Well, I have officially begun a little side project to get up to date on some technology changes that have happened since I last poked my head up from tribe. The fun thing about the beginning of a startup is that you can pretty much choose whatever technology you want to get a job done. When tribe started, they needed to get something going fast so I chose to use technologies that I had been using/creating at the time. At that point, MVC had pretty much become a mainstream idea, and not using it for your web application was a well known bad idea. Since then, the biggest advance in the state of the Java art has been the proliferation of Inversion of Control frameworks.

At the time we started, Spring was still in its infancy and the now defunct Avalon project at Apache was the IoC platform that I had heard of but never worked with. Inversion of Control is a pretty abstract idea, and Avalon did not do much to make it a more penetrable concept. But the idea is basically that your application is much easier to test and maintain if it is not responsible for managing object lifecycles and other cross-cutting concerns such as security. The IoC people strive to create a framework that you can ask for objects, and the framework itself is responsible for assembling those objects and managing them based on declarative conifigurations specified by the developer. This is, in some sense, what the redwood framework that I have been explaining does - albeit in a far more primitive way. Redwood provides a method for applications to declaratively wire application objects together, as well as providing security credentials for those objects without forcing the application objects themselves to know about these concerns.

Spring has since come along and risen to prominence in the Java community. Spring is very abstract and may be dropped into any Java application and be of some use. I am now curious whether I may be able to put it to use in Redwood, and ultimately to replace Redwood completely. Spring provides a more complete inversion of control implementation, has a huge and thriving community of developers behind it, and does in some way provide much of the goals that I had initially strived for when coding Redwood and Tribe.

So in pursuit of answers to these burning questions, I have begun a project at home to build a (non-web-based) comic book tracking application. Korin has thousands of comic books, so I should have ample test data. At tribe, we use the following software stack and products

Tomcat
Torque
Turbine
Redwood
MySQL
CVS
Roundup (for bug tracking)

At home, my goal is to not use any of these. I am not going web based right off the bat, so I won't have a Tomcat replacement right away. But in the interest of mixing up I will have:

Hibernate
Spring
Acegi
Subversion
Trak (if I can get it working. I tried this once before: sanfrancisco.tribe.net/thread...32b5739 )

What I said before was that the beginning of startups if fun because you can choose to work with whatever tools you want. But we are way past the beginning of tribe. I am not in my 3rd year at this job, and 3 years is an awfully long time in the Java (and technology) world. So it is time for a skills update. I will let you all know how it goes.