Falling Behind
I have already fallen behind on my daily post, I am going to make this post the past 3 days in one. I have mainly been working on two things, .Net integration with coldfusion and a redesign of one of our pages using jQuery. As I move into the .net world I am seeing the advantages, you have much more control but with more control comes more responsibility.
Coldfusion handles things behind the scenes for you, which is nice for quick web programming, a lot of things are done for you. ASP .NET is moving that direction but also giving the greater control over the stuff that coldfusion does behind the scenes. Its definitely a balance, on one hand things are quick and easy and the more advanced stuff just works like you are told it does. In ASP however you can tear those more advanced things apart and make them your own. Working on this integration is really showing me both sides, Coldfusion is able to incorporate .Net functionality but through the use of java proxies. I don’t fully understand how it does what it does but I’m sure i will learn it as i go, so long as what you are doing is relatively simple its just something to use that is already done for you. The programmer I am working with on this project is a very advanced .NET programmer and the design he is using will give us the greatest flexibility but is also causing deployment issues. We are getting close to having it done but through much manual logging and testing. Such is life.
The jQuery redesign is going easily, an area where coldfusion excels is the ease of layout in my opinion. Being that it is a tag based language it just seems to flow much easier with the html and css basics. JQuery itself is a very powerful framework and thankfully widely used and will be included in ASP .NET MVC going forward. I am glad most of the work I am doing with it will translate over to ASP .NET as well, I will have to wait and see how easy it is to incorporate it with a much more advanced language with different layout methods. I am very impressed with what I have done with jQuery and am blown away by how much can be done with it. I will definitely continue to use it wherever I can.
Programming in general is a mental workout, so much is involved and planning plays a big part in it. Trying to design with future growth in mind while trying to accomplish the task in the best way is still something I have work to do in. I am learning bits and pieces here in there but there is a wealth of knowledge to absorb. As I have said I will try to do daily updates but sometimes I’m just to mentally exhausted to try and be creative in my posts.