NASA, Rocket Science and Oorian

An airhacks.fm conversation with Marvin P. Warble Jr. (@marvinwarble) about: growing up with the Atari 400 and learning BASIC from a cartridge, saving programs on cassette tapes and upgrading to floppy drives, writing maze games and running out of RAM, the Atari 800XL and Atari ST with graphical user interfaces, studying aerospace engineering and working at NASA on mission planning software, converting Fortran to C and C++ at NASA, the transition from mission-specific software to reusable applications, learning Java in the early 2000s through applets, comparing C++ header files to Java class organization and missing type defs, building a stock data web scraper in Java and getting redirected to the human genome project, working on a Java applet-based product called Galileo that was abandoned when applets were deprecated, developing control system software for an aircraft carrier, the origin of iGrade Plus as an online grade book for schools built with JSP and then the Oorian Framework, the Oorian framework as an object-oriented rich internet application framework written in pure Java, wrapping JavaScript libraries like CKEditor and Chart.js and D3.js with Java APIs, type-safe Java widgets rendered to HTML and JavaScript, configurable communication modes with AJAX and SSE and WebSockets, CSS generation in Java with user-specific themes and multi-tenant support, event handling modeled after Swing with mouse click listeners, iGrade Plus running in production for 10 years with 50000 to 70000 active users and hundreds of schools, 170 JavaScript library integrations planned including Web Awesome and Tailwind CSS and Bulma and Bootstrap, comparison with Vaadin and the different approach of wrapping existing JavaScript libraries, discussion of Quarkus and GraalVM native image compilation, Web Components as a rendering target for enterprise applications Marvin P. Warble Jr. on twitter: @marvinwarble