Tuesday, December 17, 2002

new programming language called X#? Mary Jo Foley just wrote me and told me to check out her new Windows News site and promptly learned that Microsoft might be working on a new programming language called X#. Hmmm, Don Box is involved. [The Scobleizer Weblog] This sounds like it might be interesting. BEA created a JavaScript-with-XML-syntax-entensions language for scripting web services which does feel a little bit like a hack to me - it'll be interesting to see what X# ends up looking like. I can't help thinking that real programming languages should just provide their own APIs to XML and web services - is there really such a need for a new programming language just for XML? Afterall XML is just a text encoding format. The converse to the above approach is to use real XML and to embed expression or scripting languages inside it. e.g. XSLT, Ant build files, JSP (to a certain extent) or Jelly. Jelly scripts for example are normal XML documents that can be parsed by any XML tool, which can have expression languages or other real scripting languages (XPath, JavaScript, Jython, JRuby etc) embedded inside the XML. I'm yet to be convinced by the hybrid approach of a non-XML-syntax programming language which has kinda-XML syntax support. 2:00:08 PM    comment []

Standalone Uberjar Standalone Uberjar. Just a note about the new classworlds uberjar functionality. Pete Kazmier has written a maven plugin to make it super-easy, if you're sync'd up to maven HEAD. classworlds allows the creation of a single standalone jar for your project which may internally include any other additional jars that are required for your application. This allows for easy java -jar myapp.jar type of execution.... [bob mcwhirter] This sounds very groovy. I really like the idea of being able to create executables, which is one nice thing .Net provides. Its probably a small step to turn the uberjar functionality in classworlds into actual binaries that work on the command line just like traditional binaries. 1:45:27 PM    comment []

Erich Gamma and Kent Beck's Book on Eclipse Erich Gamma and Kent Beck's Book on Eclipse. Erich Gamma and Kent Beck's are writing a new book entitled "Contributing To Eclipse".  You can find the draft manuscripts here. Well, doesn't look like the Java Spider stuff is discussed in the book. [::Manageability::] I'm a third of the way through this paper and its great stuff so far. Up to now I've always found writing an eclipse plugin a little daunting but this paper really helps you get started. One of these days I'd like to learn SWT a bit more; there seems to be some interest around for an SWT version of JellySwing to allow folks to create SWT GUIs via simple declarative XML markup with tight integration into the models and controllers required to implement the UI. 11:20:29 AM    comment []

Really cool Eclipse demos... Really cool Eclipse demos... I found some great Eclipse demos on Carlos's Manageability weblog site. I learned a few neat tricks that I didn't know just by looking at these demos. He points out how these are features that VS.NET does include. This type of stuff should be on www.eclipse.org! Come on Eclipse.org guys why haven't asked Carlos for permission to add this to your site? Major kudos to Carlos for this work! [cup of joe] These are indeed great. I've used Eclipse for a while and I learnt some new tricks by watching these viewlets. All rich UI programs should come with viewlets like these to get you started and show you the neat tricks. Hey its also nice that dom4j and Jaxen are used in the navigation demos :-) 7:55:55 AM    comment []