Thursday, December 11, 2003

Groovy 1.0-beta-1 is out! It seems to have taken way longer than it should but the first beta release of Groovy is out! Download it here. This release includes... compile time or runtime compilation straight to Java bytecode as well as groovyc Ant task and command line script a Swing based console (groovyConsole) and a simple command line terminal (groovysh) complete with typeo :) full support for properties, fields, native syntax for maps, lists, regex and autoboxing 'true' closures (like Ruby 2.0), static or dynamic typing, operator overloading, text templating GPath (a native XPath like language) GroovyMarkup for embedding structured markup inside Groovy with support for markup, DOM, SAX, Swing and Ant scripting Groovlets - a neat way of writing Servlets using groovy Please be gentle with it, its the first ever official release. All feedback welcome. 8:32:10 PM    comment []

Great TSS post Cameron! I loved this post by Cameron - or should I say Frank Helmut :). LOL! 3:51:14 PM    comment []

My favourite Geronimo logo so far... aint that cute :) 1:34:48 PM    comment []

a few things I find ugly with C# - virtual and override keywords I've been looking at lots of languages for inspiration for Groovy lately so read up a little on C#. There's some nice things in there - metadata, autoboxing, operator overloading - though there's a few things I'm not too keen. virtual keyword First off the virtual keyword. I remember many many times in the old C++ days where someone would forget to add a virtual keyword on a method, meaning you couldn't override something and you couldn't change it without breaking binary compatibilty and you had to hack around it causing much pain. Usually this was all caused by someone just plain forgetting to add the keyword. I much prefer Java's approach of you lock something down when you decide you want to (rather than having to remember to open something up). Afterall its much more common for things to be left open than things to be explicitly closed. e.g. go through the JDK; there's very few uses of final and quite right too. I can't remember ever hitting developer pain in Java when someone accidentally made a method overloadable causing problems - though I still, after 6+ years of java, remember the not-overloadable-pain of C++ and it seems C# has followed suit unfortunately. Sure leaving things open can lead to the fragile base class problem - but thats something for the person overloading your code to worry about. Modern VMs are totally capable of inlining virtual method calls if they're in a hotspot - we shouldn't have to worry about helping the VM squeeze out small percentages of performance improvements - we should be aiming for reducing developer pain. Incidentally its been a while since any application I worked on was CPU bound too; these days its most IO bound, often database bound. taste A quick point on taste: I really dislike the Capital Letters For Method Names. object.Print() is just ugly - coming from a C++, Java, Smalltalk, Ruby or Python background this just jolts the senses; capitals are reserved for types (well apart from Python maybe). I wonder why they chose that? Was is just to make C# code look more different to Java? A bit like using instead of / for path separator or something? Or to make VB people happy? I'm sure C# developers will have got used to it by now - its like all those folks who drive on the wrong side of the road :) but as someone who doesn't work on the dark side, it looks ugly over there :) override Anyways the other thing I find interesting is the override keyword. You can read the argument for its inclusion here. The thing I find totally amazing is in 12-15 years of C++ and 6+ years of Java I've never ever hit the problem they're talking about. Maybe I've been doing something really wrong the last (ahem) nearly 20 years (crikey how time flies) or could it be they've added a language feature that adds yet more baggage for the developer for very little actual gain? summary I'm with Matz on this; languages these days should be about making developers lives easier and fun, removing baggage not adding it, since developers are the expensive resource - let the language & compilers & runtime do more of the work for us. A few things in C# I see as a step backwards from Java. 10:17:00 AM    comment []

a humble request for all MovableType bloggers I Folks like me turn the unread news in my news aggregator into a big blob of HTML and sync it with my PDA so I can catch up on the blogosphere while commuting to work or travelling. Its a little annoying when many movable type blogs only include, say, 100 worlds of the post - you often find that when you're back online & if you remember to go back and look that you only missed 2 words afterall :) Most RSS feeds give you the whole post, so its really neat for offline reading of news. If you're a MovableType blogger, please take pity on us offline-news-readers and enable your full posts to be in your RSS feed.  To do this... Edit your template for your RSS 1.0 feed (index.rdf) and look for <$MTEntryExcerpt...$> tag.  Merely change it to be <$MTEntryBody...$>, save your template, and rebuild your site. Many thanks! 9:51:38 AM    comment []