Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Star Trek star turns to Linux. vnunet.com Aug 20 2002 10:27AM ET [Moreover - moreover...] LOL! And spooky cooincidence this is the same day I spot some news about MS joining an anti-Linux group. Now they really are living up to their borg image :-). 6:06:15 PM    comment []

By bizarre coincidence, as I was writing my last post, my Visual Studio .NET trial DVD arrived. Must resist... On a more Java note, Sourceforge have approved my ViewBeans project. Expect plenty of inaction on that one imminently. Really, really need to sort out my new machine. The commitments are just piling up. [Pushing the envelope] BTW did you know that in JSP 2.0 you can create blocks of JSP code as ciustom tags or as variables and pass them into other JSP blocks. So you could pass the header & footer blocks into a JSP page or custom tag. This might be worth bearing in mind in your 'composite view framework' from a previous post. Is that what the ViewBeans project is gonna be? 6:03:24 PM    comment []

I've started looking at "commons-discovery" today. I've wanted something like this for some time. Its a little library that uses the META-INF/services/serviceName mechanism for loading implementation classes for a given interface. For example this mechanism is used by JAXP to load XML parsers and XSLT engines. So in your code you can lookup an implementation class of a given interface using the interface name. e.g. Foo foo = (Foo) DiscoverSingleton.find(Foo.class); Its a fairly simple mechanism to use and embed within your code. The only complicated part comes with the use of ClassLoaders which can be a PITA on the Java platform. One trick is to try get in the habit of using the thread context class loader. I'm looking into using this discovery mechanism so that new Jelly libraries can just be dropped onto the classpath then they can be used immediately by Jelly scripts... 5:48:14 PM    comment []

Whoa, Jakarta IO TagLib Does XML-RPC. Whoa indeed. Follow the link. More about this soon.. [Jakarta] Crikey, its seems an awefully long time ago when I hacked together the IO tag library. My how time flies. Unfortunately JSTL still doesn't contain any ability to HTTP POST, required for XML-RPC and SOAP. Though hopefully that'll be in version 1.1. 4:32:25 PM    comment []

Microsoft joins anti-Linux group. CRM-Forum Aug 19 2002 9:56PM ET [Moreover - moreover...] What a suprise! :-) 4:30:28 PM    comment []

James Strachan has a new Radio Blog. Not much there yet, but hopefully it will be updated much more frequently than his old blog! [rebelutionary] LOL! :-). Here's hoping. At least now I'll be able to pass comment, easily, on other blogs, which makes it look like I'm writing more than I really am :-) 2:49:12 PM    comment []

The XML Pull API is a good article on the pull parsing API by Elliotte Rusty Harold. As it happens the author of XPP, as well as James Clark, who's an XML god and created Pullax, are both on the StAX JSR. I'm not allowed to give away any details of this, due to the NDA you sign when becoming a JSR member, but from what I've seen of the early drafts, its looking a very promising API and should prove to be much simpler to use than SAX as well as providing both an XMLInputStream, an XMLOutputStream and support for easy filtering. 12:23:03 PM    comment []

Its such a shame that java.lang.Throwable didn't support nested exceptions way back in JDK 1.1 or 1.2.  Sun has fixed it now, in JDK 1.4's java.lang.Throwable but its gonna be quite some time before we can all assume 1.4 as a minimum platform. Plus there's tons of code out there using custom exception nesting. 11:55:40 AM    comment []

Portlet API, first go. Since our portal product will be based on the new Portlet API JSR (JSR168), I'm very happy to see that a very first source release of the API is now available in Jetspeed's CVS. While I still think that Jetspeed basically su*ks, the new Portlet API (which seems to be IBM's brainchild mostly) is great! It's as clean as you'd want it to be, and has some interesting stuff built into it, such as support for different types of clients and a rather nifty personalization API. Me like. (Note: I just found out that the API is *not* the same as IBM's latest Portlet API, i.e. it's not as good as it could be. Me not like) [Random thoughts] Interesting. I had a dig around Jetspeed's CVS and couldn't find it anywhere. I'd like to take a look. I've always wondered why a Portlet API should be different from the Servlet API. Does it derive from Servlets? Afterall you could just use servlet filters in Servlet 2.3 to do personalization or adorn the request with use specific information. I guess it shows I don't know that much about portals :-) 11:38:47 AM    comment []

GLUE 3.2 is shipping next week. it's going to be a fun release! most of my time is now spent working on GAIA. [what's next?] Well the good news is that Graham Glass is blogging so we'll get an insight into his brain. The bad news is now he'll never ship GAIA :) [Joe's Jelly] I've gotta say I've always been impressed with Graham's work.  ObjectSpace had the first and neatest STL implementation for C++ along with a bunch of other cool C++ libraries. Then came JGL which was nice. Then Voyager which was pretty goovy. Glue reminds me quite a bit of a SOAP-ified Voyager. 11:18:10 AM    comment []

Vincent Massol. Vincent Massol and myself will be at XtC tomorrow (Tuesday) chatting about Maven and Jelly. If you're in London, please do pop by and say hello. [james strachan's musings] And me! [Joe's Jelly] Sorry Joe. Of course you'll be there too! :-) 11:04:13 AM    comment []