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SailOK Software Currently Available |
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After 36 years developing computer software in various capacities, I finally retired at the end of 2002. This lasted for a couple of years but eventually I found that I rather missed the creativity aspect of it. To be sure, I had enough of the drudgery, time considerations and all the other tedious details, but still I couldn't help but have some desire to stay active at it. Therefore, I started working on a few small to medium projects of particular interest to me. I didn't care whether anyone else was interested or not. I started with a rather large sailboat race scoring program for my sailing club. This was soon followed by a much smaller sister database to keep track of boat handicaps. These were developed in Microsoft Access. My last employer did a lot of Access contract work so I was particularly familiar with it. Both these programs have served the club since that time. A few years later I did contract to develop an extensive point-of-sale system for a local car wash chain. Determining Access to be unsuitable for a project of this scale (I severly underestimated it initially) I elected Java as the language to be backed up by an open source database system. After a couple of disappointments, I settled on PostgreSQL and have been quite satisfied with its performance as well as its reliability. The last couple of years with my last employer, I worked on a very large Java application for a customer so I was pretty familiar with the language. In fact, I was Java certified by Sun. That, with the car wash project convinced me to abandon Access an all other languages and concentrate exclusively on Java. As a result, I have almost finished completely rewriting the scoring system in Java, using HsqlDB as the backend database. I hope to have it ready for the 2012 racing season. I have also developed an extensive library of Java utilities to aid in program development. The current finished and interesting stuff is listed below. |