On June 15th in 2004 (almost exactly 4 years ago) I was making yet another pass at getting comfortable with XML. On a whim I wrote myself a post-dated comment to appear 4 years later “Do you know XML now?” When I wrote it to myself it was half commitment to learn and half wondering how I would feel after having hopefully developed a certain degree of comfort with what seemed like this giant beast at the time.
Ironically enough I saw the question after I just spent an hour digging through a few hundred lines of XML data for one of my current projects. The question is almost laughable now. How could I survive day to day without knowing XML? My config files, my dynamic text data are all XML based. Hell, every time I describe a user interface in MXML i’m knee deep in XML. It hasn’t been so long that I don’t remember sitting on a train in Atlanta looking at some webservices data in the training from the source book and thinking “I’m f#cked. There’s no way in hell I’m gonna be able to understand this”.
Nowadays I’m more worried about how I’m going to get comfortable with LCDS , WTF is Thermo going to mean to me as a developer and how far will 3D engines like Papervision3D and Alternativa3D really take web3D?
Most of all I realize how far we have come as a community. From people laughing at the claims of a Flash Platform to our current ecosystem with desktop development and the ability to integrate with the actual creative suite tools. From Java developers on my projects chuckling at the thought of me learning design patterns for my “little flash aplications” to enterprise Flex applications, VOIP, Integrated hardware accelaration and endorsements by some of the most prominent voices in the Java community.
I’m not going to tell you what I’m going to ask myself in my next post-dated note to self. I do know one thing though- I can’t wait to see where we are in four years.
M
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