(Via TUAW.)
Archive for July, 2005
Steve Loughran: “I see everyone in apacheland is posting their route to Apachecon 2005.”
Me? I expect a rather uneventful trip: Milan to Stuttgart by plane on the 19th. Stuttgart to Milan by plane on the 23rd. What else did you expect?
The title pretty much says it all. My copy of Mail.app on the PowerBook (Panther) has an extensive collection of rules that I developed over one and a half year of usage. I’ve manually set up accounts on my copy of Mail.app on the iMac (Tiger), but I’d like to avoid copying rules by hand, one by one.
Is there a file that contains the rules that I might copy over?
It’s been a while, since my latest blog post. The problem is I had a very busy week in Rome, with no Internet connectivity in the hotel (even if I had some, I doubt I would have had the time to post). Then, on Saturday I finally got hold of my new iMac G5 20″ and spent most of the weekend setting it up and transferring data and preferences from the PowerBook.
As you can see from the picture, the iMac has found its home next to the PowerBook. I am mostly using the former for writing code and documentation and the latter for mail, IM, IRC and the occasional blog post.
As for Tiger, I haven’t been exploring its new features at all, save from being able to run Java5 on it.
You can also see that the new furniture hasn’t yet arrived. Delivery of the Mirra shouldn’t be too far away, maybe this week. The rest of the furniture will be delivered later, hopefully before leaving for summer vacations at the end of August.
Andy Oliver: “I doubt Spring will completely fade with the dawn of EJB3, since the prepackaged functionality is useful in other areas. I am, however, doubtful that it will continue to be useful for ORM-based persistence as the built in features of session management and all are more efficient and generally nicer (and will probably work better with a variety of Appserver environments). Spring has a useful place as a cross-appserver stop gap until JDK 1.5 is more widely deployed, but its Hibernate3 support needs some serious rethink especially HibernateTemplate. For the reasons above I would avoid HibernateTemplate and friends when using Spring and Hibernate3 until it has been reworked.”
This is just the conclusion of a long article, and you should really read it all. It has some good points and some not so good ones, in particular the conclusion quoted above.
For one thing, I am pretty sure Spring is not going to fade away, EJB3 notwithstanding, any time soon. Rather, it’s EJB3 that has to face an uphill battle. At the moment, Spring is gaining a very large mindshare and I find it extremely improbable that EJB3 will unseat it, in particular since Spring — as Andy acknowledges — has so much more to offer.
Nor do I think that Spring is a stop-gap solution. And I don’t see how JDK 1.5 can close that gap, per se. But maybe here Andy is referring to J2EE 1.5, or JEE 5, or whatever it is going to be called.
I do somewhat agree on the issue of Hibernate3 support. However, with Spring’s current support for Hibernate2 and Hibernate3, I can move a project from the former to the latter just by changing package names and recompiling, while starting to adopt Hibernate3’s features incrementally, which I already did without pain. This is a huge advantage, in my opinion.
Paul Murphy writes some very nice words about Cocoon:
I have one overwhelming reaction to the difference between Cocoon then, and Cocoon now. Fundamentally it seems to have evolved from science experiment to professional product - there is now a clarity of purpose and design simplicity that promises to make it a joy to work with.
[…] I haven’t downloaded and started up the new Cocoon technologies yet, but it’s clear from the documentation, demonstration sites, and sample code that they’ve gone in the opposite direction: from a scattergun agenda including ritual bowing to market realities (like com) to a clear focus on doing one job as well as possible at each stage in a pipelined processing framework. Looking at it, I’d guess Doug McIlroy in particular, but also Thompson, Ritchie, and the other original Unix creators, would be proud to see one of their core ideas carried forward and expressed so well in a working application.
Thanks Mr. Murphy. We’re glad that you like Cocoon, even though the design is not exactly the simplest possible one, to be honest. I would love to expand on this, but having risen at 4AM to board a plane, I’m not in the right state of mind to do a longish blog post. Maybe later.
As you might know, proponents of so-called “Intelligent Design” are pushing — in the US and a handful of theocratic states, in Europe we are luckily spared this nonsense — for the introduction of the teaching of a purported controversy between the Theory of Evolution through natural selection and their own re-branded version of creationism.
They want us to believe that the scientific world is split between those who believe in Darwin’s theory and those who oppose it and invoke the intervention of an intelligent “designer”, which they studiously avoid naming by the name of “God” lest they be accused of pushing a religious agenda.
If that was the case, one would expect that if we asked a group of scientists which are the most puzzling questions that science faces today, one of them would be “Did life evolve or was it designed?”
Instead, this all-important question seems to have been omitted by those “evilutionists” that run Science Magazine when they published their list of the 125 hardest questions for science.
The only question that comes near is “How and Where Did Life on Earth Arise?”, but it regards abiogenesis rather than evolution and there’s no mention of the possibility of a “designer” in there.
So much for the idea of a controversy.
One of the planned features for The Open Source Zone is an RSS aggregator that could be used to fetch and aggregate news channels from project websites, blogs, Freshmeat announcements and the like.
Obviously, I want to reuse the best Open Source foundations available for accomplishing this task. Looking around for Java-based solutions I found Rome and the Jakarta FeedParser.
The latter seem somewhat more mature and it already includes “an advanced networking layer which meets the requirements necessary for providing XML aggregations services over HTTP. This includes support for If-None-Match (ETags), If-Modified-Since (HTTP 304 Not Modified), gzip content encoding (compression), User Agent modification, non-infinite timeouts, event callbacks for download progress, support for setting HTTP Referrer headers, maximum content downloads (no files larger than N bytes), ability to use custom HTTP methods (HEAD, GET, PUT, POST) etc.”
It also supports autodiscovery and apparently it is being used by Rojo, so it’s not vaporware.
On the other hand, a suitable networking layer is available for Rome as a subproject. Moreover, there is at least one implementation of a persistence mechanism for feeds (Aqueduct-Prevayler) while there doesn’t seem to be one for FeedParser.
Everything considered, I’d be inclined to start experimenting with FeedParser, unless you, my dear readers, have some suggestions to make. In which case, please leave a comment.
Update: my first brush with FeedParser didn’t exactly inspire much confidence in me, as there is no downloadable distribution, but you have to use Subversion and the SVN URL on the website is wrong (hint: the correct one seems to be http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/jakarta/commons/proper/feedparser/trunk/). Then no build instructions are provided. Looks like it uses Maven :(. Luckily, a plain Ant build file is provided and I managed to build a JAR file.
