Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Back in the Saddle

I've been away (and neglecting Eclipse DataBinding) for a long time now. I want to offer my sincere apologies to any and all who've been affected by my lack of attention.

Now that I've settled back into my old routine, I have a new problem. There is a mountain of new / updated bugs in Bugzilla and not enough free time to catch up on all of them. Please help me prioritize by pinging the tasks important to you! Vote, comment, post patches, whatever you have time for--just let me know where the pain points are.

About the time I disappeared from Eclipse, I started a new job at Overstock.com and it's really an awesome place to work. We're always looking to hire new programmers, so send me a line if you're looking for something new.

While at Overstock I've been doing some Flex development, and (surprise!) working on a data binding library in Flex. Yes, technically Flex already has declarative data binding baked in. What I'm working on brings data binding to the ActionScript side, and gives you full support over the binding pipeline: conversions, validations (sound familiar?), synchronized access, one- and two-way bindings, bindings from multiple sources and coalescing the values together. It's really cool.

This work in Flex has been a golden opportunity to make a fresh start and use the lessons learned from Eclipse DataBinding. Pending company approval I hope to port all that goodness back to Java sometime soon. Stay tuned.

Disclaimer: Opinions are my own and do not reflect or represent my employer.