Thursday, November 13, 2003

Building the next new language.... Groovy? Ted has been chatting about what a new language might look like for working nicely with SQL & XML mechanisms. Whilst Groovy doesn't yet support the cardinality syntax like in DTDs and Xed (which I hope it will soon), it does a good job of supporting an XPath like syntax via closures for navigating, iterating, filtering & transforming objects in a clean way. It turns out to be much more powerful than XPath and just about as concise. Its easy to implement dynamic objects in Groovy so that making arbitrary data from a database (or JMX or XML or whatnot) appear as first class objects with properties & behaviour is a real snap. (e.g. there's a GroovyMBean for making JMX mbeans look like normal objects). Along these lines folks are working on Groovy Data Objects (GDO) using native groovy syntax to query data sources, either via SQL or via in memory queries which goes along way to addressing Ted's concerns on object-relational mapping. Groovy also has a native markup language for a neater, more concise alternative to XML for structured markup, for XML / SAX / DOM / Ant / Swing / bean processing. Using closures and groovy markup syntax you can build new language constructs like adding transactions and so forth into the language. So all in all Ted, Groovy isn't too far away from what you need. Adding support for SQL / XML cardinalities and completing GDO and it'd be pretty close. The neat thing to remember is, this just compiles straight to java bytecode so its still Java (the platform & runtime & APIs), its just a groovy language syntax. Update: Eric you might wanna take a peek at Groovy also. It compiles to bytecode, has an eclipse editor/evaluator plugin and is ideal for integration into servlet containers. Incidentally GroovyPico allows you to use Groovy markup to create & configure Pico containers and components in a simple groovy script. 10:24:48 AM    comment []

Who-hoo I'm back! After what seems like an eternity without being able to blog due to problems with the online store not accepting my credit cards, I've finally managed to renew my userland licence so I can now actually blog again. Hooray! Incidentally here's some old posts from September that never quite made it onto this blog (crikey has it been that long since I blogged)... If you want a neat IRC client try out x-chataqua. Uses tabbed windows for each conversation, nice and aqua-fied and is basically x-chat with all its features. Supports spellchecking etc too (has to be enabled by default). You'll probably wanna configure the colour scheme to something a bit more Mac-y but other than that it rocks. I spotted this pluginyesterday for eclipse which totally rocks. No more messing around with SSH forwarding to get eclipse to work nicely & efficiently with SSH2 based CVS repositories such as - just download this and use the extssh2 form of connection to CVS. Neat! Only downside is, you have to close & reopen eclipse when changing locations (like going home/office) as the plugin can't reconnect if the socket dies. 10:11:08 AM    comment []