Software Engineering

Eclipse Plug-ins

2002-present – JNDI Browser plug-in for Eclipse. [more]

Enterprise Computing Again

2002-present – I joined Aravo to develop version 2 of SimpleTrade, an e-procurement platform for Fortune 1000 companies. Aravo features a very senior engineering team, great people, fun to work with, and the technology is through the roof! WebLogic, the WebLogic Workflow engine WLI, TopLink, Castor, Log4J, etc, etc. I introduced the team to Eclipse and of course they loved it (that wasn't so hard. coming from Visual Café).

Enterprise Computing

2000-2002 – I was employed as Senior Software Engineer at Zero G Software. Our team of six developed PowerUpdate, a multi-platform software updating and delivery solution. The product was written entirely in Java, both client and server. My focus was on the "server" component, which involved developing a J2EE application with servlets, Java Server Pages, and Enterprise Java Beans.

Because of my strong interest in J2EE and my constant effort to keep myself informed about new technologies, I acted as the resident J2EE guru, pushing for the adoption of J2EE technologies and best practices. I was also instrumental in implementing eXtreme Programming, an agile software development methodology emphasizing team interaction, continuous testing and short releases.

An avid proponent of Open Source software, I imported into our team Struts, a Web presentation layer, as well as Log4J, a robust logging facility. We made daily use of other tools such as Ant for continuous builds, and Tomcat.

My work at Zero G ties into my Master's thesis about software agents, which can be looked at as a form of software delivery.

E-Commerce

1997-1999 – I single-handedly designed and implemented a complete e-commerce system for Ligos Technology. From a basic credit-card processing system used to sell software products online, the system grew to encompass all of sales, marketing and support activities at Ligos. Written entirely in Perl, and based off a MySQL database.

Although a fast-growing company, Ligos to this day still uses this system as its main source of revenue and customer information. The million-order mark was reached in late 2001.

Software Agents

1996 – My Master's thesis: I was hired by the R&D branch of GCF International to develop an experimental framework for semi-autonomous software agents in Java.

More to come, I'm hoping to publish the final report.

Java Applets

1995 – I discovered Java back when it was in its first alpha version! I immediately saw its tremendous potential for distributed applications and took a strong liking in the language. Java, after a period of intense hype, is fast gaining acceptance as a great language for software engineering. I'm convinced more than ever that it has tremendous potential for developing distributed applications (with J2EE maybe?); if only Sun agreed to let a real standards committee take over...

Upon discovering Java back in 1995, I immediately set out to learn as much as possible about it. To this end I quickly implemented my very first applet, displaying two types of graph searches. This applet, the very first of its category in France (where I was living at the time), was selected by Sun Microsystems for the very first Java Contest!

Here is the original page for this applet that got reviews from all the Java magazines, and the original source code, in packaged version (useful for downloading) or expanded, online version (useful for browsing).

A kind soul named Sami Tuomainen took the pain to port this code to Java version 1.0, look up his page for the updated code and a usable demo. The ported code can also be downloaded from here.

Scientific Computing

Signal Processing

1994 – The CREDA (sound research laboratory) at INSA Lyon funded and directed this development of a software product for voice physicians. I programmed the printing subsystem as well as some user interface components and signal processing modules, using the THINK Class Library in Object Pascal language.

Matrix Library

1993 – I taught myself C++ over the summer of 1993 by reading Stanley Lippman's C++ Primer and developing a class library for matrix computation. It was my introduction to the rich concepts of object-oriented programming: polymorphism, inheritance, operator overloading, etc.

This self-teaching process was completed with formal classes at ESSI later on.