Our first official company outing held in Blue Coral, San Juan, Batangas …

Time for some fun! Here is a pic taken during our bowl and dine activity.

Highest scorers were Philip and Beth garnering scores of 146 and 135, respectively.

We had fun at J2EE training today, JM talked about YUI, prototype, Script.aculo.us and Dojo. These javascript toolkits surely know their way around the javascript quirks that’s been perstering lots of developers with browser incompatibilities. I agree that these toolkits help a lot in making more stable javascript codes.

Some pictures taken from the training:

Some of our observations are:

1. Lots of these toolkits do the same functionality (e.g. String utilities, Ajax calls, Animations). Is there any standard body that is defining the new sets of javascript features? So we all live in one common world of javascript coding? Or is it a battle of the best platform?
2. Seems like we’re going back to the world of client-server days. As rich-interface becomes popular, will thin-clients begin to disappear? And what’s with Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX?
3. When prototype popularized Object-Oriented approach, they made a good point about the power of Javascript… but still, the flexibility of javascript codes make it difficult to standardize. It’s more of a developer’s conscious effort to create cleaner code.

One neat thing I learned about prototype is that it has a method “Try.these{…}” where all the statements within will be evaluated until one actually works. Sounds useful when making your javascript methods work across multiple browser.

Today is the first day of our J2EE training. Everybody’s excited to become the first batch of the 3 months extensive training program. The training will cover open-source Java frameworks such as Spring, Struts, Hibernate, iBatis, etc. We will also cover newer technologies such as YUI, DWR. It’s going to be a tough but fun training for everyone. At the end of this training, we’ll get everyone at speed with the latest technologies on Java.

I’m happy that everyone in the team share the same passion on software development. With a little kick here and there, I’m sure we’ll get the core team in sync towards building creative software applications.

To give a preview of what’s up with Day 1, here’s a podcast on the introductory session. Unfortunatey, the audio isn’t good as I’ve placed the Macbook at the end of the room. I’ll try my Jabra tomorrow, see how that goes…

Although, the workstation didn’t arrive, the trainees were quite busy setting up the network.