Sunday, November 30, 2003

another product i'm tracking is macromedia flex. http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/ flex allows front-ends to be defined in XML, compiled on-the-fly by a server into flash, and then rendered on a flash-enabled client. the server caches the flash so that the compilation only happens once. i'm a big fan of both flash and XML-defined UIs, so this combination looks great! 3:12:21 PM    comment []

one of the most interesting things i've seen recently is the Groovy language project from james strachan: http://wiki.codehaus.org/groovy/ its a language that looks similar to Java, compiles to JVM byte codes, but provides more dynamic typing that Java. i spent a lot of time working with languages like LISP and Smalltalk, so the dynamic type aspect appeals to me a lot. i especially like the ability to manipulate blocks of code as objects. hopefully he'll add the ability to create new code on the fly. 3:08:51 PM    comment []