Worus

Mother’s Day was nice. We went out for dinner at Hickory Park and back to my grandma’s for some desert. I brought my mom home with me so that she could pick up her car from Josh’s place afterwards. She was very talkative the whole time. It was nice. I’ve never had trouble talking with my mom in the car. I remember the times that we’d drive to Tama to meet Judgy so that the two of us could hang out for the weekend during high school. My mother and I usually talked most of the way.

I watched the entire second box set of Revolutionary Girl Utena this weekend. I really like that series. The setting for the series is very neat. It’s sort of a French-Japanese combination in my mind. I also think that the direction of the series is really neat, too. The direction in the series feels different than what I’m used to seeing in an anime. It may not be different at all, but it feels different to me. The story, while nothing revolutionary, is really fun to follow. I don’t always know what’s going to happen next, but certain parts of the story—like the duels—are fairly predictable.

What I really enjoyed about the Black Rose Saga was how Mikage kept saying to all the students something along the lines of, “Your only choice is to revolutionize the world.” It’s just funny to hear over and over. I wouldn’t really call this a quality part to enjoy, but I was amused every time he said it.

I don’t have a lot to do at work right now. I’m rewriting an application, and I’m taking the opportunity to use AJAX programming to do so. I did this with another application on a smaller scale and I was really happy with the results. This is a larger project, but it would yield higher benefits. Also, I figure that this is a good time to continue to develop my skills with this mish-mash of technologies. I think once I get a couple more things conceptualized with the data and how to really capture it in this application things should move along pretty quickly.

I started a new project this afternoon. It’s a simple CRUD application. The difference between this one and any others that I’ve done is that I have enough time to really push for some layer separation between data and interface. This doesn’t happen very often when I’m writing web applications. The problem is that the application is usually needed the day before I’m writing it.

I finished another component to a different’ client’s site and based it off of one I had previously written for Jooma! a couple months ago. Apparently, I had the right idea back then. As a result, I have my previous thoughts fresh in my head from all of the review of the old code to write the new version this time. I also noticed that one of the other components for that same client that I worked the hardest on and had the most fun with is not actually being used in production. It’s very sad, because I really, really enjoyed that component. It involved trees.

The difference between what I’m writing now and the other components for the Joomla! system is that my new application is in Cold Fusion instead of PHP. I personally prefer writing classes in PHP to writing CFCs in Cold Fusion.

As a general rule, PHP’s syntax is nicer after coding in it for about an hour. The only thing that I get annoyed with in PHP is having to use the $_REQUEST variable to access anything from an HTTP GET or POST. This still beats out my old way of doing it by using $_GET or $_POST. As I understand how and why to use such variables, I consider the syntactic ugliness (you can’t use their memers in a quoted string without concatenation) a small annoyance for all of the power built into PHP.

Regardless, this new application should help me get closer to where I want to be with a lot of the applications that I have to write. Many of them are CRUD applications that I could write a heck of a lot faster if I had a more refined development process for them. Instead of sitting around with a monolithic list of things that need to be done at some point, I can always write the list view, the component’s get function, the form view, the components save function, the components insert function, the component’s delete function, and the front end’s controlers for the update, insert, and delete portions.

To me, this makes sense. I’m sure that if I explained it to someone else, they would say that they have a completely different way of going about things. I guess my point is to get some kind of custom scaffolding for these projects as they are seriously very, very routine in web development for systems processing.