Walter Hardy Bio

Walter's web development career began in 1983 with graduate study in interactive technology at the University of Massachusetts. He's run his own consulting firm, W. Hardy Interactive, for 10 years, producing interactive, database driven software products and web sites.

On the development side he's been using Macromedia ColdFusion. For design he turns to hand-coded HTML and Flash. Why consider Java Studio Creator? "For one thing, I run my own hosting environment and there are a lot of issues around licensing and portability. My clients want to be sure they have the freedom to host the applications themselves, and that's difficult unless I provide them with open-standard code like Java."

Another consideration is full technical integration. "Today I write programs with SQL commands for the database stuff, similar to ASP, which run on my own servers in San Francisco. But I'm new to web services, and wish to tap into the power that they can provide my applications. A tool to make that easy sounds great. My goal is to maximize the customization and quality I can provide my clients, and yet at the same time with the efficiency of re-using my own code libraries and those in the public domain."

Walter's biggest reason for going with Java Studio Creator is to accelerate his learning curve to Java programming. "I've been putting it off for a long time because it seems intimidating. There hasn't been a tool that lets me build apps in Java visually until now."