It has been crazy busy at work the past few weeks.  Today was the deadline for my current project to go to QA for testing and about two weeks ago I thought we where is deep trouble.  I think most of the team was doing a good job getting their pieces done and getting the back end framework functional.

This is the first Spring application for everyone on this project except me.  I got the pleasure of building of the configuration files, setting up the transaction management and being the one person everyone went to when they had a "Spring problem".  We also made the change to use Spring's Mapped Queries utilities so I got to create a few examples classes for everyone to model their implementation off of.  Really we had very few snags setting up Spring and most ended up dealing with setting up class paths for running junits and working with Websphere's JTA transaction manager. 

I decided to give Spring 2.0's transaction management AOP syntax a try for this project was pleasantly impressed.  In the previous version of Spring I used to have to wrap several lines of XML around a bean definition but in 2.0 that is all replaced with some simple point cut definitions.  All the save% and update% methods under our services page are now transactional.  We have two special cases where we don't use save or update to prefix a transactional method but this implementation works well for us.

If learning Spring was not enough we also decided to build the application using JSF.  Since none of use had any real JSF experience we brought in a contractor to help us through the process.  He is a user interface savant so the transition to JSF has been significantly smoothed for us.  I tend to have a love/hate relationship with JSF.  By using RichFaces and Ajax4Jsf we have been able to create a rich UI that is very impressive.  JSF give the developer a lot of control over web operations which is really nice to have.  It does get to be a bit much when you have to convert your data objects into something the component classes can handle.

My last to weeks have been spent integrating a rules engine and custom functionality that was built for a servlet based web application.  The vendor, Yasu Technologies, built us a prototype that presented the data we wanted and handled our wizard approach to setting up a client.  I got the fun of taking their custom code and doing my best to abstract that code into its own java service in a separate project module.  I had some basic functionality completed a couple weeks ago but it was by no mean integrated with the application we where delivering and needed several different interactions to be implemented.  Well it's funny how things just seem to get completed just in the nick of time.  I still need to fix some issues but I now have the major functionality completed.

I do get a break from having any deliverables for phase 2 of this application but I still have work to do.  We do not have any automation in place here for builds or testing.  I'm going to learn Maven and get a nightly build process created.  I also have to start working on the third phase of this application.  We need to create an admin version of this application that will run on the same websphere node and point to a different rules repository.