Teknovis

I heard about the Law of Demeter today! Actually, somebody told me about when he saw a piece of code that I had written!

I just heard that Google has released a new programming language called Go! More information is available at The Go Programming Language.

My initial reaction is that I do not see the advantage of this new programming language.

Tags: Google

New Unit of Reviewed Code Quality

Very funny :D

I used this Java Service Wrapper this morning to load a Java Application (in the form of a JAR) as a Windows XP service!

The process was very straightforward, and it worked perfectly first time!

Tags: Java, Windows XP

I have been doing some work with Quartz this week to develop an application that needs to schedule tasks. Quartz provides a very nice way of doing this that is independent of the operating system.

Unfortunately, I had some difficulty getting the example applications to run because I kept getting some general exceptions (that I cannot remember now).

The problem was that I had not included either commons-collections-3.2.jar or commons-logging-1.1.jar in my classpath!

It took me quite a while to discover that :(

Tags: Java, Quartz

I used WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) during the week for the first time. Specifically, I was using WALL (Wireless Abstraction Library - I think!)!

I was really impressed by how simple it made designing a site to support multiple types of mobile devices!

Tags: WURFL

I read about a really exciting new programming language during the week called C# Application Markup Language (CSAML). It is basically the merging of C# and XML to create a totally new programming language! You can read more about it in C# Application Markup Language (CSAML): An Evolutionary Leap.

It is even more interesting to see that a few people have actually been discussing this on bulletin boards!

Tags: XML

I have been doing a lot of work in the last three weeks with XML, Schemas, and WSDLs. It has been a while since I worked with these, so it is very enjoyable!

The XML documents that are based on the files that I am working with will be small, and therefore they will be relatively easy to process with limited resources. However, there are methods of improving the performance of processing XML documents.

One such method is to use the AsmXml parser. This is an XML parser that has been written in assemble language! I am aware of this thanks to a friend, but I am not sure if he is actually using this in a production environment!

Tags: XML

A friend sent me a link to a list of humorous Explanations of common Java exceptions today. Enjoy!

Of course, you need to be familiar with Java to appreciate this humour ;)

Tags: Java

Many years ago I did some functional programming in Haskell. I was using it mainly to solve cryptographic problems, and it was very suitable for this. I really enjoyed it, and I think that I was good at it (even if I am praising myself)! However, I never spent any more time with functional programming.

I have an ex-colleague (and friend) who is still very interested in functional programming. I think that someday this ex-colleague will manage to find a reason to start using it in work :o This ex-colleague recently brought an article about functional programming to my attention. The article is It’s Time to Get Good at Functional Programming, and it provides a very brief, but good, introduction to functional programming. It also describes several functional programming languages that make good starting points to learn more.

The main thrust of this article is that functional programming will become increasingly important as chip manufacturers increase performance by adding more cores to processor chips rather than increasing their speeds.

Actually, after reading that article I feel that I would enjoy reviving my functional programming skills :)

Update

I came across Why Haskell will take over the world by a UCD lecturer.

Tags: Haskell, UCD