I have been at my new job for a little over a month now. I have had the chance to learn a lot of new things. Generally I have been a front end developer doing the GUI and writing custom controls. Of course that does not mean I don't get to do any middle or back end coding. I use SQL where needed, write business logic handling objects, etc.
Here we are using Spring, Hibernate and Postgres for the database chores. I am finding my way about on all those annotations and have sent off and received requests for new table schemas to the DBA.
In a given day you can find yourself using little bits of each framework in a few hours time. I started the day setting up a chron job to call some existing code that calls two different 3rd party APIs to get some data. One of the vendors uses XML and the other JSon. The objects are created via Spring and we use Hibernate to interact with the database. I was using various internal SDK calls to do most of that with all of the work being done in Java.
Once that was up and running I was asked to look at some existing Objective C iOS code to see how close it was to being app store releasable. First off I was not able to login in as the servers I have access to don't have valid certificates on them and our API is HTTPS based. A browser will let you ignore the suspect certificate after a warning message. I added some #ifdef DEBUG to allow the Connection code to accept any certificate. That got me into the app and allowed to try out rest of the GUI.
Sadly I crashed the app pretty quickly. Did not know initially if it was bad memory management or if it ran out of memory. Turns out it ran out of memory. I added a @try block around things so it could push itself along a bit farther and I was able to run everything.
I then started to research why it ran out of memory. I looked at the server request it was making and tried it in a browser. A huge pile of data came back so I ran used curl to grab the data and write it to a local file. Turns out there was 38.9 meg of JSon coming back.
I wanted to sniff around in the JSon so I asked python to pretty print it and sent that to another file. I then opened it up in Sublime 2 to see what I had. Straight forward JSon, just a lot of it.
Next I wanted to see how the code was handling the JSon. Turns out the developer used the standard NSJSONSearialization calls in iOS. This is like using the DOM in XML in that you get it all in memory and they you double it up or more by converting to your internal object format. It was the easy way to go but not the most optimized way to handle things.
Time to hit Google and see if there is a streaming JSon parser. I found YAJL which I plan on experimenting around with today. I also think we should write the results out into a database instead of holding it all in memory. I have written similar code, it was XML and not JSon, storing to SQLite at a previous position so this should be fairly straight forward.
So was this a typical day? Yes, in that I ended up using a pile of different languages, data formats, command line tools and frameworks / SDKs to get my job done. You really need to branch out and learn new things.
I played around with Python in my spare time at home as I kept hearing about it and now I have used it multiple times. I used it at my previous job for a quick error log parser. I have used it here because some sample 3rd party code was written in it and I needed to convert that to Java. I was able to run the Python code and tweak it until it worked before I converted it to Java. I have used python to pretty print JSon files.
Curl was something new to me here. I have used it a lot with the 3rd party vendors as one did all their sample code it in. Curl makes it very easy to grab server results and shove them into a file. It works great with HTTPS as you can pass the user name and password in the command along with ignoring invalid certificates which seems to be a recurring need.
I have used Java for years so that is second nature. I have not used Spring or Hibernate in the past. I am really starting to see the power of the annotations. With great power comes great responsibility though. I am learning when you need to put code in other objects so it can be properly initialized. Anytime you use a new framework you find new and interesting ways to crash your code.
There is very little iOS knowledge here so I was able to step in and handle that too. A bit of a mind shift to get back onto Objective C and it will take some time to remember the syntax, framework and ins and outs of Xcode. Keeps you on your toes to shift around between languages, IDEs and frameworks. Good thing my Mac has a lot of memory, disk space and a large second monitor to keep all of this open and ready to roll.
Just to add to the mayhem I am working on updating my Android game at home. It does not scale well to tablets so I am converting the graphics to vector based allowing it hopefully work on nearly every device. At the end of most days I am pretty mentally fried.
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