Pushing the envelope

Darren's take on Java, agile methods, cool open source stuff, interesting technologies and other random wanderings through the land of blog.
Updated: 26/01/2003; 11:49:00.
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  22 October 2002

The value of software

OSAF Post Feedbacks.

I disagree that there is no sense of value for software in this country.  I do agree that I seem to be buying less software than before, but I ask what factors might have caused this change?  Microsoft contributed, but there are other factors involved.

[Don Park's Blog]

I do pay for software. I would pay for more software, if there was quality software out there worth paying for. I think I've said it before, but free / open-source software entering a market won't ipso-facto kill commercial software, but it certainly will raise the quality bar. If the only means for a commercial product to survive in a marketplace is to monopolise it, then it probably doesn't deserve to survive. I bought The Bat, not because there are no free (or indeed pre-installed) email clients, but because it was sufficiently better to warrant its price. If a product takes a team of 50 a year to develop and costs tens of thousands per cpu, should it really have anything to fear from a competing OSS alternative developed in a few months by 3 or 4 people who've never met working in their evenings and weekends? And if it does, does that say anything about its true 'value'?


8:49:09 PM      comment []

RSS Validation

Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have released a nifty RSS Validator. I had a very quick go at running it through Jython, but it fell over as Jython doesn't have the 'select' module. A java port would be nice, but its unlikely I'll have the time so rather than make promises I can't keep I thought I'd just flag it up and see if any of the other java guys feels like taking up the challenge.

Oh yes, and I'm valid apparently. Although I do now feel like an extra in Gattaca.


2:06:33 PM      comment []

Namespace collision

Someone else has a software blog entitled 'Pushing the envelope'. Someone from Microsoft to be precise. I knew it wasn't a sparklingly original title, and when I first started I was going to call it 'Random Thoughts' - until I saw Rickard's. I'd be annoyed, except the other PTE was there first, so my bad (although there only appear to be a couple of posts).

I'm pondering the merits of switching to a fully web-based system such as moveable type, roller, or miniblog, which will involve a URL change and all sorts of other inconveniences, so maybe I'll change the title at the same time just to add to the fun. Darren's Daily Diatribe, perhaps?

On the other hand I'm no.1 on google for 'pushing the envelope' so maybe I can just pull rank (bad pun intended).


11:37:43 AM      comment []

Delegating SAX Parsers vs Digester

Delegating SAX Parser Handler

Delegating SAX Parser Handler.
At work I'm working on refactoring / redesigning something that started as a cool idea. Basically, you register sub handlers to a root handler with the path you're interested in getting messages for (like "/document/header/title" would get you the events for the document title).[Jason Carreira]

It does sound quite similar to digester which allows you to register interest in SAX events using abolute paths, relative paths, wildcards and so forth and apply Rules when the SAX events fire. Plus there's default rules for all kinds of things like creating beans, setting bean properties, invoking methods. There's a default object stack so its very handy for parsing XML config files and turning them into your domain objects.

Competition in open source can be healthy, though I do prefer reuse when it makes sense since it promotes a bigger user community which often results in better software. So I'd recommend evaluating digester first to see if the effort of starting your own project and supporting it is worth the effort.

[James Strachan's Radio Weblog]

I discovered Digester a few weeks ago and have found it very useful. Couple it with BeanUtils and you've got a great way of automagically populating your beans from an XML config. I have a Configuration object that contains a Map of the 'digested' name-value pairs and uses BeanUtils.copyProperties to set the fields on any Object it gets passed. All I have to do is obey the javabean naming conventions and it just works. For an additional check you could include the bean classname in the XML and have the Configuration object complain if it was passed an object of the wrong type.


11:09:13 AM      comment []

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