Saturday, 5 July 2003

Flow Caml. Flow Caml is an extension of the Objective Caml language with a type system tracing information flow. Its purpose is basically to allow to write "real" programs and to automatically check that they obey some confidentiality or integrity policy. In Flow Caml, standard ML types are annotated with security levels chosen in a user-definable lattice. Each annotation gives an approximation of the information that the described expression may convey. Because it has full type inference, the system verifies, without requiring source code annotations, that every information flow caused by the analyzed program is legal with regard to the security policy specified by the programmer. Technically speaking, Flow Caml is also one of the first real-size implementations of a programming language equipped with a type system that features simultaneously subtyping, ML polymorphism and full type inference. Here's a very clear explanation of the basic concept. Section 2.1 of the manual contains several simple examples that will be helpful for understanding how such a system can be used. [Lambda the Ultimate] And who says that language research has died? 9:33:37 PM

On mis-marketing The Animatrix Being the late adopter that I am I just purchased myself a cheap arse dvd player and rented The Animatrix. I won't hide the fact that I was disappointed at The Matrix: Reloaded. It was thoroughly lacking in the writing department. I felt lost in the plot, and worse, I felt no empathy for any of the characters. It made me feel like I was missing half the story. Which I was, because I didn't see the Animatrix beforehand. What they should have done was released The Animatrix to as a theatrical release. I honestly think it would have sold well, and it would have paved the way a lot better for The Matrix: Reloaded. Not that anything could really save Reloaded. It was crap. 8:47:30 PM

Jamon 1.1, a typesafe text template engine for Java. [Erik's Weblog] A templating language with higher order templates? Wheee. This looks good. And it has an ant task for compiling templates. Sweet. 8:42:20 PM

XML Rule engines... The Importance of Dogfood. At work at the moment, we're using a commercial Rules Engine product (that I will not name for obvious reasons1). Rules are entered through a Graphical User Interface that obviously looks really nice when you're giving a demonstration: “Look! With a few clicks you can add a new business rule. All the available objects and methods are in these convenient drop-down menus. It's so intuitive!” The rules are then saved in a set of XML files that are, like most machine-friendly XML, totally opaque to a human author2. [chomp] [The Fishbowl] Not Idiom perchance? :-) 7:28:08 PM

Multi threading. Mutable state. Stable code. Take any two... All the noise on SWT vs Swing speed comparisons is really quite pointless. The only time you will really see a difference in the UI rendering speeds is when you go and do something that is so far outside normal usage that the toolkits are not in their optimised range. The real feel "responsiveness" feel of a UI comes to the fore when a user does something that will take a while, and suddenly the whole UI goes into "I'm not responding now" mode. Thats when the users bitch about slow UIs. And this is not the fault of the UI toolkit. It is just plain bad programming. So really, if you want responsive java code, learn to write code such that all updates happen in a background thread, and then get painted onto the screen when finished, without locking the UI in gone-to-sleep mode. Go on, you can do it... ;-) 5:34:18 PM

Sergio — IE on SWT. [Erik's Weblog] Another one for the todo list... 12:08:44 AM

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