Thursday, May 05, 2005

A new piece is up in my portfolio: the Bouwsteen Informatie Systeem. It's a web-based application that myself and a coursemate developed for our final college project. The client was a special primary school in a town nearby that requested a customised solution that improved upon their use of Excel and Word to manage student information.

I learned a lot from the process of developing it, but the most interesting part of it all, looking back, is that the XmlHttpRequest object I taught myself to use as a solution for seamless loading/fetching of data from the server appears to have become something of a hype while I was "away" working on it. Adaptive Path is claiming "Ajax" (Asynchronous Javascript + XML) will fundamentally change the way websites operate in the near future, basing this mainly on Google and other portals' use of it in their recent services (such as Google Maps and GMail). I'm left to wonder if it's worth hyping up at all - those who were interested in applying it to their software surely already have been doing so without coining 4-letter terms to make it popular.

Either way, my latest portfolio addition is up for all to see, although obviously a threesome of screenshots hardly accurately display the complex underlying engine that I crafted specifically for the project.

My aim in the next few months is to continue developing my php engine by integrating this new-fangled "Ajax" system that I created for this project. Perhaps then I can start worrying less about how to provide information to a user seamlessly, and more about improving the user experience overall.

Oh, and I started my internship at Yes2Web. I'll be working on developing generic community/portal software for them, so that's what will most likely be the next addition to my portfolio. Expect that in September or so. Until then!