Well, that title is slightly deceiving. I am almost done. I successfully defended my thesis earlier this month and pasted in my revisions. I am just waiting to get my committee's approval before I can official declare that I am done. So yes, that means I can be referred to as Dr. Chris. I am not too sure about using the prefix but I am definitely glad to be done.
Any interesting aside; so I have been doing a lot of Spring development. I have now seen applications that use JSP pages and applications that use Apache Velocity templates. From what I can see, you can actually configure a Spring Web app to use pages that are external to the actual WAR file. There isn't a whole lot of difference between Velocity and JSP really expect that if condition statements are a little more cumbersome in JSP since you have to use choose, when, otherwise statements and I haven't really found a good editor for Velocity. In truth, I have to say that I prefer Velocity templates over JSPs though it is because Velocity really forces you to keep your business logic to your Java code as oppose to in your HTML. You can use JSP in the say way but there is nothing stopping you from dumping a whole ton of Java code in there.
I know I have been kind of spotty with my blogging. I'm new at it and have been busy getting wrapping up school and getting settled (excuses I know). I'm going to starting up a new side project with Dr. Toms at Dalhousie so I should have some interesting coding tid bits to post and maybe some user search behavior results.