It was a better week. As I said last week I was looking to cut down on distractions and improve my focus. I stuck to a morning routine this week: every day I got up around six, took a 30 minute walk on the beach while listening to Stackoverflow podcasts, then got showered and online by 7 to 7:15. I usually got over an hour of work done before anybody else even woke up. I kept twittering, e-mail and such to a minimum.

I’ve definitely enjoyed working at our condo here in Destin, FL. It was quite a novelty to work on a balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, and I made sure to rub my teammates’ faces in it. But honestly by the end of the week I couldn’t stand to work out there with all the noise and glare. I spent most of my remaining time on the north balcony which overlooks a golf course and lake, and is much quieter.

This week I got started on the reference web app that we are working on as part of Terracotta’s strategy to really nail the clustered “user session” use case. Alex has blogged in detail about that strategy, and more recently on the technology stack we settled on for the web app. Geert Bevin, who is himself the author of the Rife web framework, had already spent a week or two learning Spring MVC and laying down some architectural groundwork. By the time I got started on Monday he was up and running and had stubbed out some basic pages.

My week was divided into two parts. Part one was two and a half painful days of just setting up my workspace. This involved upgrading to Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede, which includes the WTP that Geert was already using to launch the app in Tomcat. Then upgrading all of the plugins I needed. Then endlessly debugging because I got exception after exception when I tried to do seemingly anything.

When I was interviewing for Terracotta, one phrase I heard was “just in time learning”, and that was certainly true this week. Here is a probably-not-complete list of technologies that I’ve had to learn at least some of (or some more of) this week, quickly: Maven and it’s Eclipse plugin, Subversion and Subclipse plugin, WTP, Spring MVC, JPA annotations with Hibernate as ORM provider, SOJO (for JSON parsing in Java), Crosscheck (being evaluated for JavaScript unit testing in Java vm), jQuery, MySql, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting.

During the second half of the week, everything started clicking and I was finally committing changes. I began working on the exam-creation page. Geert recommended that we approach the page by using JavaScript to allow the user to build up an entire exam and submit it as a single request, passing JSON to the Controller. I’m really excited about this because I’ve grown to like coding JavaScript. I’m almost disappointed that I’ll be on vacation this week. By week’s end I had the controller basically working, accepting and parsing JSON. But I did not get any JavaScript in place yet, although I spent a good bit of time reading up on jQuery and Crosscheck.