Simon is a hands-on software architect and a senior consultant at 
Too busy to blog!
Wow, it's been a busy few weeks since I got back from holiday towards the end of last month. Work is proving to be pretty hectic at the moment, both back at the office and on the client site where I'm working. With the end of year approaching, it's appraisal time at Evolution and an early morning start was needed to ensure appraisals were performed for the group I manage, in order that they were represented at our annual promotion/bonus/salary review meeting (again, another early start!). You might have read about the Evolution/Detica deal that was announced recently and, coupled with the regular Evolution information exchange meeting, there have been a few late nights (i.e. last train home) to compliment the early mornings! Another late night can be attributed to the architecture summit (I'll blog about this soon) and the rest can basically be put down to the client work that I'm doing. We're building an n-tier, distributed SOA system (J2EE web application -> enterprise service bus -> database & legacy systems) and I've been busy contributing to the architecture and design, mentoring a team of architects, doing quality assurance, etc.
Other things include getting to the bottom of why the JavaRanch Radio server kept continually falling over (it was spam) and JavaOne 2006 submissions. My web application framework comparison is still moving forward and I have the following implementations that I need to write up : model 1 with JSTL, model 1 with JSP XML view, Struts, Stripes, WebWork with JSP, WebWork with Velocity and (almost) Karma.
On the Pebble front, thanks to everybody that's been raising feature requests and issues on JIRA. Pebble has taken a bit of a backseat recently but it's still very much on my mind. I'll save the details for another blog entry, but essentially I'm trying to decide where to take it next. The existing v1.9 codebase has been branched and I have a couple of slightly different v2.0 prototypes that I've been playing with. One features a new web framework with a simplified HTML/CSS layer, while the other uses Hibernate and a relational database for persistence. It's also worth mentioning that both make use of Java 5, JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 features. Ultimately, I want to make Pebble more scalable while retaining the reputation it has for ease of use/deployment. Feel free to get in touch if you are using Pebble and have thoughts/ideas on where you'd like to see it go.
So, while it's been a busy few weeks, I'm really looking forward to next week because I'm off to JavaPolis. I'll be there for both the University and the conference. All being well, I'm planning to blog a few entries here and there about the event. Stay tuned!
