Hooray! TWU-Developed [Internal] Application Launches!

It feels like just last week I was headed to India for TWU XVIII. I remember being nervous for the flight and eager to start our internal project. The previous batch began development on our web application, which was built for chronicling the experiences of ThoughtWorkers all over the planet.

My batch took over in August and headed up another four weeks of development. The initial goal was to launch just before our departure. Ultimately the launch was pushed back and development work was handed off to the members of TWU XIX.

Today saw that application go live.

I'm extremely impressed with the work by the last batch. I'm extremely proud of these three new classes of ThoughtWorkers, and feel honored to have been a part of this project. To see something you've worked on go live is incredibly satisfying, to say the least.

Learnings

I learned more than I can count on this internal project. To be effective, we had to dive in deep to the following technologies.

• Spring MVC - Java Web Application Framework
• Hibernate - Object/Relational Mapper
• MySQL - Relational Database
• Hudson - Continuous Integration
• Subversion - Centralized Version Control
• Selenium - User Acceptance Testing Framework

My favorite technical accomplishment on this project was implementing flash scope (as in Rails) in the Spring MVC framework. Prior to this implementation, we were passing around query strings for absolutely everything; that simply didn't feel appropriate.

It took a lot of learning on my part along the way to flash scope -- including how to implement a listener, filter, and Java annotation. The end result was a far better solution for the application and one that was reused several times in places where query strings just didn't make sense. I'm so very happy to have had the opportunity to push my knowledge and contribute to a delivered product.

Thanks!

So many people are to thank for this moment of accomplishment. Sumeet Moghe has put together a truly world-class training program. The real-world experience has helped me in immeasurable ways on my current project and is a far more effective way of learning than solving small problems from textbooks. Our trainers were wonderful as well, bringing their global experience into the classroom and project setting. I had the opportunity to work with young developers like myself from Australia, China, India, and the US.

Fun Fact query strings are attached to the address of a webpage. If an error were to appear on this blog with a query string, it would be shown in the address bar. e.g. -

http://sghill.blogspot.com?error=CommentTooLong

Clarification The app is not public facing, which is why a link doesn't appear in the post.