For the last few days, I’ve been elbow deep in code during any reasonable chunk of free time, trying to get the Account services implemented for the Zen::Community services.  I’ve learned a few things while working on this particular service…

• Code generators are awesome.  We have some custom code generation scripts for generating a data model from a database schema and for generating network message classes for service protocols.  Needless to say, I’ve saved countless hours in implementation of the literally hundreds to thousands of lines of code that these code generators have taken care of for me…  (Thanks, SgtFlame, for making my life that much easier )

• Nothing is ever as easy as it seems.  When I started laying out the initial design for the Account services, I thought, “Hey, this is going to be so straightforward and easy!”  Straightforward, it was, and still is — easy, however, was a bit of an understatement…  Just because a design is easy to understand doesn’t mean it’s easy to sit for hours and implement the same mundane design pattern in code over and over and over and over and – well, I think you get my point…  Needless to say, it’s taking a little bit more time and effort than I originally estimated

• Which brings us right back to the code generators I mentioned — once I get these Account services done, SgtFlame and I are most probably going to use them as a reference for the design and implementation of more meta-data driven code generation scripts.

Essentially, what this boils down to is code generators and SgtFlame are both awesome

In other news, the AIR art team has released another piece of concept art to the public…