Seems as though this week went by in a flash. Pretty much everyday I’ve been working, messing around with programming stuff from when i get home until 3 or 4 in the morning, sleeping for 4 hours — then doing it again. Doesn’t sound too exciting, but some of this new Ajax stuff i’ve been reading about it pretty amazing — definitely opening my eyes to new ways of handling data for web development. So far i’ve only scratched the surface, but it’s still interesting. I’m trying to make the entire ap in Ajax, make each page a unique link, never reload the entire page, and have all output generated by the backend be xml. Sounds easy enough for a small ap, but for the entire system it’ll take a lot of work. The biggest problem so far has been finding a decent way of handling an application with one point of contact — a new concept for me. Usually any given page has a processing page and a display page, then maybe some common framework pages that lead it there. In this case the javascript directly accesses the framework with requests, so there’s no space for splitting up each ap. Not on that, each part has more phases for processing now too. There’s a usual display page (in this case the login form is one page in my definition, the register is another page, etc), a js validation phase for that form, a backend (coldfusion ) processing of that form, an xml generation of the response (handling all responses the same way), and then a js function to parse the response (which will hopefully be static and not unique for each ap. So far it’s going well — slow, but well. Javascript was kind of the missing link in my web development exerpience, so most my testing has been trying new things with it. I’d probably be working on it now if the site wasn’t down actually. ;p Oh, it’s back up! Something strangely familiar about programming for hours and hours while watching a string of sci-fi movies and shows. Nerdy, but a lot of fun. 
At work I’ve been doing something completely different though — database encryption. Easy enough really, just a matter of wrapping calls to certain columns in a function, and executing a massive encryption script (30 mins to run -_-) — but it’s my first project as lead! It’s currently in QA for the next week or two, so we’ll see how it goes. A few bumps so far, but it’s been a fun learning experience. If you haven’t checked out Del.icio.us yet, go there now. It’s a paradise of useful and interesting links!
