Sunday, 13 July 2003

Oh for fucks sake. Radio's news aggregator really is quite dead. I can't aggregate the freeroller feeds because they keep recurring. And now it looks like I can't aggregate MT feeds either. That, combined with the fact that Radio's programming language appears completely undocumented, I've really had enough. Blah. 8:50:03 PM

Lack of re-usability Jef Raskin: The Woes of IDEs. More modern languages, instead of becoming more maintainable, have gotten less so. This would have surprised Weinberg (see his epigram at the beginning of this piece) and should upset anybody working on or managing a project involving programming today. A prime example of this is Visual Basic (VB). A VB program soon becomes a morass of windows and requires a slog of opening and closing windows to create a program or to follow what is happening in a program. The language is largely unstructured, and writing a program is a wrist-numbing experience. Not only is the environment hellish, but also the language is frustrating to use unless your interface restricts itself to the standard Microsoft widgets. Creativity and imagination are rapidly punished; anything outside the interface norm is either inordinately difficult or impossible to do. The problems with the interface to VB and its reluctance to implement new interface widgets are especially surprising, considering that the person credited with designing VB writes books on interface design. If, like me, you ponder about the subtle relationship between programming languages and their IDEs, you should take a look at this essay. But beware: Quite a few of your favorite languages are mercilessly criticized by Jef... [Lambda the Ultimate] The big problem here is that the barrier to entry to modifying word is too bloody high. Problem with closed source code. 8:42:42 PM

Win32 build of JSR-134 (JOGL, etc) via [JavaBear] 8:40:04 PM

Saturday, 12 July 2003

Michael — Good template build.xml via [Erik's Weblog] 9:44:30 PM

Friday, 11 July 2003

Brian Ingerson: Ingy on Kwiki. I'm in Brian Ingerson's talk on Kwiki. Kwiki is the PERL based Wiki software that is running the OSCON Wiki. Brian is the author of numerous Perl modules. One of the chief design goals behind Kwiki was to make it easy to install. Brian demos this by creating a new directory (that can function as a CGI directory), typing "install-kwiki" and there's an instant kwiki. That's a neat feature if you want to tack up and tear down wikis for specific purposes (like using them as an adjunct to a conference call). [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] Easy to set up wiki? cool... 8:34:42 AM

Best Practices and Web services Profiles. This tutorial examines some of the architectural (high-level) and implementation (low-level) best practices for building Web services. We will examine the following topics, tools, and techniques: WS-I Profiles and Scenarios; Which SOAP model to use; The importance of WSDL and where it fits; Where a UDDI registry is very useful; Planning for maintenance and extensibility; The best ways to access a Web service from a JSP, Servlet and EJB; When SOAP caching is appropriate. Learn from your customers for usable Web apps. Of course you want more customers landing on your site! How do you get and keep them? By asking them to tell you what they want. Usability consultant Paul Englefield discusses how valuable users are when it comes to designing and evaluating your site. Parsing, indexing, and searching XML with Digester and Lucene. Java developers can use the SAX interface to parse XML documents, but this process is rather complex. Digester and Lucene, two open source projects from the Apache Foundation, will cut down your development time for projects in which you'll manipulate XML. Lucene developer Otis Gospodnetic shows you how its done in this article, with example code that you can compile and run. Java programming dynamics, Part 2: Introducing Reflection. Reflection gives your code access to internal information for classes loaded into the JVM and allows you to write code that works with classes selected during execution, not in the source code. This makes reflection a great tool for building flexible applications. But watch out -- if used inappropriately, reflection can be costly. In Part 2 of his series on Java platform internals, software consultant Dennis Sosnoski provides both an introduction to using reflection and a look at some of the costs involved. You'll also find out how the Java reflection API lets you hook into objects at runtime. Don't miss Part 1, Classes and class loading. Integrating ActiveX controls into SWT applications. With the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), you can develop a stand-alone Java application that feels and operates like a native application. If you've spent any time developing Java client-side applications for Windows, you've probably wanted to integrate some native Windows components into your applications. SWT, part of the developing Eclipse Project, fulfills this need by providing a way to easily leverage and integrate ActiveX controls within a stand-alone SWT application. [developerWorks featured content] [Dwight Shih: Development] Request of the week, someone tell me how to use Gecko Runtime Environment inside SWT... :-) 8:12:48 AM

© Copyright 2003 Brett Morgan.