javaiq.in - A playground for learning Java RIAs. I am planning to expose my experimental applications with GWT, JavaFx & Felx. I will also be creating applications mixing multiple open services from various vendors (Google,Yahoo, Amazon, eBay...) & create a combined value. I guess this is the area that has huge scope.
I created this site & made it public 2 months back. It was result of my experimenting with new techniques with sample applications/code snippets,I always felt that best way to sell any new technique is with real application. It's great to have useful apps while learning new technologies/framework,I hate to write throw away examples. I have been following web frameworks from past few years, I have spent large amount of time in validating/learning over the year. I am SWING programmer & was always trying out the samples from Internet/books. Learning (or Stealing) the good code snippets that I liked & thought of exposing them as useful apps. Having spent a considerable amount of time and energy with Swing, it was queasy feeling in my stomach to see all my Swing programming heroes (Like Chet, Romain Guy...) either have gone to Adobe/Google or have moved to JavaFx/Flex way. I have also lost faith in Swing. I don't expect to develop new pure Swing apps any more, but I guess I was able to grasp GWT, Echo, Wicket frameworks much better than any pure web MVC framework (Struts, Spring MVC...) developers who were not having exposure to swing. I guess that's the advantage still I can leverage.
Chasing entrepreneurship dream- "When you are not into inheriting money and because you do not belong to a rich family and when you aren’t an individual blessed with the talent of a sportsperson or an actor, the next best thing to do is to become an entrepreneur" - Anand Morzaria
A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do - Bob Dylan
Now experts say it has become relatively cheaper to start a new web application or a startup. Moore's law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages & techniques are making development teams smaller & powerful. But actual life it is not that simpler, especially if you are fighting a lone battle.
It's really pretty time consuming process to create & manage applications. I went with cheap shared Java hosting which was unable to run my "stripes" web framework based application & no one was there to help me out by providing tomcat logs & I had to settle with few JSPs with trimmed version. It's pretty costly affair to run java apps in a proper manner. It's big road blocker if anybody wants to develop/expose web applications in java today. Sun has to fix this problem (shared hosting) if it wants to replace PHP/Ruby On Rails apps in small scale applications. (I will have separate notes with java hosting) Enthusiasm to code is very hard to maintain, actually I wrote most of the applications in a few days, but was difficult to keep the momentum. Perseverance, relentless resourcefulness (as paul graham calls it) is difficult to achieve without full time dedication. Anyway it was good exercise to know all these limitations.
If I look back, I seriously doubt my spending of countless hours in browsing blogs, learning 10s of java web frameworks has significant impact on carrying out my day today work or think better. In fact my guess is I have wasted >30% of total time spent in gleaning through useless/marketing literature links. Hopefully from now on I will be able channelize all my energy in building better context for my day today work rather than learning all java web frameworks under the Sun. BTW all my web framework heroes (Wicket, Appfuse, Stripes, Tapestry...) that I have been following from past one year are apparently looking for jobs themselves & are investing time in using Groovy, Scala & Clojure. :-( not really a happy situation. I guess innovation with pure java in this space has reached dead end. Now I want to to learn/invest more on my current work so that I can become better at what I am doing currently, that's my priority #1 & I will resist experimenting with what blog writers say on latest technologies. One of the trouble I had disclosing this site was public embarrassment! of people knowing that I created this half baked application that I hesitated to own. But now it's quite decent set of useful applications that I started as my week-end project & I have good ideas to make it still better & this will be always my low priority work & also make sure to extract the best out of I am currently working on.Oh! Now I can call myself CTO of javaiq. nice feeling. :-)
