HYPERAXE

I had been used to a lot of multi-tasking work as a developer, and I must say I enjoyed doing such things since it made me feel a lot more efficient if you are able to do a lot of things in the shortest time possible. Nevertheless, I had always been very careful not to overdo things since productivity also suffers if you tend to overwork or misprioritize on the current tasks at hand.

Just recently, I had this very challenging multi-tasking stint of learning a new programming language and a new web application framework, namely iPhone SDK for the new programming language and Google Web Toolkit for the new web application framework. Whew! When the tasks were given to me, I got excited knowing these are something new and exciting things to learn, and another addition to my arsenal of software development knowledge.

It’s funny that after I posted that I am not really into getting an iPhone that this task of learning to develop on it came. Learning the iPhone SDK isn’t really easy for me as a long time java developer. I had a bit of experience on C, C++, and C#, but developing on the iPhone requires me to learn a subset of C called Objective-C. This is actually the programming language of choice for the Mac OS or Cocoa  based development. I must say, that I still find things a bit confusing since I am still making a lot of adjustments on breaking away from the java coding conventions that I got used to for years of doing these stuffs. It may take me a while to actually dig more complex Objective-C or iPhone development, but hopefully I’ll get there when it’s time to go on formal development of our new product line.

On the other hand Google Web Toolkit, is not that hard to learn or understand since I had managed to play a bit with it since GWT 1.2. I just never got the chance to dig more into it, but nevertheless was able to know most of its concepts and API. Right now, I am using the latest release of GWT 1.5 and there are cool new features that made it more interesting since the last time I used it. One neat feature I found is the addition of generic RPC support. At least now, it’s a lot more easier to communicate with remote services and work with serializable objects. Another cool thing is the addition of different default themes, which allows you to make use of the default blue/light blue theme or the much darker black and gray UI theme. I am still trying to freshen up a bit with my UI skills on GWT, especially on the CSS side. I hate to admit it but I am really no UI expert since I had been working a lot with server-side or backend programming throughout my career, but I don’t think UI development would be a show stopper at this point.

Well, I just hope things would progress as required of me and right now, things are looking good.

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