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Wow it's been ages since I updated the Blog. I've been working hard for Microgen on a new Billing portal for Virgin Media (ntl:Telewest Business). It was an awesome project. In Four months we re-wrote the online billing application that they'd inherited through an acquisition.

Now it's leaner and meaner. User admin functionality, self sign-up, still with full integration with Microgen's eBilling architecture only now the load process is more maintainable and leveraging JSF, Spring, JPA & Hibernate, we managed to produce a lovely RIA. Only draw back is the configuration nightmare that was the project inception. So what next?

There's a phase II that I may or may not be involved in because I've got other projects to work on, although I'd love it if I could be part of it but Microgen is back up to strength in that department so maybe consultancy only.

I've been investigating other alternatives in the RIA market place. Currently I'm messing with Google's App Engine which I love, with GWT. I played with flex but there are issues there with page ranking, and forcing customers to use Flash - not a bad thing in itself but some people registered protests about moving away from vanilla web (silverlight? JavaFX?)