Thursday, September 5, 2002

Memes... For some time now I've been struggling to come up with a simple meme to describe exactly what Jelly is. Joe Germuska just suggested one that I think I really like. Jelly is executable XML. How's that sound? [James Strachan's Radio Weblog] Finally!!! I've been longing for a description like this. Now if we could just get one for Maven, I'd be much happier.. [josh lucas' Radio Weblog] :-). Glad you like it Josh. Ok here's my attempt at a meme for Maven as well. Project Wizard. Maven automatically does most things your project will need by itself (compiling, unit testing, reporting, deploying distributions and your website, automating IDE integration etc). You can configure it to do things differently, so its customizable. The neat thing is that Maven's based on a plugin architecture and plugins are reusable across projects. Develop a cool plugin and we all get to use it on all Maven built projects. So maybe Reusable Project Wizards is a more apt meme?. Anyone got any better ideas? 7:31:16 PM    comment []

Mock Tags Had a fun time at the Thursday Geek-Lunch in London. I got chatting with Joe about the value of the value of "mock objects" to implement unit testing of blocks of code. Joe had the neat idea of using Mock Tags in JellyUnit to allow us to simulate services and operations in unit tests. This technique also allows us to mock up web services, or arbitrary operations with a mock tag until the implementation is ready. This will make much more sense when using Jelly to script SOAP services, workflow or unit testing. If you're interested there's an example of creating some Mock Tags inside a JellyUnit test case here which then invokes an example service using SQL and web service tags here.. 7:15:04 PM    comment []

Connecting the dots - Scripting in 2005  Although it's a year old, this is a very interesting read on the .net Microsoft strategy. [Miceda] Scary reading, though a clever strategy. MS are the experts in creating, maintaining and extending software monopolies. The common runtime could be a problem for all the various scripting languages out there. Though at least they'll leave Java alone won't they?... This common runtime strategy seems spookily similar to the windows API strategy that MS used to crush pretty much all their competitors (like IBM (OS/2), Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, Corel) in the desktop & developer software world and effectively turn developing software for Windows into a monopoly. Get folks to write to their API that they control. Make some mumbles about maybe it being cross platform one day, maybe, through partners. Dick with the APIs whenever they like to put any competitors at a disadvantage, keep the good internal stuff for MS products or at least hold it back so that MS are always one step ahead, then when its got enough traction, crap all over the non-windows implementations. I guess they're trying the same thing all over again to try move people away from Java and locked into MS again. But are people that stupid not to see exactly the same play all over again? Just had another thought. We've got Jython, Rhino and Jacl (Python, JavaScript and Tcl? for the JVM).  So why can't the JVM be the non-proprietary common runtime platform for scripting languages to share? I wonder what extensions to the JVM would be required to really support all languages and all platforms. 9:05:00 AM    comment []

For some time now I've been struggling to come up with a simple meme to describe exactly what Jelly is. Joe Germuska just suggested one that I think I really like. Jelly is executable XML. How's that sound? 8:28:58 AM    comment []

Better Editor ideas....  A possible better solution than IE for the editor. I found Josh Dura's flash rich text editor I haven't played with it yet, but if the ActionScript is included, it would one possible way to create a cross-platform editor. It would require Flash 6. [A cup of joe] Great editor! Now we just need it integrated into Radio :-) 6:15:39 AM    comment []