No, I did not fall off the face of the earth, however...
it sure felt like it.
I just realized that I haven’t posted anything since Jan 17. Yep, that’s 3 months ago. Where did the time go? No excuse. Time to get back in the saddle.
Interestingly enough, what I have to say today is very close to what I said on Jan 17. I’m getting to upgrade Terracotta to 3.2.1 tonight for a client. Also with 3.2.1 comes Ehcache 2.0. The upgrade from 1.7 to 2.0 was fairly painless. To me, the coolest feature with 2.0 is write-through and write-behind caching with the CacheWriter. Unfortunately, we really didn’t have a good place in the application to use write-behind yet. However, I’ve got a couple of other ideas where it can be used, so I’m really looking forward to putting it to use.
I also signed up to get access to the Terracotta Cloud Tools. Within an hour, I had 4 instances of Terracotta running with 8 Jetty instances all running on an Amazon EC2 cluster. Wow. Let me say it again. Wow. Now my head is spinning on what I can build to leverage this. I’m also looking at doing the same thing on a “private” cloud running Eucalyptus. I do a lot of work with PCI, so using Amazon (or any other cloud providers) is still pretty much out of the question, but Eucalyptus is a great solution.
I’ve also been working a lot with Titanium Mobile from Appcelerator for iPhone and Android development. Until version 1.0 came out, it was not really what I looking for. However, once 1.0 GA dropped, I quickly realized that it was a force to be reckoned with. I was able to port about 90% of an existing iPhone application using Titanium in about 3 days. (It’s the last 10% that’s always the pain.) Titanium is definitely a great tool for quickly creating an iPhone app. I’m looking forward to creating a completely new app where I have little to no knowledge of the business and see how quickly I can create the app as compared to doing everything completely in native Objective C.
That brings up an interesting point. In Apple’s new TOS for OS 4, it appears that Titanium and other similar tools could be in question, at least for Apple platforms. To that I say, ok, that stinks, but for everything that I get with Titanium for Android and soon Blackberry, I really don’t care. If I have to write in native Objective C, I really don’t care. I’ve already taken the dive and learned the language, so I’m counting Titanium as another tool in the toolbox. Plus, if I wanted to get into cross platform desktop development for Windows, Mac and Linux, it’s available as well from Titanium as well in the same package.
I will state that I am a paying member of the Titanium Professional Edition at $199/month. For how long? For as long as I’m using the tool. I’m sure a number of the guys (especially the Android guys) are getting tired of seeing me open up support requests 🙂
Finally, for anyone in the Charlotte area, this coming Tuesday (and the 3rd Tuesday of every month) is the Charlotte iPhone Developers Meetup at the Ballantyne Panera at 7:00pm. If you are a developer or someone that wants to learn how to develop for the iPhone, iPod Touch and now, the iPad (no, I haven’t purchased one yet, but soon), come on out. There’s no cost for the meeting, but show some props for Panera and at least get a drink and one (or two) of their cookies.