User:M sabal

Here's a little about myself.

I started programming when I was nine years old on an old Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) 3 that plugged into the television. At that point, everything had to be written in BASIC, although one could "poke" some machine code directly into memory for faster execution. Over the years, I was able to pick up more mature methods of programming; but never lost my love of using the keyboard or framing my code to make the best use of hardware whenever possible.

After leaving college, and adding more tools to my belt, I needed a language that could compile into an executable that could be developed and run with a very small footprint, and without needing a lot of cash. I ended up finding the Euphoria programming language as the perfect candidate at the time. Though it wasn't exactly compiled (nb, version 4 uses semi-compiled byte code), the bound program was relatively small and ran very quickly. This became my favorite language for most tasks for many years, and I added many libraries to its toolchest, including the socket library that is now included in the standard distribution, albeit somewhat modified.

With the release of Windows Vista, and later changes with Mac ending support for the Cocoa API; I needed a language that would run cross-platform, with a consistent GUI across devices, that could interact with a variety of databases without needing to code new libraries to support them. This brought me to Java. I'd already been programming quite heavily with PHP for all my browser based applications, and had done some work in Java off and on almost since its inception.

My current projects in Java include an ERP support system for the apparel industry, and a couple PDF and XLS analysis programs.

My current projects in PHP, beside web site support, include migrating the Apache PDFBox library to PHP (available on GitHub as I make commits as phpdfbox), some work in natural language processing, and some work in computer vision.

I have a small consulting company at http://hickoryservices.com.