Employed to assist Lhasa with the creation of their first server based Java application for use in the Pharmaceutical industry. This has included development work with Oracle 10G, Hibernate and Struts deploying to Tomcat and WebLogic.
In addition to development I provided consultancy in the following areas; establishing the non functional requirements such as scalability and reliability, review of the Architecture and UML design against these requirements, establishing customer requirements for roll out, planning the initial roll out, identifying risks in the project and proposing approaches for risk mitigation.

Assisted in moving a very large J2EE project from a complex high maintenance in house Perl based build system to a system based on Maven, subversion and continuous integration builds. This allowed the introduction of quick builds, component versioning and standard unit testing in order to increase developer productivity. This also included configuration of and deployment to Weblogic and JBoss.

A senior part of the development team and often lead developer. I worked primarily on the server side Java part of a leading mobile push email solution known as the Relay Server. My work involved improving scalability, reliability, the addition of new features and improving ease of use. In my two years at Seven I played a key role in increasing the number of concurrent users supported by the system by a factor of five.

The Relay Server is a highly complex multi threading, clustered application written in J2SE. It is designed to support tens of thousands of concurrent users and to have mobile network operator standard fail over and uptime. The constant need to improve scalability in line with user growth has given me significant skills in diagnosing performance bottlenecks and other problems in complex distributed environments. In addition to the Java application I made significant improvements to the database performance; primarily with PostgreSQL but we also supported Oracle as a back end. I was the lead developer responsible for the introduction of Oracle support and this gave me experience with Oracle and PL SQL. My work with databases has given me extensive experience of diagnosing complex transactional issues in mission critical databases with millions of transactions per day. I also gained experience of mitigating problems in live systems where an outage is not an option.

I was part of the XMS development team responsible for mDoc, a J2EE based server product. mDoc provided document repository access and printing for mobile devices. I played a key role in the architectural design and refactoring of the mDoc product for the J2EE platform, creating UML designs for the refactoring of the software. The tools used for this were Rational Rose and Rational XDE. I also created a new database schema for the settings configuration system to overcome limitations of the previous file based system in clustered configurations. This was developed as BMP Entity Beans with optimized SQL. Update capabilities were exposed as web services to management tools. Using this I developed a new web based administration tool using a combination of HTML and Swing applets making SOAP calls to allow easy remote configuration of mDoc servers. I was also responsible for the successful integration of new Document repositories (WEBDAV, Documentum) with mDoc. This system made use of XML to represent all content, the XML was then translated into a suitable format for the device by custom servlets.

I was selected by Cap Gemini for a one year student placement as a developer based in Swansea. I worked on one of CG's largest outsourcing contracts. Initially I worked on a successful Java trial project converting a graphical management information system to a web based system. This system consisted of a mainframe back end using MQ series for mainframe data retrieval and JSP for the presentation layer. After the success of the initial project I went on to work on a project to allow customers to track the progress of their orders via a web based system. This was based around Websphere application server with an Oracle back end. During my time in this role I worked closely with Business analysts from the client company to ensure customer satisfaction.
My contribution resulted in an award for employee of the month in the Welsh hub for my work on the trial Java projects. On my return to University I continued to work for Cap Gemini on a part-time basis.