13 May 2002

Psychoo is a set of PHP classes for rapid application development - precisely the kind of technology needed for knocking up quick sites. In pragmatic style, it revolves around a central file that defines your objects including name, types, labels, input methods, constraints, relationships and filters. From this file, database schemas are created and mapped to objects. Different types of HTML forms and form submission handlers can be used with single methods. I like how simple it is to use - developers need not duplicate themselves when modelling data. The best bit is that if you want more control (which you always do), you can create custom classes which will be automatically mapped to the model, and you have a rich (yet clean) API for interacting with objects directly. 6:32:30 PM     Enterprise Object Broker 0.60 (Development) [freshmeat.net] Good to see EOB making good progress. Having spent way too long thinking that EJB actually makes me productive, this is a pleasant breath of fresh air. 12:02:11 PM     I've been slowly grasping .NET for way too long now, but I've just purchased .NET Framework Essentials by O'Reilly. For a Java/J2EE guy, learning the APIs, programming languages and all the nice toys is pretty easy. This book covers the not so obvious stuff like how component assemblies are built and linked and what all those little acronyms actually mean. Developing for .NET without knowing these essentials is like trying to build Java applications without understanding what the classpath is. 11:39:29 AM     The more I use Mock Objects for testing, the happier I get. I've realised that every single class and method I write can now be tested in complete isolation, and even from inside my IDE. It's great. I write a line of code, hit my shortcut key and *bam* - a big red JUnit bar. I modify the line, hit the key and it goes green. Time between writing the line of code and seeing the result is typically about 1 second. Happyness is a cigar called hamlet. To get it this fast is pretty simple. You use the incremental compilation features of your IDE with Jikes to compile to a temporary directory. All you need is the class you're testing, your test case and the interfaces and mock objects for any dependencies. No fancy Ant script, app server, brokering daemon, servlet engine, messaging middleware or source generation needed for the test - your mocks take care of all that. Of course, you still need all that other stuff (especially the build script), just not to test a single class. 9:51:37 AM     I finally took the plunge in the land of lexers and parsers. I've been meaning to learn about these for sometime as I have this little niggling feeling inside that the parser in SiteMesh is still not as fast as it could be. If it was written by a compiler compiler it would be a lot more maintainable and faster. So I've been looking at the combinations of using JFlex and Cup (Java versions of Flex and Yacc) or the famous Antlr. My first parser is for MockDoclet and is designed to be a really fast and lightweight parser for extracting JavaDoc comments and interface definitions from a Java source file (I was originally using JavaDoc for this, but it's wayyy to slow - breaks my five second build patience tolerance barrier). I'm kind of enjoying it. It makes me feel like I'm developing low level stuff when really I'm at an even higher level than before. It also opens up a new world of development opportunites for me - previously I've always relied on other people's parsers so have been lumbered with things like XML as grammars, which may be easy to parse, but it's a pain to write sometimes - too much typing. Relying on other people's parsers for your code? Have a go at building your own - it's very liberating. 9:39:27 AM     Wooo... my first WebLog. I wonder if I'll use this more than my Wiki. 9:08:24 AM

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