seanwillson.com

surfing the web today i came across two interesting programming language articles. the first is by tim bray and is entitled on character strings. reading this article i couldn’t help but shudder at the thought of using strings in objective-c. if i have to type stringWithCString or stringWithFormat one more time i’m going to explode. while i’m not a huge perl advocate, i think it gets used far too often than it should, i do think that the string constructs in perl represent an ideal world. it’s easier to get what you want in the format you want it in perl than any other language.


the other article worth a read if you get a chance is by paul graham and is entitled the hundred year language. it’s an educated look at programming language evolution in an attempt to hedge our development with languages that are going to be short lived or quickly converge into a something superior.

there’s a new programming language in town called io. it’s named after the moon of jupiter, which i find cool. i need to find time to look into another language, but i wanted to put note of it here so i can come back and check it out. i’ve been drowning in objective-c as of late.

for those java programming geeks out there, or people like me who just use it to pay the bills, you may find this interesting. coyote gulch (aka scott ladd) has released a new version of jisp (java indexed serialization package). in short it’s a portable platform independent database. very cool if your writing an application that needs a fast in memory storage solution or a structured querying language processor without the overhead of a huge database like oracle or sybase. the uses are endless if you really think about it. thanks to bski for the link.

I found an interesting Java web publishing system called JPublish that was developed by Anthony Eden. It’s not quite what I had in mind for a blogging tool but it’s an interesting start. The more I play with it the more I keep thinking that it’s a proprietary version of Turbine, please correct me if I am wrong. Looking around I can’t help but think that I’m going to have to write my own tool.

See what happens when your out of the loop for 3 months. The latest beta version of Tomcat (4.1.9) has a slick new Struts 1.0 based administration tool. After playing with the WebLogic server console I wondered how long until Tomcat had something similar. It didn’t take as long as one might have though and I think it’s actually nicer than the WebLogic one, I hate applets. It’s not yet as full featured but that’s only a matter of time now that they have something to work from. I guess they also updated the manager web application that ships with Tomcat. It now has an API that facilitates integration with external development tools like JBuilder. I’m now effectively 3 months behind the curve, time to play catchup.

Am I the only person waiting for a Java based Blogging tool? With technologies like Cocoon and Xindice, how far away can it be? I may just have to jump into the fray myself if I don’t get one soon. Here’s how I see it, feel free to correct me if I’m off base here.


Bloggers love things that are free, hell all people love that 4 letter word F R E E. If you look at applications like Blogger and LiveJournal, the proliferation of their use and their sudden rise into the mainstream are perfect examples of the “free is good” manifesto taking over blogging.


In steps the open source community, specifically the Java and XML open source community. They offer all of the tools needed to create a killer blogging tool for, yes you guessed it, free. About all you’d need for this killer blogging tool would be Tomcat (server), Lucene (search), Velocity (template), Cocoon (publication framework), Jetspeed (portal), Xindice (storage), and a little SOAP (used to clean yourself) for good measure. The only thing I can’t seem to find for free is a comment/discussion framework. Anyone know of one? These guys already sold out.


With all of those frameworks and tools, and a few talented and determined webheads, I think you could create a tool to compete with the entrenched Perl blogging community. I’m talking about the likes of MovableType, Slash, and GreyMatter. Anyone up for the challenge? If so, drop me a line.

I’ve been spending some time recently updating my web pages. Adding some dynamic font controls to increase and decrease the fonts, change the font family, and even control the stylesheet used to render the pages. It is all done via JavaScript using this library controls.js. It also relied on some simple cookie reading and writing methods in main.js. These libraries are © 2002 Sean Willson and can be used by anyone so long as your keep the headers in place. Enjoy …


Sorry for not getting that HomeSite extension out that I promised. I’m not sure when or if I am going to complete it. I’m not doing full time Struts work any longer and when I was I didn’t have time. Anyhow, I recently changed jobs and have moved on to other things Java. Look for me to contribute some other web tools to this site in the near future.