Joined the project at UCxx

After my contract is completed with State Govt in mid-west, I started looking for local job openings, found a couple of them, but those wanted specific business domain knowledge in particular UE Insurance. My technical skill sets matched with them except the business domain, so it did not come through to me.

In about 3 weeks time, the opportunity at UCxx knocked ringed on my cell phone, my friend who has earlier worked with me on a Govt project, has referred me at UCxx, couple of rounds of interviews were scheduled and in a week's time I got selected.

Here I would like to share my thoughts over joining a project at UCxx:

First and foremost is the change is the city (people, lifestyle, living, water, air, weather, high-speed traffic and so on), from mid-west heart-land of America to extreme west, in south CA.

Now, let me list out the methods, tools, additions, replacements in term of Technical areas as compared to earlier project at State Govt:

State Govt:

Application Servers: Tomcat 5.x and up, very few projects run on Websphere 6.1

Repositories: CVS, SVN

Build: Direct export from Eclipse of .ear or .war files

Unit testing: NO, it is upto the developer working on that piece, make sure it fulfills the expected result; results were not published.

Secured Authentication and Authorization: Accelerator (n->Ich) and Custom built interface to Ldap (<-sugrA)

Presentation layer: Sun/apache JSF implementations, Tomahawk/Richfaces libraries, Css, Ajax, Javascripts.

Service layer: Spring core, batch, mail, Jdbc/hibernate templates

Sqlserver 2005 and management studio

OR mapping: Hibernate with annotations

c3p0 connection pooling framework

At UCxx project:

Methodology: Agile with SCRUM

Application Servers: Tomcat 5.x and up for development, Websphere 7 for deployment

Development env: Eclipse Galileo with required plugins.

Repository: SVN

Build: Maven: build/deployment for every hour or on code change.

Unit testing: Nightly Junit tests are run and published

Secured Authentication and Authorization: Opensource shib

Webservices: RESTful with JSON; interfaces with IBM's CICS Transaction Gway

Presentation layer: Sun JSF implementation, Tomahawk/Richfaces libraries, Velocity, Css, Ajax, Javascripts.

Service layer: Spring core, batch, mail, Jdbc/iBatis templates

Db2 and Qdb

O/R mapping: iBatis

I will keep updating this post on required basis, so keep visiting and share your comments.

Thanks
Have a nice day!