I love NYC. I visited for a week, and found the experience absolutely amazing. There is so much to see and do.
The best parts of the experience are meeting people and just walking around. Central Park is beautiful, and I like walking down the streets of Manhattan and seeing the interesting mix of new and old buildings, people, shops, and restaurants. I also like the MTA (subway system). For about twenty bucks for a week, you have a pass for a subway network covering all boroughs, except Staten Island, which is not accessible by Subway, but is accessible by a free ferry. There is more to see in those boroughs, at least when it comes to human civilization, than there is in all of Arizona. In Arizona, however, I have to drive for transportation, and it is expensive enough that going to new places is a rare experience for me, even on weekends.
Today I received a random e-mail from a recruiter about a Java web application job in NYC. I said I don’t have Oracle experience, but he was still interested and said I could probably get an interview. The mere thought of moving to NYC gave me butterflies in the stomach. How I would love to return, and visit the zoos and museums, walk around, and go to interesting clubs like LispNYC.
So I set forth to learn more about programming in Java. I am very motivated in this endeavor. One of the requirements for the job that I got the e-mail about is Spring. So I decided to pursue a project that I’d been planning to do in Java Swing (a desktop GUI framework) and do it in Spring, as a web application. I’ve been working my way through a tutorial, figuring out how to get a good setup with Tomcat, Ant, and Spring. Next I’m going to hook a PostgreSQL database to it.
I’ve heard good things about Spring. Some people like it even more than (gasp!) Rails. So far I’ve just entered the first sample code for a controller:
import org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
import java.io.IOException;
public class TileEditorController implements Controller {
public ModelAndView handleRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws ServletException, IOException
{
return new ModelAndView("");
}
}
A class named ModelAndView! Interesting. I imagine if Java had support for tuples, Spring probably wouldn’t have that class. I think in absence of tuples, however, it’s a perfectly valid way of doing it. Quirky, but good.
Some things are complicated. Other things are just quirky. I don’t think it’s good for a developer to let quirkiness get in the way. In fact, I think a lot of the time it’s just a fact of life, that can not only be accepted, but enjoyed.
Just as I enjoy the quirkiness of buildings in NYC, which are full of character, and take on a life of their own, I can appreciate a clever solution to a programming problem that reality brings. I think of programming now more as a series of steps. If I have to do something needlessly complicated to complete a simple step, that’s annoying. If I have to do something straightforward but a little quirky, that’s OK by me!