Programming project is eating my lunch
I've been maintaining Radio silence this week because of a project to republish the Chef Moz restaurant database as Dining.Name, a dynamic Web site created with Java and Perl and served with MySQL and PHP. I started the project with two goals in mind: Getting more experience developing real-world Web applications and promoting Chef Moz, a corner of the Open Directory Project devoted to restaurant listings and reviews. Chef Moz offers its entire database under an open license, but no one appears to be doing ... read more
Sun to offer alpha builds of Java 1.5
Sun Microsystems is taking applications for an alpha test of Java 2 version 1.5 and has pushed up the beta release date in early 2004, according to JavaLobby founder Rick Ross: I am assured by the J2SE Steering Committee that every possible step is being taken to accelerate the delivery of J2SE 1.5 builds and get them into your hands for feedback and testing, but it just cannot happen until sometime in early December at the earliest. ... read more
Geronimo can take a flying leap
I know it's a bike shed discussion, but I couldn't resist entering the logo contest for the Apache Geronimo J2EE application server. For reasons unknown, the project is steering clear of using the historical Geronimo, so I used the expression "geronimo!" for inspiration and found a picture of a flying squirrel in mid-leap. More entries can be found on the geronimo-dev mailing list. ... read more
Regular expressions are beautifully ugly
For several years, I've been unable to find a suitable Web server log statistics program for this server, which hosts several dozen virtual domains for myself and a few friends and relatives. The commercial options such as WebTrends and Wusage cost more than I want to pay for a server-wide solution. The open-source and free-beer programs I have found are either skimpy on stats or can't handle sites that get millions of hits a year. I've decided to write my own program in Java, a project I'm naming Logfreak. The ... read more
In the Java Specialists newsletter, Heinz Kabutz and Carl Smotricz have devised a way to write BASIC programs in Java with a series of case statements for line numbering, a GotoException, and horrendous formatting: Carl told me that it was possible to program GOTO in Java. Naturally I was curious, so I asked Carl to give me an example. ... What makes me scared is that the code runs and actually works. ... read more
Java coders have lost their POJO
In an interview about Java programming, author Bruce Tate uses a term several times without explanation: POJO. The same acronym is popular on the Apache Geronimo developer's list, so I looked for a definition. It stands for "plain old Java objects," simple classes that are implemented as an alternative to Enterprise Java Beans and other complex methodologies. It appears to have been coined by Martin Fowler in the book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture: The alternative is to use normal Java objects. ... read more
Apache coder offers Java weblog
There's lots of interesting shop talk on the Radio weblog of James Strachan, a maniaclly busy Java programmer who cofounded the Geronimo, Dom4J, and Jaxen projects at Apache (among others). Geronimo, Apache's new open source J2EE server, began in August and seems to be rapidly moving towards its first significant public release. Right now, it's still in Apache's Incubator, a place for unofficial projects to prove themselves, but that's clearly a formality at this point. ... read more
