The EndFinally the environment mapping chapter is finished. Coming in at around 25 pages with all the figures, it took me the better part of two months to complete. Even so, it is nice to sit back and review the work that I've accomplished and know that it will help out someone else sometime soon - it's a good feeling. Plus now I do some work on my 'material' system (the quotes on material are due to a good suggestion from SimmerD in my last post - check it out and see if you have a better name to use!)!!
TinyXMLAs the name implies, TinyXML is a very small library for reading and writing XML files. I think it is fairly widely used, and only consists of six files to add to your project. That's a small price to pay for being able to have hierarchical access to the DOM of an XML file.

Up to this point, I have been reluctant to add these types of libraries/middleware into my engine. However, after ~5 years of working on the engine, I have finally come to the realization that I can't write every line of code that goes into the engine. I think the trick (at least for single developers) is to choose the parts of the engine that won't bring that much satisfaction in implementing on your own to replace with middleware. It's a huge time saver, and there is actually somewhere to go to ask questions (aside from the GDNet forums of course), plus there have been thousands of people using (using == testing!!!) the library to ensure that there are no obvious problems. It's a good thing all around!
Web TechnologiesI'm not sure why, but over the last two weeks or so I have been reading up on various web technologies. The web has been one area of software development that I haven't really had much interaction with, and I have been really enjoying it. Here are the areas that I have hit recently:

1. XHTML - I had done some small amount of HTML before, but not XHTML. It makes much more sense in the context of well formed XML to the programming side of my brain! [grin]

2. CSS - I always knew what it was for, but had never actually used it for anything. It is damn powerful compared to standard (X)HTML, and is a vast improvement to web developing in general.

3. &#106avascript - I've used scripting languages before (Python, Lua, Homemade) but never had a reason to use &#106avascript. Using it in conjunction with XHTML and CSS is quite powerful as well and has really helped me to understand how certain web sites are put together.<br><br>I'll be talking more about this in the next few posts...<div> </div>