to like them so much at the office that I am using it a home in all of my side projects. This blog will hopefully shed some light on some of these technologies to hopefully give back. Blogs like this are especially important because although these frameworks aren’t relatively new, there can be some holes in the documentation. Two books that helped me through my trouble were Matt Raible’s book “Spring Live!” and “Hibernate in Action”
After years of having the same logo that I made when I was 17 I finally decided on something interesting fitting. It only took me 5 years to figure it out. Well here it is.
I created this way back in Junior year of college for a class in which I was doing somewhat mediocre due to my lack in the introductory level discussions. Yea, yea. Anywho, I’ve been tuning and tweaking it on a off over time, but here it is. Please dont sue me for the use of copyrighted works. It was for school.
(click image to view)
A friend of my was attempting to open a wine bar which unfortunately never got opened. In the short time we worked together we went through several iterations but never came to a conclusion. He had a hard time time deciding whether he wanted something modern, traditional or somewhere in between. So, what I try and do with my clients is attempt to jog their thought process. This happens often.
This is the final Flash thing that I made for my site. I am not sure why I carried on so long. I guess its because Flash was, at the time, the “flashiest” way to get your message across. I gotta say, it got me some business but its pretty out of date. Nevertheless, is some of my better work and it took many long hours to produce.
(click image to view)
While digging through all my old files to try and create this blog I came across this Flash site I never launched. I remember when all the Flash buzzed died I decided to tone down my site but I guess I never got around to launching it.
(click the image to view)
When I was a Sophomore in college my guidance counselor contacted me for a job. Turned out to be a pretty cool gig and I learned a lot, not just about Flash, but consulting with a larger firm. This was definitely one of my better experiences and they were very sure on what they wanted which is very rare in the consulting business. It took me a total of about 100 hours which is pretty good considering its size. I’d love to do another one but I just dont have the time.
This is one of my first Flash works and I am still very proud of it. Its always hard to create something usable while your learning it for the first time. Flash is very powerful, yet convoluted language involving multiple events at different points in time. Now that I have moved more in the way of engineering I am going to start to learn Flex.
(Click the image to view)
Lucky for me, I have saved a lot of my work from the past to help remind me of who I was and what I have learned since then. So what did this teach me? Hmm.. that I should probably stick to architecture and engineering 
.
I created this in my e-commerce class for the Governor’s Institute of Vermont. It was a fully case study involving 3 of my other peers. Outside of engineering projects with friends this is the first business-like environment that I was exposed to. It was a great experience and definitely helped me to prepare for the workplace. Unfortunately the site never got launched but here is a working version.
This is also the first larger scale application I have written. I hand rolled a CMS using PHP and MySQL. If I had known more about open source then I probably wouldnt have started from scratch but nevertheless a good experience.
(click the image to view)