When considering a potential contract, I started wondering about how I would develop it. This shop I know is windows and there's very little chance they'd migrate to anything else so I started thinking, "Should I use C#?" It has certain benefits, to be sure. But just because I don't think they'll ever change operating systems, why should I limit them? Maybe they'll see the light and switch to Linux or OS X. So then what?

I considered using the Eclipse framework as a platform to crank out the app. That was an attractive option as it gives (at least according to the hype) near native speed on the desktop. But, then, eclipse also gets knocked for being slow on Linux even with SWT. On the other hand, I use IDEA as my IDE and it's as snappy as I could ask for. So when it comes down to it, I think I'll stick with Swing. It's a known quantity and available anywhere Java is. I don't really have to worry about deployment/installation issues like I would with the native components of a SWT app. The JDIC projects are starting to give Swing real muscle on the desktop. Now what would be really nice is a Swing based framework like Eclipse offers to build applications on top of. Maybe I could just port Eclipse to swing. :)

I finally put the new website up today. It took me a while because I kept going back and forth on how to "power" the site: "Should I use a CMS?" "Should I just hand roll it?" etc. I finally decided to build a simple ant driven site to build all the content for the articles and just use sitemesh to deal with the decorations. It's a bit more hands on that a CMS probably would be long term, but I decided that a CMS was too much for the site and I couldn't find one that would let me do what I wanted to do: namely, write articles online and push them up when they're done. My system, however simple it may be, lets me do that with complete control over every aspect of the site. Now I just need to tweak the UI a bit...