How AJAX led me to blogging

Actually, I have never graduated from server side Java to the wonderful world of web 2.0 or polychromatic Swing widgets. Once, second day in a new job, while I was trying to find the location of the men's room in the labyrinth of a building in downtown San Francisco, someone caught me in the corridor and asked me to write a demo program for a freshly minted JPA product. I immediately agreed - what else do you do when you do not even know where the men's room is?

After few days of reading a basic book on HTML, I managed to get a web page up and running against a server program deployed in Tomcat that reads/writes some data from the database using JPA entities. I went back to the man who caught me in the corridor and showed him the web page. No wonder that he was not impressed at all. He told that everybody was doing AJAX. Those were the heady days of AJAX -- just put it in the title of a presentation and the room would get filled with audience instantly. So naturally the demo had to be an AJAX application. I went downstairs and bought another book - on JavaScript. What a wonderful language -- you can put anything into anything -- surely they love that in San Francisco. After some Google search, I also discovered Direct Web Remoting or DWR - a neat library that marshalled Java objects to JavaScript objects (if there were such thing) and vice versa. Three days (and two nights) later, I was a star in the office -- the new guy who wrote an AJAX-JPA application to be demonstrated in the famous Java conference.

Next day, while I was lecturing unsuspecting people in the Java conference about AJAX and demonstrating them the application with the same enthusiasm of a tourist guide in Taj Mahal, a gentleman approached me and asked: Have you ever blogged? He turned out to be the editor of a well-known blog site and soon my life as a blogger began. Yes, blogging was fun till it lasted. A server side engineer hardly gets a chance to tell his story in a fantastic virtual world of mashups and e-somethings. Like a hungry man in a all-you-can-eat buffet, I blogged furiously about AJAX, Fluid, Slice, Kodo, OpenJPA, Coherence and Generic Graph -- how everything is connected to everything else and such hyperbole. But then one day a big company bought the company I worked for and moved the blog site in such a way that all my pearls of wisdom were gone for ever. It was such a devastating shock to be banished from the heavenly world of blogging that I grieved for almost an year.

But now I am back.