Its almost 10 years that I started writing Java Code. I like relook at the begining and introduce my first project/product I worked on.
Its 2001 January I started my 6th Sem Project as part of my MCA (in University Of Hyderabad) course. I decided to work on a module of Multilingual (Indian Languages) text editor along with my classmate Ganesh under Prof K Narayana Murthy. This project is executed as part of TRCT (Technology Resource Center for Telugu) in University. This is one of the 11 reaserch centers/organizations setup for developing Tools and Technologies for Telugu. Being open source and to achieve platform independency it was decided to develop this product using Java. This is why and how it (Java coding) started. No prior or formal training!! Started with Java1.1 but soon moved to 1.2. Person working on this product had to leave and we had to take over complete product and this happened around Feb 2001. We got first basic version done in couple of months... but was slow (on 216 and 512MB machines). So we had re-design basic things and code. The next version came out impressive and promising. It was named "Akshara" - Advanced Text Processor for Indian Languages.
Project got over in July 2001. I was supposed to join in my first Job in SQL Star International but thanks to rcession joining date was delayed..... Luckily I was offered Job in same organization I did my project and to work on same product along with 2 of my classmates. So in 1st Aug 2001 I started coding for Money... For next two and Half I continued there and during that time we added more features to Akshara and also created a chat tool and a Technology for web input and output along with other things.
After many years and many projects Akshara still remains my best work so far from personal satisfaction factor. Below are few features of Akshara.
- Open sorce
- Platform Independent
- 14 Indian Language support
- Basic Text editing featured and styling (Alignments, text styles etc)
- Uses own and open format (XDL) for storing files
- Embeded Email Client
- Spell checker
- Text to Speech
- HTML file creation with CSS
References to Akshara can be found at below links
http://www.lisindia.net/Telugu/telugu_Tech.html
http://tdil.mit.gov.in/TDIL-OCT-2003/text%20editors%20&%20word%20processors.pdf
