Pushing the envelope

As promised...

XDoclet 1.2 beta looks good. I've been trying out the castor and servlet tags today. It makes it a lot easier to evolve the design when you don't have to keep changing your mapping file. It was the work of moments to throw together a couple of beans and collection objects and dump them out to XML. Nice.

Still not sure what to do with regard to persistence. I don't need a relational database (or the hassle), just something quick'n'easy. I toyed with the idea of just storing the raw xml in Lucene, indexed on the various fields and attributes, but I need to look into the querying side a bit more to see how easy (or even possible) it would be to construct queries like 'select * from documents where date is between 10-OCT-2002 and 20-OCT-2002'. I have a feeling this may be difficult, and probably isn't the best use of a search engine anyway.

Things to check out further:

• Xindice
• Jisp
• Prevayler

Any other suggestions out there?

It turns out my radio problem is a known bug. Don't know why I got so annoyed, other than the fact that most of the times I break something out of curiosity the only person who suffers is me, and most of the time I can dig around the source until I know enough to fix it. Or simply roll back. Its a little hard to hide it if you break your blog.

Found a fix on google, so this will be my last rant on that subject. Back to more interesting matters.

I've broken radio. All the so-called 'dynamic' links have frozen pointing to 'www.darrenhobbs.com' after I played around with the upstream via ftp option yesterday. I aborted that idea after finding out that turning on ftp switched off the normal upstreaming to my radio account. Now I've found out that if you ever use the ftp option you can't apparently ever go back. Thank you Userland.

This wouldn't have annoyed me if I could go in and fix the problem, but I can't find the reference that the macros are using, leading me to believe it's buried somewhere in one of the mysterious .root files, which are, naturally, binary.

Now nobody new will be able to subscribe to my RSS feed until I hard code the links back to what they should be.

And to think this morning I'd just about decided to stick with radio for the time being, to minimise the inconvenience to my rss subscribers. Thank you for making the decision for me, radio.

Looks like I will be moving blog software after all.

Actually, the biggest incentive for me to leave radio is because I can't post to it or access my RSS feeds through the web.

Another leaves radio land. It's looks as if more people are leaving Radio behind. The Desktop Fishbowl has left its old Radio shanty to... [<big>kev's</big> catalogue of this and that.]

I'm not sure what the incentive is (even though I'm now feeling it myself) to leave Radio. Maybe its developer masochism, that 'not invented here' feeling that because I didn't write it / its not in my pet language, it must be bad for me. Maybe we feel vaguely guilty about using a 'consumer' product. We're geeks, we're supposed to use two or three arcane command line utilities and a dodgy perl script to achieve the same thing as a normal person using a pointy-clicky GUI app. Or something.

Maybe once the blogging addiction bites then you start wanting to add your own features, which is far easier to do when you have the source in front of you, in a programming language you're comfortable with.