Hello, everyone! This is Xuan Wang, from China. I started doing my master degree of Computer Science in Leiden University last September. And since 13thJune, I will be doing my internship in Finalist, Amsterdam office for 4 months on the project CMS Container—Site management section based on Ajax technology. How time flies, suddenly it is already October and my traineeship is going to be finished very soon.

I came across this opportunity on the ‎Betabanenmarkt in Leiden this March where I had a very inspirational talk with Marcel from Finalist. Luckily, I got this chance to work for Finalist and also work on a project that I am really interested in. The most attractive thing is how Finalist is trying to make everyone feeling home here, besides, I could put what I learn into practice here and sharpen my skill, both of which mean a lot to me. During the past three and half months, I learned a lot from doing the project itself and also from other colleagues especially my supervisor Nico. The most important thing that I have learned so far is the ability of understanding a project on both abstract and practical level. I think it is also the interesting part of software engineering. First of all, you should be able to generalize your idea on an abstract level such as how to design the whole project in an efficient and extendable way. This could be the basis of the whole project. After this, you should also think about which techniques are suitable for this project and how you are going to implement them. This is a more practical issue but pretty important too because the final product relies on this.

This project is about using Ajax technique on site management section of CMS Container. Actually, the biggest surprise to me is how big CMS Container itself is. I did not realize that before I started reading the codes. It was really a hard time and I kept getting lost all the time. And, it seems like lots of magic stuff are involved every time after Nico explained to me how a certain part works. Understanding CMS Container is a big challenge to me. Well, I think keeping asking why and thinking about it is the key to it. Since Ajax is actually a combination of several web development techniques, learning how to understand and make a good use of these techniques on this project is really a challenge to me. At the very beginning, I had to search for tutorials on these topics and try to grasp the key idea as soon as possible. Also, making a demo and keeping experimenting new ideas and solutions are very helpful. These days, I had a really hard time on making the project work on IE too. It took me quite a while and almost drove me crazy. Although I still have some problems with it, I feel like I am learning more and more whenever a problem is solved. I mean, the process of figuring out a problem is quite painful but it feels quite good when you finally solve it.

Oh, question time, since I am talking about cross-browser problem, I would like to ask one question. The problem I have here is that right now whenever I drag a portlet from one container to another container, the portlet will appear under the container (invisible) if this container is defined before another one. But it will be visible again when it is dropped to the container. I think it has something to do with z-index. I have checked the internet and tried to find a workaround but it seems that they are not that helpful. If someone of you are interested in this question, please give me some hints. Dank je wel!!!

Well, at last, I would love to thank all the colleagues who are so friendly to get me adjusted very well here, and esp. my supervisor Nico, as he is always there to help me out. I had a really great time working for Finalist and I hope I have the chance to work on more projects here too.