Ruby on Rails

A friend of mine asked me if I could develop a web based billing application for his VOIP business. I was immediately excited to acccept the project because it's been a long time that I was able to do web based application. Since moving here in Singapore, I've been doing a lot of AS/400 (COBOL, CLP) and Informatica stuffs, but never web based application which I really enjoyed during my stay on my previous company. Problem is, I can't use ASP.NET since we'll be using Linux. ( Yeah I know about mono and grasshopper, but I don't have any experience in deploying it in production environment). So I turned my attention to java. I used the JSP/Struts + Hibernate + MySQL for my development effort. Unfortunately, I'm good in java but I don't have any experience using Struts and Hibernate. In fairness both framework is very very good. Struts provides a strong foundation for MVC based web applications and also Hibernate provides a top class OR mapping facility. However both of them give me a very steep learning curve (specially struts). I find the configuration file very annoying. Too much distraction, I find myself shifting attention from my business logic to Hibernate config to Struts config to JSP tags to Tiles to javascripting to CSS ... to finally I gave up. It seems that I will not be able to finish my project if I continue doing this. Fortunately while I was browsing for some books looking for a good struts and hibernate books, I noticed this ruby on rails book "Agile Web development with Rails", I scan a few pages of the book and found out that this might me the solution I've been looking for. I bought it and read it for the whole day, looking for issues that I have encountered in my development and find how rails solved it. So I developed some portions of my code in rails and noticed that I could create most of those things easily in rails. The ruby language is easy to learn and the framework is very integrated and most of all it eliminates the usage of XML config files. Most of the time you concentrate on the main flow or logic of your program instead of other things. I think this is why rails is gaining popularity now, because of it's simplicity. Anyway, I have to continue my code now need to catch a deadline.

Run ASPX in Tomcat

Mainsoft, has developed a way for your asp.net pages to run in Apache Tomcat. Check out this site for additional information, and the best part is, it is free!!!

PEBCAC

//user authentication code hereFormsAuthentication.Initialize();
FormsAuthenticationTicket ticket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket(1,
uid.Text,
DateTime.Now,
DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(30),
true,
string.Empty,
FormsAuthentication.FormsCookiePath);
string encryptedTicket = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt( ticket );
HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie( FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName, encryptedTicket );
cookie.Expires = ticket.Expiration;
this.Page.Response.Cookies.Add (cookie);
this.Page.Response.Redirect("Default.aspx");
The above code used to work but just last week it provided wrong result. I was not able to login to Internet Explorer anymore, using a valid user name and password, however I could login to Firefox without any problems. In addition to that, not all computers in our department exhibit such behavior. There are computers that could login using IE but there are some that don't. I have check various websites for the issue and some says that WebUIValidation.js might be the culprit. I implemented the workarounds suggested but the problem persisted. After a couple more hours of debugging I've finally found the problem -- me.

Osiris Team

One of the most talented programming team I have a pleasure working with.

Moving out ...

After 7 years of loyalty and dedication to my Alma Mater which happened to be also my previous employer, I decided to move for good. It's been 7 good years, and it's a pain to finally leave something that you are closely attached with. I have learned a lot and enjoyed every moment in that place. Financial reasons finally forced me to decide to leave and work overseas. Right now I'm currently working in a big bank here in Singapore, but I will always treasure the memories of my first job. To the people at the University of Cebu MIS and Computer Science department, I miss you a lot guys!!! Keep up the good work and make our Alma Mater proud.