Alain Hufkens {Rich Interactive Applications Developer}

Seven things about me (cause I’ve been tagged)

Saturday I was tagged by a Mark Creeten, a co-worker who blogs about HTML/CSS. I was already thinking about what would be my first post this year, but because I was too busy a haven't gotten to it. But now someone else decided the topic for me. Thanx, Mark with a K.

Well, here goes:

1. Once a year, I drive to the snow and put on my snowboard boots. I am not an expert, but when the snow is fresh and crispy you can find me in the deep snow next to the piste.
2. The first video game I played was Mario Bros on Atari 2600. I played it until the joysticks completely fell apart. You can say that this was my first contact with the bits and the bytes. The last game I played was the fantastic Gears Of War 2 on Xbox 360.
3. In the weekend I like playing boardgames with my friends. My favorite games are Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne.
4. When I was little I had a lot of Star Wars toys, but I gave them all away to the boy next door who was a lot younger than me. Too bad, because I could have sold them for a lot of money on eBay!
5. I like to cook, especially exotic dishes. My favorites are the Mexican, Thai and Moroccan kitchen. The more spices the better!
6. There is a Wikipedia entry about my family (sorry, only in dutch). Royal Nord was a brand of old timer motorbikes made in Belgium in the fifties and sixties.
7. And last but not least, I became the proud father of a beautiful son at the end of last year.

Here are my victims:

• Rien, a fellow Flash developer.
• C'Real a former classmate and creative soul.
• Bert Heymans, the Journeyman Project Manager.
• Mark Deraeve, a former colleague and .NET Developer.
• Minorissues, the interactive strategy maven.
• Sakri, the best Flash developer from Finland.
• Patrik, traveler and designer.

Here are the rules if you are tagged:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter

Well that's it.

footballfan.be

I have been working on a social networking platform for soccer fans and players for the last month. We started more or less a month ago building the platform from scratch. We developed the site in Java with a team of very good developers. By using existing frameworks like Hibernate and Spring we were able to deliver on time (which was actually almost impossible).

The new part for me was working with Spring MVC, which meant working a lot in the HTML front-end. With Spring MVC you can almost have data binding like in Flex, but off course keeping in mind that we still are working in a HTTP context. Another cool thing was adding the UrlRewriteFilter so that we can have clean urls like http://www.footballfan.be/users/alain instead of something like http://www.footballfan.be/user.do?username=alain. There are also some cool AJAX features in there. So in the end it was fun developing again in Java, but now I am also eager to go back to Flex or "who knows" a Silverlight project.

So here you go footballfan.be has gone live yesterday and has been launched as part of the "We Believe" campaign. The site is only available in Dutch and French.

It’s been a while

It's been a while since my last post. I have been on holiday for two and a half weeks and we visited the eastern part of Canada. You can see the the route we followed here, and read more about the trip on my travel blog (it's in Dutch).

At work I am currently working on a big social networking site. This is going to be a very big challenge because we are on a very tight deadline and the project is very big. Anyway when we go live I can be more specific, but for now I can tell you that I will be working on the front-end development of the site. This means that for the coming months I will be coding Java again. Fortunarily we will be using the latest version of the Spring framework and Hibernate. I already did two smaller projects with this setup, but now will also be using Spring-MVC to integrate the HMTL front-end.