One of the issues I have with my current position is what appears to be the lack of interesting in developing both mine and the other technical staff’s skill set. I should clarify this by saying that I’m referring to our technical skills rather than the more “soft” skills like speed reading, managing people, etc. Of course for the majority of projects that come our way we can use our current knowledge to craft a solution. However, I’m always left feeling a little cold knowing that maybe there is something out there that would make life easier, improve what we can offer the rest of the department, or simply make things look more professional.
So I’ve decided to take the old bull by the horns and look into exploring new web technologies. To this I’m trying to weight up two options. The first is J2EE, which I’ve been reading about for the past couple of weeks. However, an email today said that there is currently no supporting server on campus and that one would have to be purchased. That could be a bit of a problem, so my second option is Ruby on Rails. There seems to be a lot of hype about this. So the question I’m faced with is which of these should I continue spending time on, or is there something else I should look at?
