When I read the latest technology blogs, I feel sort of guilty for not being as up to date on the tools I use every day. For example the latest thing that Tomcat 6 has is an Asynchronous Servlet for Ajax, and I’m still 
using Tomcat 5.0.28. In fact, I was using Tomcat 5.5, but because of some issues with classloaders, I had to revert back to 5.0.28. I thought I was being conservative by not using Tomcat 6, but even that wasn’t conservative enough. This is the curse of the practioner in the world of pioneers and evangelists.
I wish I could be up on the latest and greatest features of every tool, but alas, I use the tools to get my work done and the three-year-old version is usually good enough for me to get my work done. I suppose I could work nights and weekends learning new things, and five years ago, that is what I did. I learned a lot, but I didn’t get out much either. But now I have a family – and hobbies – or at least hobbies that don’t have to do with computers.
Now that I’m in a transition phase career-wise, here is my time to come up to speed on the latest greatest things. I was reading an article on event driven web applications and I came across a very novel idea. I thought it was an incredibly new idea, but it has been in use for about a year and is even in the Tomcat 6 advanced IO features. I guess that’s one reason for a developer to transition careers every so often.
