Getting going.

My journey with mobile app development started with Oracle’s MAF with particular interest in EnterpriseOne integration. It was a good learning exercise but I was never quite comfortable with JDeveloper. I found it clunky and bit temperamental not to mention Java’s puzzling never ending folder names.
I then digressed for a couple of months in the good cause of earning some money by coding in JavaScript. At the time I thought JavaScript was, as the name suggested, a scripting version of the Java language as opposite to being compiled. In hindsight that’s a bad way to approach JavaScript because you make assumption based on what you know about Java. In my traverse around the Internet for support I came across this quote:

Java and Javascript are similar like Car and Carpet are similar

I would recommend to anyone learning JavaScript to keep this in mind – I’ve certainly found it useful.

Coming to terms with JavaScript is like going on a roller coaster. Scary and thrilling at the same time. Make one typo and the browser will throw you an error – if you’re lucky! More likely it will run the script successfully with random results.
The flip-side of this “I’ll try anything you throw at me” scripting engine is that you can, well, do almost anything.
This reminded me of a quote by the author of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup:

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

JavaScript expands on this the by not only making it easier to shoot yourself in the foot but also when you do it blows your balls off along with your leg. This is where JavaScript is scary.

My ambivalence about JDeveloper made me briefly look a Xamarin after suggestions from a colleague. Even though it’s now a Microsoft product in the familiar Visual Studio IDE it made me a bit melancholy.

Perhaps I subconsciously craved the thrills of JavaScript – and who needs the metaphorical balls anyway.