And, back to JAVA…

So tonight I pulled myself away from C# and stepped back in to the JAVA world. As I said previously, I’m actually trying to learn JAVA for business reasons and such. Along the way, I’ve been trying to learn MySQL as well. Well, tonight – thanks largely in part to my fooling around with the XNA tools, it all kind of clicked for me.

I sat down and wrote my first functional JAVA class (and test class) tonight in all of about 20 minutes. It’s nothing fancy, just a class that accepts some specific arguements and then writes them to a database. Really, it’s nothing big… but it’s my first. Wrapping my head around the object oriented functions on C# and the enjoyment of it through making a “game” really helped me grasp how this is all supposed to work. This is the first step for both my personal online media database and the mini-project I’m doing at work.

I’ve spent 2-3 months pouring over books and code, trying to sort things out. Between the beginnings of my XNA venture and now getting a JAVA class to write to a database… I feel like I’m starting to see some fruits from my labor. It feels good. Real good.

The First Project: Media Database

So, the first full project I’m attempting is a media database for audio recordings. The end goals are:

1) Add Media Records to database, including file upload using Amazon S3
2) Delete Media Records from database, including deleting the file
3) Ability to modify media record
4) Enable end-user to sort media files by people involved, date, and subject matter from website
5) Enable end-user to download media files from website
6) Create RSS of newly add media files
7) Create a Javascript to display the most recently uploaded media

That’s… a lot. And it’s intimidating. So, my plan is to break it down into 4 major steps:

1) Develop a Java program that can add records and display records
2) Enhance Java program to interact with a database, including file uploads to Amazon S3
3) Develop html-interface to Java progam
4) Enhance html-interface for RSS and Javascript

This is a lot for me to do; remember… this is my first project. I’ve not really done anything on my own before. I’m not giving myself an hard dates yet, except that I want to be done with step 3 by January 1st. To be honest… I don’t know if that’s being overzealous or lazy. But between now and then I’ll have also completed two MBA courses, published 2-3 comic books, and made at least 3 freelance videoes (that I already have lined up). So… it’s going to be a long 4 months!