Shlrm.org Blag

At work I’m dealing with this “Semantic Web” concept thingy. “Web 3.0″ it is called. Frankly I don’t see the point in it yet. The goal is to have the internet also contain data to ensure that computers can find relations in the data and such, not just pages with links that people can browse. One of our projects involves taking unstructured data and mining entities and relationships from it. I’ve picked up a book, the only book, on programming software to (ab)use the semantic web. So far, I am unimpressed. The source code in the book does not match the source code that you can download from the books website. And, the two different packages on the books website (one is just Chapter 2’s code, the other is all the code for the whole book) also had different code, and the “all encompassing” one was even missing the right files needed to run the code!

So yeah, unimpressed.

Reading about groovy. It’s got some really interesting things. It brings the magic of dynamic typing and such (like ruby and python have) to java. But it doesn’t replace java, it simply adds it to java. So when you’re writing a groovy script, you can actually just write pure java and it’ll still work. That’s a very interesting (and potentially evil) feature. Imagine code with groovy and java intermingled. Yikes.

Anyway, there’s also something called grails. It’s groovy’s rails application framework. I’m hoping that it’ll be more useful to me than ruby on rails was. Whilst I was able to get some stuff done in rails, I wasn’t able to do quite what I wanted to do. Things didn’t interoperate the way I wanted them to. Building things to be completely REST-ful was a pain. It may simply be that I don’t know enough to do fully RESTful applications.

Also, testing was a pain in rails. I found several testing frameworks, but none quite fit what I wanted to do. That may have had something to do with my insistence upon using constraints in my database. Rails isn’t built to handle constraints, it wants your database to be dumb. I don’t really think that’s a good thing; having constraints in your database allows the database to make more intelligent optimizations regarding the data. Since rails assumes there aren’t any constraints on the database, it generates tests that break databases that use constraints. There are a few work-arounds, but none that exist well enough to actually run all my tests at once. I can piecemeal them and if I do them in the correct order, everything works just fine.

Regarding ruby itself, I miss the ability to create threads. I’ve finally understood threading in java, and how to efficiently and effectively use threads to handle things. Lacking a similar threading operation in ruby (at least an obvious one) I had a lot of trouble trying to implement some of the things I wanted to do. I love the dynamic-ness of ruby, and I like the ability to just write code and it does mostly what I think it should. There is probably a good way to do threading in ruby, I mean, people have written webservers entirely in ruby, I just haven’t figured it out. I’ll probably still use ruby for things, I’ve got a project or two churning around in the back of my mind to use ruby on, but for now, I think I’ll stick with Java.

This has turned more into a rant about what I don’t like about ruby and rails. I guess I’m hoping that grails will live up to my expectations more than rails did, and that groovy will give me the dynamic fun that I enjoyed with ruby.

I haven’t yet completed an entire application in ruby (well that’s not completly true) and I’m already off on something different.

Groovy feels like Ruby (the name even sounds like it!) but it’s closer to java than Ruby is. That’s good for me to rapidly do stuff. I’ve found that whilst I do enjoy learning new languages and new frameworks, when I want to get stuff done learning the stuff is somewhat of a hindrance for me. Groovy, and it’s framework Grails, shows promise to be the best of both worlds. I (possibly foolishly) purchased the PDF and the Paper copy of Programming Groovy from the Pragmatic Programmers.

I think that if I were to have a favorite publisher, it’d be them. They’re fairly new, about five years old, and located in Texas. I’ve spent more on books through them than just about anywhere else. And I haven’t been dissappointed yet. I also purchased Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. I’m hoping this will help me become more proficient in learning things. It also is somewhat of an interesting subject to me; mastering the mind to further enhance my ability to learn and become an expert in my field.

If you’re looking for some good programming books, I can highly reccomend The Pragmatic Bookstore.

Well, after lots of work I’ve finally managed to successfully (I’m pretty sure) rewrite the existing jaimlib code base into a more object oriented, and hopefully easier to follow, code base.

Ive decided to call it 2.0 because it’s substantially different than the old one. Not really adding more functionality, but the code is substantially improved. It’s also been updated to use generics and needs at least jdk 1.5.

I’m going to attach the tarball to the existing jaimlib site. It’s attached in a Patch Submission bug. It will also be available here.

http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/java/logging.jspx

I’ve found this link to actually explain how to use the Java Logging apis. It’s quite good.

The API’s are missing a few convience methods that I liked from log4j, but they’re not that difficult to migrate. The Logging framework is quite robust and it’s easy to apply run time configuration stuffs. So you can code up the junk and deploy it, tweak a configuration file, viola, no more FINEST logging messages. Yeah, FINEST is something different. There’s FINE, FINER, and FINEST. Those are like what you’d use for DEBUG. Beyond that you can decide what you want to show the users and such. Anyways, this article actually explained the thing to me to the extent that I was able to figure it out :)