I had a fairly interesting weekend. I started using IntelliJ for my java programming and I have found it to be as good if not better than netbeans or eclipse – both of which I find good. IntelliJ has superior syntax highlighting and code analysis and i think this sways things very much into its corner. I use ReSharper at work and these guys make it and its apparent in IntelliJ.

I’ve been working on my investment tracker application which was for a long time a project that I’d just wanted to get off the ground and it has thus far come together quite nicely. Its really a best practises approach to writing Spring web applications and I’ve used it to explore the many facets of the technology. It went stagnant for a while because I was finding the webflow work quite frustrating. I solve the problem this weekend and like a ricocheting bullet I’ve continued to progress. The one thing that was bother me is the updating of the entities in the applications – basically the ‘U’ in CRUD as this is a laborious process of creating new pages to edit the various entities. So saw Podio, a web application Citrix acquired and used it for a while and I was amazed at how they did in-place editing. I wanted to do that. So I came accross in my research x-editable, which is precisely that. i can now update my entities in-place from the ‘view’ entity pages.  All I needed to do was write the backend server code to respond to the POSTs that this JavaScript framework would make on my behalf when I edited a label/link that I tied to x-editable. Absolutely marvellous.Upped my productivity by 100% because within 10 minutes I had it up and running, and within the session I had all the entities being updated in-place(the server code would update the entities in the database).

Apart from that I had a quick look into iPandas and numpy which is used for dealing with sets of numbers,figures etc and well basically filtering, cutting and splicing them and basically dealing with them. Quite powerful library. I’m going to be using this in my data statistics and visualization module soon so I wanted to read up a bit more on it. I’ll read the official course work this week so I should see some familiar stuff.  I’ve got a dataset in mind that I’d like to visualise and analyse so I’m keen to learn more.

I also pushed by investment tracker code to github. My git skills have come along remarkably and even more so now that Citrix moved to Git from Perforce.

All in all, a good weekend of technology, computing and IT.