Also, it's not much fun climbing upon your 80-year-old house in the driving rain to tie a tarp over the roof the previous owners described as having "no leaks". Sure, depending on the definition of "no".

Looks somewhat familiar...

Janino is a compiler that reads a JavaTM expression, block, class body, source file or a set of source files, and generates JavaTM bytecode that is loaded and executed directly. Janino is not intended to be a development tool, but an embedded compiler for run-time compilation purposes, e.g. expression evaluators or "server pages" engines like JSP.

One of the many worms out there is sending its crap and spoofing the From with my email address. We all know it happens, right? Well, these idiots don't bother to check to see if it's bogus email, instead, they send an automatic verification email to me, for me to prove that I really sent the mail. 30 times. For the same recipient. Of course, they provide no way to anti-verify it. So, I continue to get assloads of their verification mails in my inbox. Helping to solve the spam problem? Not from my perspective.

update

Just received a reply to my complaint...

OK, your address is now blocked. You could have setup filters in your mail client to block us as well.

Doesn't that seem like an odd response to someone providing services to keep your inbox clean? Not even an opt-out response, but more of a "just delete'em" response. Yep, idiots.

A Coverage Tool for Java Developers, Written By a Java Developer

Code coverage for free: a basic freedom? Until recently, the world of Java development had been plagued by an absurd discrepancy: Java developers had excellent free IDEs, free compilers, free test frameworks but had to rely on code coverage tools that charged an arm and a leg in license fees. As a Java pro, I would like to use the same free coverage tool regardless of whether it is a massive commercial project at work or a small fun project at home. I've created EMMA to be that tool.

That's all for now

The BEA WebLogic Workshop controls are immediately and freely available for download at http://www.dev2dev.com/controlpack.com. BEA is sponsoring an open source community to foster collaboration and further improvement on service controls. The community will be hosted at controlhaus, a sister site to popular open source community codehaus, at http://www.codehaus.org.

Had the distinct pleasure of meeting Cameron Purdy and Cliff Schmidt yet again, and Chris Fry, Alex Vasseur and Jonas Boner for the first time.

I'm still in SF until early Friday, so if you're here and I don't know it, look me up.

Service-Oriented Architecture...

It's the buzz in the world of enterprise software development and integration: Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA). And at BEA, we're all over it.

TeXML is an XML vocabulary for TeX. A processor translates TeXML source into TeX.

Berkeley DB Java Edition

So long, and thanks for all the fish...

eth1      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"flyingj"  Nickname:"HERMES I"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412GHz  Access Point: 00:0B:FD:C8:B0:46  
          Bit Rate:1Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity:1/3  
          Retry limit:4   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:31/92  Signal level:-75 dBm  Noise level:-106 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:122
          Tx excessive retries:448  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

Bridging the worlds of NNTP clients and RSS feeds, nntp//rss is an application that will enable you to use your existing favorite NNTP newsreader to read your information channels.

<bob> !time
<ben> The time is Fri, 05 Mar 2004 00:29:14 +1000 in Bensland, Australia. Happy Birthday Ben! (subtle I know...)

Created On:26-Feb-2003 15:55:34 UTC

Since then, we've had the first irregular Haus Party, picked up a corporate sponsor or two, birthed quite a few new projects (some which admittedly should probably die), and overall wildly exceeded any expectations I had when I spent the $35 on the domain.

Without the amazing hausmates, the Codehaus would've been nothing than rebranded Werken Company projects. Thankfully, Werken things make up a much smaller percentage of the goings-on of the haus. So, if you care to celebrate, raise a stein of brew and cheer in another year.

Technologists consume Big-Gulp-loads of information, and write, code, and edit reams of output. Author Charlie Stross notes that he reads and digests more in his morning bookmarks than most literate 18th-century readers would process in a year. Linus Torvalds and other open source leaders hold down day jobs, and still have time to create wonders in their spare time. Everyone at ETech juggles amounts of email that would stun an ox.

While not necessarily a causal relationship, the sampled geeks tended to use plaintext, shells, and email. And index cards. Lots and lots of index cards.

Rebecca, a self-proclaimed "east-coast girl" declared San Diego to be "too sunny".

2.0-beta-13 is actually now out, fixing a problem with the Groovy semantic module. At the same time, I'd like to announce the Kalstride KRules GUI.

mnogo has a nice feature where you can pass limiting search URLs as a query parameter. But I find that to be ugly. So, with a little mod_rewrite, and a Perl CGI which is truly a classic wrapper-facade around mnogo's search.cgi, I've encapsulated my own collection logic using pretty URLs and collection descriptors on the file-system. The Perl wrapper synthesizes a QUERY_STRING that mnogo will eat, and formats the results nicely.

Overall, I'm pleased. I use to hate Perl. Now, I realize that sometimes, it can certainly get the job done.

You could mix the Strawberry and Rice Shampoo with a little ginger ale to produce a lovely beverage. Slices of the Oatmeal and Walnut Body Bar would go well with a cup of coffee. The Lavendar and Mint Bath Beads in a dish for guests to freshen their breath. Maybe even roll up and smoke some Pure Hemp Exfoliating Cloths.

The idea: Get 200 or so smart folks with a lot in common together in one place at one time, let them pitch tents, toss in a Wi-Fi network, and see what happens. Turns out, quite a lot.

Claims about the Web and politics have commonly confounded two different things: retrievability and visibility, the large universe of pages that could theoretically be accessed versus those that citizens are most likely to encounter. While the governing assumption of much previous work has been that retrievability would translate inexorably into visibility, we cast doubt on that claim. Drawing on a large literature in computer science that ties a site's visibility to the number of inbound hyperlinks it receives, this paper proposes a new methodology for measuring the link structure surrounding political Web sites. Our technique involves iterative, extremely large scale crawls away from political sites easily accessible through popular online search tools, and it uses sophisticated automated methods to categorize site content. In every community we examine, we find that a small handful of Web sites dominate. Online political communities on the Web thus seem to function as "winners take all" networks, a fact that would seem to have widespread implications for politics in the digital age.

While the Drools project has previously experienced a drought in terms of releases, the release schedule has once again picked up and active progress is being made. Ring in the new year!

Some of the important changes include:

* 2-phase execution model
* conflict reslution
* removal of Jelly
* simplification of the XML language
* expanded the semantic module framework
* fixed the go-slow bug. several orders of magnitude faster now.
* a Groovy semantic module
* a new manual
* simple bash script to build it (no maven required)
* all dependencies included
* and a brand spanking new website

Keep in mind this is still a beta release, and there are indeed holes in the website and the manual. Good luck and godspeed.

I would like you to Welcome Thomas Diesler that will start with us on the 1st of January 2004 (at 0h00, and I will verify this). <applause />

Thomas will work on the Web Services for J2EE 1.4 and is also interested in better integrating a rule engine in JBoss. He will work out of M�nich and he is thus our first true German-speaking engineer.

Thomas is also the stereotype of the Red-Pill guy: he left East-Germany while he was at the army by doing a risky trip through slavic countries (he was then condamned to a life-sentence by the East-German authorities), had to swim between borders, etc. and .... a few months later... the Berlin wall felt! Somehow frustrating I guess ;)

Another entry in the small but growing management library that suggests purposely slowing down and smelling the roses could actually boost productivity in today's 24/7 world, Tom DeMarco's Slack stands out because it is aimed at "the infernal busyness of the modern workplace."

Tired of writing the same old code over and over again to catch InterruptedExceptions on Thread.sleep() calls?

The example that is so proudly displayed demonstrates how the library makes it easier to sleep without having to catch and ignore those apparently useless InterruptedException s. What this fails to realize is that when an InterruptedException is thrown, chances are, someone is trying to shut things down or otherwise do, I dunno, something exceptional. If you're ignoring them, then you're not addressing the circumstances correctly. You certainly don't need a library to help you ignore them more effeciently.

Thread.sleep(...) doesn't throw InterruptedException just to annoy you. It's done for a reason. Understand the reason and code appropriately.

Individuals and companies interested in making presentations or giving tutorials are invited to submit proposals using the form below. Proposals will be considered in two classes: tutorials and convention presentations (sessions). Presentations by marketing staff or with a marketing focus will not be accepted; neither will submissions made by anyone other than the proposed speaker.

I have just been informed that RELAX NG was published by ISO as an International Standard on 1st December 2003. The full title is: ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003 Information technology -- Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL) -- Part 2: Regular-grammar-based validation -- RELAX NG

This is the first ever release; so I'm sure there maybe mistakes or issues with the source / binary distro; we can fix any issues & do more releases much quicker now. A last minute feature that made it into the release (complete with typeo) thats not yet been documented is the script 'groovysh' which runs a groovy command shell. Its like the swing console but works on the command line - you just need to enter a blank line to execute a command (so hit CR twice).

Current directory: [codehaus] / drools / drools-groovy
Files shown: 8

XQEngine is a compact (roughly 250K) embeddable component written in Java. It's not a standalone application and requires a reasonable amount of Java programming skill to use. It has a straightforward programming interface that makes that fairly easy to do. It's single-threaded and should work well as a personal productivity tool on a single desktop, as part of a CD-based application, or on a server with low to moderate traffic. (Making the engine thread-capable is not overly difficult and remains a future project.)

Proposed Final Draft 29 Oct, 2003

If you write, you need a copy of Strunk and White sitting right next to your Websters Collegiate Dictionary.

The fact is, the vast majority of so-called book doctors are garbage. An exception would be Strunk and White's classic Elements of Style. It was originally written during WWI by William Strunk who was then a professor at Cornell, and it has since been updated by E.B.White, one of his former pupils. Strunk's strategy was to edit down the complexities of English grammar into those few basic elements which would help people to improve their writing skills. His central rule is simple:

So, I knocked upon the door today with a bag of new hardware and said "congratulations, you're a Mac user now!" She's now been vaulted into the 21st century with a G4 iBook, Airport Extreme, Wifi route/WAP combination and a bundle of new software. It was easier than dying a slow death diagnosing Windows.

I'll admit that currently there are technical limitations to allowing business folks to write and deploy rules on IT infrastructure without the intervention of IT staff. But ultimately, IT should be transparent and the people who write the rules (ie, who run the business) on a daily basis should simply be able to do so. If a business person can't write business rules, perhaps he should be flipping burgers down at Krusty Burger.

Of course, I'm also fully aware that some/many business folks don't know how to write rules and only can keep their jobs because it takes IT quite a while to realized bogus rules in code, and by then, it's assumed that it's IT's fault the system doesn't work or make sense. A transparent business rule facilitating technology will make the business side of the enterprise more directly accountable for their decisions. Be careful what you wish for.

I've learned that the rule engine is but a small portion of the entire space of "business rules". There's plenty of room to grow. Nothing quite like a swift kick in the ass to get excited about a project again.

Agile methods don't produce agile enterprises because you're still writing code.

The context is, of course, that a business rule approach and technology can move a lot of your logic out of code entirely, allowing the enterprise itself to be agile. If you're using agile methods to write code, you're still locking business logic up in a form that's not easily mutable. Somewhat similar to doing agile brick laying instead of reconfigurable cubicle farms.

The Advantage USB contoured keyboard sets a new standard for ergonomic keyboards. The Advantage line incorporates the same advanced ergonomic design as our other contoured keyboards and delivers additional features not found on other USB keyboards.

Happy birthday to me!

Change is the only Constant

Your enterprise undergoes change all the time. Entering into new Markets. Introducing new Products. Complying with new Regulations. Making new Agreements with customers and suppliers. Changing business direction through mergers, acquisitions, alliances and divestitures. And the rate of change is increasing daily. Can your systems and procedures keep up?

A Business Rule Application is an Agile Application; one deliberately architected for continuous change in business logic. Even better, a Business Rule Application gives the control of Business Rules back to the business.

XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document, used most commonly by XSLT. There are various APIs for processing XPath. For the purposes of this article I will use the open source Jaxen API. Jaxen is a Java XPath engine that supports many XML parsing APIs, such as SAX, DOM4J, and DOM. It also supports namespaces, variables, and functions.

XPath is useful when you need to extract some information from an XML document, such as a SOAP message, without building a complete parser using JAXM (Java API for XML Messaging) or JAX-RPC (Java API for XML-Based RPC). Moreover, the loosely-coupled nature of web services suggests that the use of dynamic data extraction is sometimes better than using static proxies like the ones produced using JAX-RPC.

In the article I'll show a JAXM Web Service for calculating statistics and a generic JAXM client that uses the service, demonstrating the use of XPath for generic data extraction.

Starting today (as in CM Today :-) ), we are gearing up for a greatly expanded CM Today, one you will find compelling, interesting, and hopefully even a little controversial. We hope to begin to share our new ideas and content with you in the coming weeks and months, so please check back often.

And we want you to participate. We are looking for people to participate in CM Today both as contributors and maintainers. If you have an opinion you want to share, we want to hear it and give you the reach of CM Today to make sure others hear it, too. Please contact Alex Neihaus (alex@cmtoday.com) for information on how to participate.

Once again, thank you and stay tuned.

JOCache is a Java library that implements strict object caching.

The Java Binary Enhancement Tool (JBET) is a general Java program analysis and manipulation tool. Existing class files can be disassembled, reassembled, or edited programmatically through the JBET API. JBET can also be used to create new Java class files from scratch. JBET uses a convenient internal representation of all the contents of Java binary (.class) files, allowing the user to edit the classes easily, in a structured manner.

With the growing acceptance of rapid development techniques in many development organizations the notion of continuous integration of changes has also become commonplace. Continuous Integration involves an automated process in which developers changes are either continually or on a periodically introduced into the application as they are checked into the source code repository.

However you got here, stick around an' get yerself ready for September 19 - International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Singer-songwriter Warren Zevon died yesterday (September 7) after a much-publicized fight with lung cancer. The 56-year-old musician died peacefully at his home in Los Angeles while taking an afternoon nap.

The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) today announced the release of the public draft for the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN 1.0) providing a readily understandable, royalty-free notation designed for both business process design and business process implementation. As an amalgamation of best practices within the business modeling community, BPMN provides a simple, standardized means of communicating process information to other business users, process implementers, customers, and suppliers.

UCMcentral is a popular non commercial "Coffee Break" site providing support and education in the field of Configuration Management. It is the intention of this site to promote CM in both traditional and new areas of technology.

Even adding Cygwin is not sufficient to make using Windows fun. I guess I've gotten used to the Unix way of things, and window managers with 10 virtual screens, and console windows that I can resize, even horizontally, by just dragging. I'm starting to think that I should add a Win32 surchage to my daily rate when forced to deal with this toy of an operating system.

Hopefully sometime soon I'll get the opportunity to return to drools to implement some of these ideas. Particularly interesting would be to allow a working-memory to participate in an XA transaction so that rules may be fired upon commit or even be used to abort a transaction involving multiple resources.

Additionally, we noodled around with some ideas regarding using drools in a distributed cache environment for scalability, in addition to not-in-memory fact bases such as JDBC datasources (or more appropriately, JCA datasources).

So, no, not much content in this entry. Just noting that sometimes you have to connect with someone in real life to breath some enthusiasm back into a project. Plus, my blog had rolled all entries, and was completely blank.

I mourn its passing. Good thing a new coffeeshop with gratis Wifi has opened nearby.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. The database community is interested in XML because it can be used to represent data that originates in repositories by providing structure and the possibility of adding type information.

The symposium theme is the combination of Database and XML Technologies. Today, we see growing interest in using these technologies together for many web-based and database-centric applications. XML is being used to publish data from database systems to the Web by providing input to content generators for Web pages, and database systems are increasingly used to store and query XML data, often by handling queries issued over the Internet. As database systems increasingly start talking to each other over the Web, there is a fast growing interest in using XML as the standard exchange format for distributed query processing. As a result, many relational database systems export data as XML documents and import data from XML documents and provide query and update capabilities for XML data. In addition, so called native XML database and integration systems are appearing on the database market, whose claim is to be especially tailored to store, maintain and easily access XML-documents.

We met in Medford, Oregon for 3 days July 12-14, 2003 to discuss the future of ANTLR. Specifically, we wanted to discuss what a future version of ANTLR (3.0) would look like. We made a list of what we didn't like about the current system and made a wishlist for ANTLR 3. There are four raw, stream-of-consciousness documents that resulted from the cabal. The documents are summarized and linked to below. Feel free to comment on the documents to the antlr-interest list, but the real "request for comments" will occur once a real whitepaper has been flessed out.

Ayn Rand's Anthem is a short dystopic novel about a man who escapes a society from which all individuality has been squeezed. Its allegory is crudely transparent, and the ideas have lost their political urgency. (The book was published in 1938, a decade before Orwell's 1984.) But Anthem provides a good introduction to Rand's philosophy of "objectivism," which is built on individuality, freedom, and reason.

ARLINGTON, Va.--Mike Wendy says he doesn't hate open-source software.

Wendy, spokesman and policy counsel for the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), says he just wants to make sure government agencies don't unduly favor open-source or free programs over proprietary software.

"We want a process that is not based on automatic preferences," Wendy said.

BERKELEY, California (AP) -- A number of prominent scientists got some support from a congressman in challenging the way their publicly funded research papers are handled by for-profit journals. Congressman Martin Sabo, a Minnesota Democrat, has introduced legislation that would give immediate public access to all research papers created mostly with federal money, regardless of which journal publishes them.

The latest official build is 2.0-beta-11 .

This is mainly a checkpoint for folks before heading down the path to 2.0 beta-12 on the way to 2.0-final. The roadmap will give you an idea of where we're heading.

PapersINVITED.com was conceived and developed to assist those numerous scientists, professors and student researchers who have had a difficult time in tracking Calls for Papers from professional bodies, universities, journal editors and other conference organizers.

PapersINVITED.com brings an exhaustive list of Calls for Papers in all areas of specialization to your fingertips.

Morphon XML-Editor now available under a free software license

The Morphon XML-Editor is now being offered under a free license, there are no strings attached. Morphon Technologies would like to increase the user base of the Morphon XML-Editor. Having a larger and varied user base will help us understand better the future needs of our users.

To use the free XML editor, you will no longer need a license key. You simply have to register (optional) and then download Morphon. The software is fully functional with no crippling features, no time limit to usage.

Release 7.6 is the latest installment of my experimental implementation of the new XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 specifications. For the first time, this release also includes support for XQuery 1.0. In all cases, the product is aligned with the working drafts published on 2 May 2003, though of course not all features are implemented.

FreeCache is a system of

* cooperating caches to move
* large files of
* free content
* closer to users.

Around the turn of the Century, (year 2k), we began seeing software projects that were attempting to try a new development approach called Agile. Most were implementing Extreme Programming, and their reasons were to reduce cost, improve software quality, better manage project risk, and to offer the business quicker functionality in the form of frequent releases incorporating smaller sets of change.

Today, the surprising hostile takover by Jaxen of SaxPath was announced and executed. The code formerly in the org.saxpath.* namespace will now live in the org.jaxen.saxpath.* namespace. Jaxen 1.1 beta2 will soon be released to include this functionality. If you are currently using SaxPath for something else and want to upgrade, you just need to change the package name, as everything else is the same.

Randall Knutson has released the first prototype for a remote desktop using XUL. Point your Mozilla XUL browser (e.g. Firebird) @ http://robin.sourceforge.net to call up a fresh desktop with a startup menu and play XulMine, Mozteroids, Pagman, Snake, Xultris, MozInvaders and more. What is Robin? Here's the "official" blurb from the sourceforge project site: Remote Operating System Build in Netscape (Robin) is a window manager using DHTML, Javascript, XUL and some crazy hacks.

Google AdSense is for web publishers who want to make more revenue from advertising on their site while maintaining editorial quality. AdSense delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to what your readers see on your pages --- and Google pays you.

You've come to a friendly place, and we welcome you to our book-lovers' community. What is BookCrossing, you ask? It's a global book club that crosses time and space. It's a reading group that knows no geographical boundaries. Do you like free books? How about free book clubs?. Well, the books our members leave in the wild are free... but it's the act of freeing books that points to the heart of BookCrossing. Book trading has never been more exciting, more serendipitous, than with BookCrossing. Our goal, simply, is to make the whole world a library. BookCrossing is a book exchange of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind.

Basically, I write the docs so I have the requirements, which allows me to write the tests, which then help write the code itself. Things that make sense while writing the tests or code start looking goofy sometimes when you have to describe them in prose documentation. So, if you feel like an ass trying to describe how to use a component, that's a code smell that means you probably need to refactor.

So, I'd like to solicit experiences from others if you've used this type of development before. Most everywhere I've worked, either commercially or on open-source, documentation was an afterthought. Drop a comment or email bob@werken.com.

JMXP is an application protocol that provides access to information about a JMX Agent's MBeanServer and the MBeans registered with that MBeanServer. JMXP also provides a mechanism for transmitting the Notifications emitted by a JMX Agent's MBeans to remote clients.

Anyhow, a night shooting the breeze on a variety of topics with a guru was certainly more edifying and enjoyable than spending time at the JUG. I also, once again, learned why I like to stay out of downtown Atlanta. Crowds, one-way streets, turn-only lanes. Yum.

CiteSeer is a scientific literature digital library that aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of scientific literature, and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness.

Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeer provides algorithms, techniques, and software that can be used in other digital libraries. CiteSeer indexes Postscript and PDF research articles on the Web, and provides the following features.

I used to work for CAPS Logistics, which was owned by Baan, which was owned by Invensys. CAPS was my only foray into large corporate empires where the org chart is so large it stops making any sort of sense.

A U.S. investment group has agreed to buy Baan a Dutch business software company, from Invensys and merge the unit with another software company in a move to broaden the product and customer base of the new venture.

Invensys has sold Baan to the U.S. private investment group, consisting of Cerberus Capital Management and General Atlantic Partners, for $135 million, the London company said Tuesday in a statement.

The deal comes several weeks after Invensys said it wanted to put Baan up for sale.

Carbon is a light-weight component model that serves as the foundation for a services based architecture. Carbon has the following objectives:

* Create a more flexible architecture via a decoupled, metadata-centric system
* Reduce complexity by providing access to services as small replaceable components
* Encourage the separation of concerns, resulting in code assets that are easier to maintain, adapt and reuse in a complex and dynamic operating environment

8:00 am -- Seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network. Their charter "is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects".

The JBoss Group has been forked. And I'm here in San Francisco to tell you about it.

Our research seeks to bring modern information management and retrieval technologies to the average computer user in order to make computers a more compelling place for users to interact with their information. Haystack looks into the use of artificial intelligence techniques for analyzing unstructured information and providing more accurate retrieval. We also deal with the modeling, management, and display of user data in more natural and useful ways.

If you're interested in AI, you've come to the right place! The Artificial Intelligence Depot is a site purely dedicated to AI bringing you daily news and regular features, providing you with community interaction as well as an ever growing database of knowledge resources. Whether you are a complete beginner, experienced programmer, computer games hacker or academic researcher, you will find something to suit your needs here.

So, here're my questions: Are there any hard-core java developers in Atlanta? Any of you guys want to meet for coffee? Or should I go to C/C++ users groups for mental stimulation, and avoid all of the java weenies?

addendum: Just to clarify, I do not think of myself as a guru. I'm looking for real gurus who can stretch my mind and ways of thinking.

The dust was thick on my copy of the 1985 Clocksin and Mellish classic, Programming Prolog. But Ted Neward, author of the forthcoming book Effective Enterprise Java, brought it all rushing back: expert systems, declarative rules engines, predicate calculus, backward- vs. forward-chaining evaluation.

We strongly recommend people interested in XQuery join the talk@x-query.com mailing list. This list is for practical discussion about XQuery: a place to work together to learn a new language, talk about problem solutions, discuss engines and implementations, chat about the latest announcements, and so on.

Got the blogging system set up today.

MovableType is now available for hausmates or projects.

Business rule engines are moving toward maturity. In 2003, they will support business agility when called on to do so.

Extensible Rule Markup Language (XRML) can support the automatic processing of implicit rules embedded in the hypertexts and help human browse them for their comprehension. The topology of XRML in contrast to XML and HTML is shown in Figure 1. XRML aims to convert itself to XML for browsing, and assist the generation and maintenance of consistent explicit rule structure

This month the Crossroads News writers discuss the issues surrounding SCM for agile development projects and how to make SCM itself be more agile. We also welcome author and SCM evangelist Brad Appleton as our newest Contributing Editor with his regular column Agile SCM.

QDox is a high speed, small footprint parser for extracting class/interface/method definitions from source files complete with JavaDoc @tags. It is designed to be used by active code generators or documentation tools.

I'd rather not see this effort go gently into that good night. XQuery and cousins will be REC pretty soon, and I still strongly think the world needs an alternative. Basically, I think all we need to provide something people can latch on to is a refinement of my original straw man to take into account all the discussion that followed, and putting together a couple of foundational modules. I think if we were able to get together for a few hours at XML Europe, we could probably get most of the former done, and start useful discussion of the latter. I know that a decent number of the folks here will be at XML Europe, so what do you think of the idea?

Take Amazon, for example. The whole e-commerce process is just data management. The cool part of amazon is the suggestions it makes for you. That's computations. Likewise, bioinformatics, resource optimization, cryptanalysis and web indexing/searching represent way cool problem domains to me.

It seems to me that it's in the computation that real value can be added to a system. There are a bazilliion systems that can collect an e-commerce order, all of about roughly the same feature set. The "you might also be interested in..." feature is the value-add which might help you sell more books. Tracking trucks isn't difficult, but routing them efficiently can directly affect the bottom-line.

Reading the trade press, folks seem to be questioning the value of IT investments. I have a feeling it's because they aren't creating IT projects that actually add value. Replacing a PHP order-entry system with a Java order-entry system of pretty much the same core features, maybe with a more modern architecture or language just doesn't seem to make much sense to the bottom line.
It's like replacing the carpet in a bricks'n'mortar bookstore.

So, I think I'm arguing (and certainly self-servingly) is that organizations should keep their existing data management applications, even if in PHP, and find ways to fund value-add projects. The promise of XML is that these heterogeneous systems can interface. We've taught to fear stovepipe systems, but we can just relabel them as best of breed and focus on adding to systems, instead of whole-sale replacement. You need to find the computational aspects of your business and target them. That's where you'll differentiate yourself and affect the bottom-line.

Of course, folks who know me probably find this ironic, as I'm a chronic re-implementor.

One issue, whether the specification would be submitted royalty-free, apparently has been resolved, as all submitters have agreed to not seek royalties, or financial compensation, for their contributions to the specification used in any implementations, according to the source.

IBM and BEA have previously agreed to not seek royalties, but Microsoft had not made such a vow.

I've personally struggled with OWL for a while since Danny Ayers (rawblog, semantic blog) planted the idea in my head of mixing drools with OWL.

Does anyone else care about XQuery. Does anyone want to see a jaxen-esque XQuery engine?

Anyone who is interested can view the slide deck here.

note to self: figure out how to get this Toshiba displaying on both the external VGA port and the LCD at the same time. Got a crick in my neck craning around to look at the 15' screen behind me to see where I was in the presentation.

I attended the reception for speakers and met Floyd M. (sorry, but I have no hope of actually spelling his last name correctly) from The Server Side, Jason Hunter of JDOM, Craig Russell from Sun (JDO spec lead), and Elliotte Rusty Harold of Cafe Con Leche. Luckily, Floyd didn't smack me in person after my recent blog entries. Had nice random chats with ERH and Jason regarding Jakarta and such. And Craig gave me some insight on how Sun deals with JSRs and reference implementations (bottom line: "it's complex").

It's always weird meeting someone for the first time in meatspace after interacting with them digitally for years sometimes. Personally, I know that I ascribe arbitrary faces and voices to people I've never met. Of course, I'm seldom accurate. I can only wonder how folks envisioned me (if at all) before this evening.

I did note how much more quickly conversations occur when they aren't being handled through email.

So, maybe more useful notes tomorrow, after I actually attend some of the presentations.

So, if you're in the Bay Area and want to grab a beer, talk about open-source, or offer The Werken Company some work, let me know either via bob@werken.com, or if it's time-critical, meet AT werken.com (obfuscated so I don't get some much spam on the shoephone) which will deliver 160 characters to my right hip.

TheServerSide has added me to their freaking spam list and provide no way to remove myself. I've logged on, and the box saying "Subscribe to TheServerSide newsletter and Event Notification" is unchecked yet I still get their crap. The mails contain no removal instructions.

Likewise, Java Developers Journal added me to their spam list somewhere along the way. Yes, their mail offers removal instructions, but they are futile. I've removed myself from their list at least a half dozen times, and yet they persist in sending them to me. It seems that they clone their original master list for each vendor they sell it to. Any unsubscribe requests only seem to affect the clone, and not the master.

So, guys, this is pure bad practice and is going to garner you some bad press.

So, if Floyd, Alan or anyone else associated with either of these two organization reads this, you need to get your act together and stop irritating your readers.

If BPEL4WS becomes the de facto standard for Web services choreography and transactions, will the intellectual property owners take advantage of you? That's not absolutely clear. Implying that there are barriers to BPEL4WS becoming a W3C standard, the W3C's Janet Daly said, "BPEL4WS has a [intellectual property] statement that, as it stands, makes it questionable as to whether it could be used as a foundation piece." That stands in stark contrast to the promise for WSCI, should it progress to the ratification stage at the W3C. The W3C recently adopted a royalty-free position with respect to the standards it ratifies.

This document describes the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 1.2, an XML language for describing Web services. This specification defines the core language which can be used to describe Web services based on an abstract model of what the service offers.

This JSR extends J2EETM with business integration SPIs.

Definition of an annotated Java syntax and APIs for programming business processes in Java.

I'm still working on the generic syntax, but someone with an interest in BPEL4WS and an affinity for Jelly and web-services could certainly jump in, hack in the BPEL4WS module and win fame, glory, fortune and prestige.

If interested, pop on into irc.werken.com at the #werkflow channel, or ping me at bob@werken.com.

Java developers need to publish synchronous and asynchronous Web services and compose them into reliable and transactional business flows. Web service orchestration standards (SOAP Conversation, BPEL4WS and WS-Transaction) are emerging and need to be packaged into a reliable and easy-to-manage software solution. So we've gathered a wealth of information to get you up-to-speed quickly.

Web services technologies are beginning to emerge as a defacto standard for integrating disparate applications and systems using open, XML-based standards. In addition to building web services interfaces to existing applications, there must also be a standard approach to connecting these web services together to form more meaningful business processes. In 2002, a number of new standards were introduced to address this problem, including BPEL4WS and WSCI. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of these emerging standards, to help the reader better understand how web services orchestration can be accomplished today.

The Werken Company also maintains a couple of other open-source projects, including one that caught his eye--and mine, when he mentioned it to me--called drools, a rule-based inference engine, much as tools like ILog Rules and Jess are. (Two others I hadn't heard of before but are mentioned in the drools documentation are Haley Eclipse and CLIPS.) Naturally, having been interested in Jess long before this and having consulted for a company that was deeply involved in the whole business rules concept, I had to take a look. After about ten minutes' worth of looking and experimentation, I figured I'd blog about it. :-)

So, if you have a need, please send questions, RFPs or good jokes to bob@werken.com.

Because programming languages are at the core of writing software, programmers should have a thorough understanding of how languages are designed, implemented, and manipulated. This course concerns itself specifically with the implementation and translation of computer languages, leaving an in-depth study of language design to another course. Students will learn the formalisms behind computer languages, but the focus will be on developing the ability to build languages and their translators.

This class is only moderately difficult for the most part, though some of the language formalisms take a while to sink in. Well, actually you have one major hurdle to get over and then it's easy--abstraction in the sense of recursion, meta-language, programs that generate other programs (or even themselves), etc... If you get a headache when you try to figure out how the first C compiler could have been written in C, you might invest in a big bottle of aspirin

Ter is making lecture notes and lecture audio available for download.

For example, filing taxes is quite important, but not necessarily urget just yet. Getting the trashcans to the street today since it's trashday is urgent, but not overly important, since we have very little garbage this week.

I think the key to managing time effectively is finding the things that are both urgent and important and doing those. Defer the items that aren't urgent and important. I find I have the most mental stability when I accomplish things in the following priority order:

1. Urgent and important
2. Important
3. Urgent
4. Luxury

Okay, time to jump off the bandwagon now. I've said my piece.

Now, I typically don't think too much of many of the W3C's recommendations, but this thread shows me there's some smart peoplle really considering the issues here.

Now, if only it wouldn't cost me $50,000 to join the W3C...

Thanks to James Strachan for pointing this thread out to me.

I would definitely urge the WS Choreography WG to look at models that combine PetriNet with process algebra and pursue the development of a specification along these lines.

Happy birthday, Rebecca!

For anyone playing along at home, the appropriate CVS repository to check out used to be wfx but now it is simply werkflow.

To clarify some ideas floating around out there the the blogburgh....

werkflow no longer uses drools but instead uses a purpose-designed implementation of a RETE-like algorithm. Likewise, it no longer uses petridish but instead maintains its own optimized/simplified Petri net framework.

This is all a reaction to over-generalization. This (3rd? 4th?) rewrite of werkflow has aimed for simplicity in implementation over generalization simply for the sake of generalization.

werkflow is a flexible, extensible process- and state-based workflow engine. It aims to satisfy a myriad of possible workflow scenarios, from enterprise-scale business processes to small-scale user-interaction processes. Using a pluggable and layered architecture, workflows with varying semantics can easily be accomodated. Processes can revolve around documents, objects or any other entity.

Anyhow, check it out. Come chat on IRC. If you're in the South, let's have lunch, and I'll explain to you how everything is workflow and how everyone needs werkflow.

Release 1.17 is now available for download. The SMIME/CMS classes now support compressed data, CMS supports encapsulated signed data, and SMIME now allows for the sending of binary files where base64 is not appropriate. RC2 processing now works for the full range of parameters, and the X509Name/Principal classes are now configurable when it comes to string processing (in other words you can now support any "standard" way of doing this you want). A few minor bug fixes have been made as well.

Who really needs anything besides rot-13? That's uncrackable, right?

I've stumbled my way through many an academic paper just trying to guess the meaning of symbols from the contxet. Having this resource just rocks.

“Seems like every time I install a system patch, something else goes wrong with my system,” said Frank Beier, president of Web design firm Dynamic Webs. The designer said many system administrators won’t patch for many months, because they don’t trust Microsoft to fix the problem without breaking some other function of the software.

“In most cases, I'm better off just playing Russian roulette with the hackers until our servers are broken into,” he said.

Which makes me think. Every time there's a large-scale attack, folks come out with a number like the attack cost businesses $35 million. How much would it have cost businesses, though, if everyone had installed the security patch on the same day last summer, and had all of their systems break due to the patch itself? Admins across the country applying the patch, applying other patches, fixing conflicts, re-installing, etc, for several days. Sure, I'd call that $35 million also, probably. But, since admins tend to not all patch on the day a patch is released, we don't see the big balloon cost to business of the patches.

Instead, lots of businesses lost a few thousand here and there as their admins are waylayed attempting to make the patches and all other software on the machine happy.

So, I'd like to see a study to determine how much applying wonky patches costs business each year.

The quote above may have it right on the money. If you patch a system that never gets broken into, you've spent time (and thus money) for nothing. A guaranteed loss. If you don't patch a system that never gets broken into, you've spent no time (thus no money). If you don't patch a system that does eventually get broken into, you'll spent time (thus money) fixing it. So, I think these guys are typically playing the probability game. An uncertain cost later is better than a certain cost now, monetarily speaking.

Time for me to update the maven plugin, it seems.

The ANTLR 2.7.2 release is a feature enhancement and bug fix release, partially brought to you by those hip cats at jGuru.com. It has been about 2 years since the last release so expect lots of stuff to have been fixed and improved.

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist is a movie within a movie, created to spoof the martial arts genre. Writer/director Steve Oedekerk uses contemporary characters and splices them into a 1970s kung-fu film, weaving the new and old together. As the main character, The Chosen One, Oedekerk sets off to avenge the deaths of his parents at the hands of kung-fu legend Master Pain. Along the way, he encounters some strange characters, one of which is a cow trained in the martial arts.

Water™ is a new all-purpose Web programming language that delivers both power and simplicity.

A quick-ref sheet is available.

The latest official build is 2.0-beta-10 .

A few more issues and I think we'll be pushing 2.0-final out the door in a few weeks.

tangent: Canada is fargin' cold. Glad to be back in Georgia. A lot of work on werkflow did get done while up there though. Good things.

Anyone in #maven knows my perils but maybe this'll help other random folks attempting to do what I did.

After getting an HP laptop with bad hardware (random reboots), I procured a Toshiba 5205-703s, which has the radically cool 1600x1400 resolution. It also has the radically uncool legacy-free BIOS, which means you can only frob the bios from Win32. No F1 or whatnot to get into it before loading an OS.

Redhat 8.0 didn't support this machine very well out of the box. The biggest key to getting a legacy-free Toshiba machine working is the ACPI patch to that linux can learn your IRQs from the BIOS.

You can't simply patch RedHat's 2.4.18 kernel sources, since they're mutated from the main tree. I attempted a 2.4.20 kernel with the ACPI patch, which worked, but kept my load average at 1.8 when idle.

This morning, I went back to a 2.4.19 kernel, applied the ACPI patch immediately, and then added my network modules.

Internal WIFI now works and load is a nice fat 0 when idle.

The cPad mousepad works, but only as a PS/2 device. Once I enable USB, it goes wonky and disappears. I've played with the Input-Core stuff and the *HCI modules, to no avail. Some other week I'll attack that. Sound works beautifully also.

One note: when booting up the initial RedHat install, it freezes when kudzu does a probe. Just do a manual boot sequence and prevent kudzu from running. Once you have an ACPI kernel, kudzu causes no problems.

Back to work...

Back in the C++ days, I could, thoough conversion methods and operator overloading, make an API as simple as this for en end-user:

transition.addFiringRule( Foo.RULE && Bar.RULE )

Without, I have to do this in java:

transition.addFiringRule( new AndRule( Foo.RULE, Bar.RULE ) )

To many humans (ie, developers), infix notation is notably easier to read than prefix or postfix. Operator overloading allows us to use existing infix symbols instead of having to create a semantically similar prefix symbol set implemented as objects.

Somewhat related, I think folks who are creating expression languages should take the time and effort to create a real parser for it, instead of using ostenbily a prefix/postfix XML syntax.

This makes me feel dirty:

<and>
  <or>
    <term>...</term>
    <term>...</term>
  </or>
  <term>...</term>
</and>

FVWM is an extremely powerful ICCCM-compliant multiple virtual desktop window manager for the X Window system. Development is active, and support is excellent. Check it out!

I just bought a new laptop (HP ze5185) and burned some RedHat 8.0 CDs and did the big install. No longer is fvwm2 included in the distribution it seems. My only choices are gnome or kde, neither of which do I like. I've been used to scp'ing over my .xinitrc, fvwm2rc, and my .emacs and feeling at home.

Now, I have to go find an rpm or compile from source. That's just silly. And I would've thought that enough folks were using the linksys wireless devices to include support for them in the distribution also. Alas, nope. More downloading and compiling of pcmcia-cs and linux-wlan-ng.

No wonder my dad doesn't use linux.

The latest official build is 2.0-beta-9 .

Notable in this release includes:

....Better ant-based build, for the maven-impaired
....Cleaned up gratuitous (non-used) dependencies
....A few bugfixes only fleetingly seen in beta-8
....More stuff I've probably forgotten

At the time Sendo declined to give all the reasons for the split, saying only that it had not been given access to so-called 'source code' which would allow it to tailor the software.

It is source code, damnit. Not so-called "source code".

Now I remember why I don't read CNN's so-called "website" too often. Long live boortz.

update: Folks keep asking what inspired this. It was inspired by the massive number of "Foo Sucks" headlines I've seen in the past 4 days. We could all get pretty tired pretty quickly trying to enumerate all of the sucky things in the world. Instead, why don't we just search out and promote the good non-sucky things instead?

Be like Plato: search for The Good.

This site serves as a repository for workflow modelling patterns. These patterns can be used to examine the expressive power of a workflow server that you intend to work with or they can serve as a set of ideas how to implement given business requirements having some workflow server already deployed in your organization

Welcome to the home of ebPML.org, a website dedicated to the architecture and technologies of Business Process Management Systems (BPMS).

For some reason, probably due to the number of fingers most of us have, we prefer nice 'round' numbers that include lots of zeros.

Since I've shot my mouth off about not knowing who's behind a blog, here's me, working on my 100th entry.

(yes, intentionally self-referential)

Keywords: messaging, async, service, ovaltine.

Plus, the screenshot includes mention of cheese, so it absolutely has to be good.

Includes plugins for Eclipse and NetBeans.

XPath Explorer (XPE) is a GUI application that lets you interactively experiment with XPath. Basically, you type in a URL (to an XML or HTML document) and an XPath expression, and it displays the elements or attributes from that document which match that expression. It also displays the value (string, number, or boolean) of the expression, and (in a stunning coup de grace) displays the entire XML tree of the original document, but with the matching nodes highlighted in bold. This makes it easy to play with and debug your XPath expresions.

By popular demand, we've added a reverse gear! Now when you click on a node, XPE will generate an XPath that uniquely identifies that node. If you double-click (or click the "Use This Path" button) it will close the circle and select all nodes that match that XPath -- should be the one you clicked on, huh?

The generation algorithm basically walks up the tree until it finds the document root, or a node with an id tag (since ids are supposed to be unique in XML), then walks back down, building the path by position.

Attack me in your blog and you'll get in the triple digits on FreeRoller!

Just so you know, as others have discovered. If you don't have any actual legitimate points, just trash me and the way I express myself in your blog! It will be a sure winner and you'll reach the triple digits onfreeroller! So have at it! Flame away! (But for now on I'll ignore you...sorry ;-) )

Kibo. Kibo. Kibo. Kibo. Kibo.

classworlds allows the creation of a single standalone jar for your project which may internally include any other additional jars that are required for your application. This allows for easy java -jar myapp.jar type of execution.

Please do not interpret the above statements as an indication that I condone Phish.

Would there be war if we all listened to Phish, the Dead, Widespread Panic, Blueground Undergrass and all of the other happy twirly music? Listen to Phish. Do it for the children. You don't hate children, do you?

Everyone involved wants to write conformant implementations, for technical or marketing reasons. In order for conformance to mean anything, it needs to be defined. Bear in mind that conformance and certification are not the same thing: "certification" seems to be what marketing people hear when technical people say "conformance". It would be much easier to allocate resources if a case could be made that the extra effort of testing and, thus, conformance is worthwhile. Without making conformance meaningful or trying to enforce it, testing will be seen as an added bonus and will not be as central as it needs to be. Again, end users and consumers are at the losing end, since they won't be able to make sure the implementation they choose is conformant.

Personally, to me there is nothing better than a well-written, clear, concise spec. Marshall Rose's RFCs for BEEP and its bindings to TCP are excellent examples. Most RFCs are pretty good. Most specs lead by individuals (such as most RFCs) tend to have focus, whereas those authored by an organization which costs thousands of dollars to join tend to be meander muddled messes.

To its credit, the BEEP community is attempting to put together cross-implementation compatibility and conformance test suites.

The XPath 1.0 recommendation is pretty good, aside from a few ambiguities and the confusion inherent in XML namespaces. OASIS recently came out with conformance tests for XPath, but alas, they are quite tied to XSLT.

JSR-94 (Java Rule Engine API) has its share of problems.

One of the key features seems to be allowing an object reference to actually be a reference-to-a-reference but still used without the programmer being aware of the double indirection.

For those of you with C/C++ backgrounds, gilgul seems to add pointer to a pointer with automagic deference semantics.

The examples on the site seem to indicate that it could be used to solve some of the same problems solved by AOP, while at other times, seems to be a distinct architectural method (see their state pattern example).

Looks cool. Guaranteed to be stuck in academia of course, since it so radically mutates the familiar Java concepts and isn't bytecode-compatible with the JVMs in the wild.

Oh well.

Object identity is usually regarded as a corner-stone of object-oriented programming. The observation that this concept in fact combines two distinct notions lies at the heart of Gilgul's model that provides the conceptual basis for the programming language Gilgul. Its central idea is a strict separation of these notions, namely the notions of reference and comparison.

Gilgul's model can be illustrated with an implementation technique called Identity Through Indirection [KC86]: Here, a reference to an object is realized as an object oriented pointer (OOP). An OOP points to an entry in an object table which holds the actual memory address of the object (see figure 1). Since Gilgul's model needs not to be restricted to the implementation technique of an object table, it is only claimed that object references point to entries which hold referents that represent the actual objects. Contrary to Java, where references themselves are immutable, it is possible to manipulate referents in Gilgul and in this way, to replace objects at runtime.

XPDL 1.0 uses the popular XML language to describe a business process. A process defined in XPDL (a set of XML statements) can be imported into any workflow engine that supports XPDL. The related objects and attributes (data associated with the process) are now also included in the XPDL process definition. The XPDL process definition can be generated by workflow modeling and simulation tools, or can be manually coded, or can be exported from another XPDL-compliant workflow engine.

Session Title: Introduction to XPath Processing in Java with Jaxen Time/Date: Friday (March 28, 2003) 8:30 am - 10:00 am Track: XML Programming Format: Class Level: Intermediate

Description: XPath is one of the more useful and powerful specifications developed around XML. Jaxen, a free and open-source XPath implementation can assist developers in applying XPath within their own application. This siminar will address the issues surrounding XPath, such as the XML-InfoSet, XML-Namespaces,variable bindings, and how Jaxen can be used within an organization's XML-handling application.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-12-10T16:05:07+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000380_bpmlbpel4wsbpmn.html Somehow, amongst the random bpfoo specification releases over the last 45 days, I missed Business Process Modeling Notation from the creators of BPML.

It aims to be a graphical notation, sorta like the UML and the spec includes mappings to BPML and BPEL4WS. So, maybe we should consider it a graphical equivalent to the XML Infoset, for business processes. Maybe that's cool. I like abstract Infosetesque things.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-12-09T22:20:32+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000379_conversation_support.html Conversation Support from IBM seems to be yet-another addition to the fray currently occupied by bpml, bpel4ws and wsci.

I have yet to dig deeply into it, but on the outset, it does seem closer to what I've been pondering with regards to the strengths of werkflow.

The technology proposes and implements a conversational model of component interaction. In that model, a component’s functioning is divided into two broad categories: interoperability technology and decision logic. Here, “decision logic” is a catch-all term for what is usually regarded as the true function performed by the component, regardless of how or by whom it is done. In an e-business, for example "decision logic" is often called the "business process". The interoperability technology is the software the e-business uses to communicate and interact with others, especially other e-businesses.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-12-06T03:28:02+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000378_coding_in_the_small.html Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck has changed my life in 48 hours. While I haven't completely gone test-first, I have radically changed the way I write code.

Specifically, I'm using a lot more fine-grained interface-based designs in order to make testing with mock objects easier. My test-cases now actually demonstrate the logic instead of just blindly exercising methods after a bazillion lines of setup code.

TDD has forced me to think about coding in the small so that I focus on exactly and only the portion I'm currenlty working on. Over the past 3 days, I've noticed that when I do jump around and revert to my old ways, I end up writing myself into a corner again.

Initially, TDD seemed much slower but in the end, elapsed-time per tested functionality is actually much lower.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-12-02T00:32:41+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000377_better_javadocs.html The -use option to javadoc can greatly simplify the life of someone attempting to understand your code. It's especially useful with developer versions of javadocs which should also use the -private option.

-use Includes one "Use" page for each documented class and package. The page describes what packages, classes, methods, constructors and fields use any API of the given class or package. Given class C, things that use class C would include subclasses of C, fields declared as C, methods that return C, and methods and constructors with parameters of type C.

For example, let's look at what might appear on the "Use" page for String. The getName() method in the java.awt.Font class returns type String. Therefore, getName() uses String, and you will find that method on the "Use" page for String.

Note that this documents only uses of the API, not the implementation. If a method uses String in its implementation but does not take a string as an argument or return a string, that is not considered a "use" of String.

You can access the generated "Use" page by first going to the class or package, then clicking on the "Use" link in the navigation bar.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-11-27T17:00:51+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000376_better_xml_serialization_for_rdf.html RPV: Triples Made Plain describes Tim Bray's new proposed serialization of RDF assertions.

The current RDF serialization format confuses me. RPV seems much clearer. Maybe, hopefully, it'll lower the bar for RDF-enabled applications?

There's been musings of an RDF semantic module for drools and possibly hooking drools into some Linda/TuplesSpaces implementations, such as JavaSpaces or JXTASpaces. Piping space objects and properties to drools via RDF, or ideally, RPV, would definitely allow some coolness.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-11-23T11:09:42+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000375_xpathng.html Uche Ogbuji has set up the XPath-ng mailing list for discussing something to follow XPath 1.0.

Yes, the W3C does have XPath 2.0 in progress, but there is the general opinion that it's overblown and too dependent upon other specs, particularly XML Schema.

XPath 1.0 rocks because it so closely follows the 80/20 rule. XPath 2.0 from the W3C looks significantly less enlightened.

As the project lead for jaxen, I'm following the XPath-ng conversations closely.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-11-21T12:14:25+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000374_always_have_a_plan_b.html So, I haven't blogged in a while, and I needed something new to read, so I fed in an arbitrary search term (coffee) into CiteSeer, and Conditional Nonlinear Planning by Peot and Smith churned up.

Work-in-progress on the design of a conditional nonlinear planner is described. CNLP is a nonlinear planner that develops plans that account for foreseen uncertainties. CNLP represents an extension of the conditional planning technique of Warren [75] to the domain of nonlinear planning.

Reading this paper, I definitely think that magic of the human mind comes from its non-linearity. Creative epiphanies typically come from non-linear reasoning. Finding better or more efficient ways of accomplishing a goal comes from non-linear planning. Ostensibly, making lemonade when life gives you lemons is a non-linear activity.

As has been mentioned, I've spent some time doing logistics planning, mostly with regards to transportation planning and scheduling. There has always been a pretty large disconnect beteween the planning and execution in the transportation industry. While telematics can provide a real-time view of the environment, there is still very little dynamic re-planning to react to the environment. We deal in terms of historical statistics when making a plan that executes in a decidedly concrete world.

Dynamic replanning can plan around a changing environment, while it seems non-linear planning can plan for a changing environment.

I'm just fascinated by techniques to allow us to better model the imperfect world via the perfectionist computer.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-11-18T02:34:01+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000373_esoterically_cool.html JSimul is a java-based simulated annealing package.

JSimul is a JAVA-based simulated annealing package consisting of three layers:

• A swing-based user interface that provides intuitive access to the tuning of the algorithm's parameters.
• A simulated annealing algorithm coupled with a downhill simplex, mostly a JAVA object wrapper around two algorithms in Numerical Recipes (1) (ameba & amotsa). The driver is inspired from the example book(2), but I've added my own clustering scheme to test for convergence.
• Examples of a third layer (ie: test objective functions to minimize) are provided with the release. Refer to the directory structure section for their location. Presently, this third layer must be written in JAVA. Adding the flexibility of using C or Fortran code (through JNI) is high on the TODO list

I love things that search solution spaces, particularly for solutions that aren't necessarily correct or incorrect, but rather feasible or optimal. I've got a strong interest in genetic algorithms which are a somewhat distant cousin of simulated annealing. What is cool (pun intended) about SA is that its based upon the real-world metaphor of slowly cooling metal during the annealing process.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-11-10T02:41:55+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000372_make_it_look_like_outlook.html dynamicobjects spaces is just one example of the trend of everyone wanting to make everything look like Outlook. We all complain about how crappy MS software is, how they can't design a humane interface to save their ass, yet we attempt to make every application look like Outlook.

At my previous Day Job, we were working on a logistics execution application. It looked like Outlook. Hrm.

Outlook's 3-pane design might be roughly useful for applications that mostly just organize data. But, for robust applications that have user interactions that are more complex than pushing bits from one folder to another, please attempt to resist the urge to make it look like Outlook.

[disclaimer: I still do email using Pine 3.96 and vi]

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-11-08T00:53:37+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000371_national_go_crazy_day.html Looks like Russell forgot his medicine this morning. We all have political ideas and agendas, but I prefer to think of the java.blog world as a place we can set aside irrational/emotional crap, and go about getting some real work done.

]]> Opinion bob 2002-11-05T16:11:59+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000370_new_scm_patterns_book.html Stephen Berczuk and Brad Appleton have just published SCM Patterns. That's software configuration management not supply-chain management in case you're confused. Brad's a smart guy, even if he has an unnatural love for Rational ClearFoo products. I like SCM, having done a little time with accurev.

This book describes many of the common problems organizations face when using SCM in a way that is not consistent with the needs of their organization. The book presents the patterns organized in a pattern language that shows how the various structures that you need to use for an effective SCM system build on each other. ]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-11-03T22:07:31+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000369_personal_citeseer.html I love CiteSeer, but I need some help. I need something, maybe a bookmarklet, that can help me organize my various findings while browsing CiteSeer. Accumulating bookmarks in mozilla isn't useful and makes it difficult to share my findings. I basically want to be able to have a blog that's centered around a research topic.

In addition to possibly adding to a bloglike recently added page, I'd want to be able to index the page multiple ways (ie, by topic, by project, by date, etc...). Ultimately, it could scrape the CiteSeer page and download a .pdf or .ps to a local cache.

Surely there's a MovableType Perl hacker out there who has Copious Amounts of Free Time to hack something up. I think MT has most everything we'd need. Just need to sort of repurpose it.

Bonus points if it's WikiEnabled.

]]> Opinion bob 2002-10-29T21:46:25+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000368_29_29.html Well, I'm 29 today. Life is good. I have a wonderful wife and son, a house full of pets who I think appreciate me and extremely enjoyable work. Though, I could always use more books if anyone, ahem, wants to help me celebrate.

]]> Home bob 2002-10-29T00:57:56+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000367_application_isolation_jsr.html JSR 121, the Application Isolation API specification looks kinda cool. Unlike many JSRs, this one at least has a fair number of public documents at this stage in the game (scroll down).

This API provides a uniform mechanism for managing Java application life cycles that are isolated from each other, at least with respect to object reachability, but that can potentially share underlying implementation resources. It provides a means of deploying new Java implementation features that enable and enhance scalability while providing an alternative to ad hoc control schemes.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-27T02:14:32+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000366_serverside_wet_dream.html The Avalon Project over at Jakarta has blown my socks off over the past 48 hours. It is a server-side hacker's wet dream.

I've always enjoyed the idea of component-oriented architectures. Unfortunately, most component frameworks decided to assume network-accessible distributed components. So, I always ended up avoiding them, using normal JavaBeans and hacking in my own lifecycle and broker patterns. Never the same way twice.

Jason van Zyl kept promoting Avalon to me (plus, I'm going to have to use it on the Day Job(tm) anyhow), so I finally dug in. I decided to make werkflow be Avalon-enabled. Having Avalon force me to think about components has definitely helped the design and extensibility. The configuration mechanism, while a little wacky, is certainly nice. And I'm finally understanding the true benefit of inversion of control.

So, if you want flexibility and life-cycle management in a component architecture framework that doesn't assume you want distributed object, definitely check out avalon.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-24T17:47:08+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000365_business_models.html As many of you guys know, The Werken Company as a hopefully-viable commercial venture, is pretty new. You may also be familiar with our various open-source projects.

We've had the extremely good luck to have some of our development sponsored by Zenplex, a company that uses, supports and produces open-source software.

So, I'm wondering how many of you guys know you have a need for a rules engine, or a workflow engine, or whatever else we're churning out here at Werken. How many of you have done any sort of cost/benefit analysis comparing building in-house, licensing a commercial offering, or supporting an open-source project?

Ideally, I'd like to have our open-source projects treated as sort of a venture fund. Many organizations with a need for rules, workflow, or whatnot could contribute dollars towards the development. Sure, development continues without sponsors, but sponsors get their use-cases considered quicker, their bugs fixed faster, and their voices heard more often in general.

I know the now-defunct SourceXchange attempted something similar, but lacked the coherent organization of developers by instead simply hooking random developers with random sponsors. I think we're different as we have a history, code you can inspect, projects that are already underway, and a developer headcount greater than one (there's three of us werkers, now).

Would your organization be interested in sharing the costs of development of these infrastructure pieces with others and support the open-source community at the same time?

]]> Opinion bob 2002-10-23T03:45:10+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000364_notes_on_postmodern_programming.html Notes on Postmodern Programming is a nice paper to make you think about what it is we're doing.

These notes have the status of letters written to ourselves: we wrote them down because, without doing so, we found ourselves making up new arguments over and over again. When reading what we had written, we were always too satisfied. For one thing, we felt they suffered from a marked silence as to what postmoderism actually is. Yet, we will not try to define postmodernism, first because a complete description of postmodernism in general would be too large for the paper, but secondly (and more importantly) because an understanding of postmodern programming is precisely what we are working towards. Very few programmers tend to see their (sometimes rather general) difficulties as the core of the subject and as a result there is a widely held consensus as to what programming is really about. If these notes prove to be a source of recognition or to give you the appreciation that we have simply written down what you already know about the programmer's trade, some of our goals will have been reached.

via slashdot.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-23T02:20:47+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000363_beep4j.html Brett Morgan mentioned ny beep4j project but complained about the broken domain-name. The problem is that SourceForge is almost complete crap and can't handle more than a single vhost entry, apparently. This has been a probelm for a long time and has yet to be fixed. Hence, my slow migration of my projects away from SourceForge.

Brett.... You don't allow comments on your blog?

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-19T20:29:33+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000362_internal_apis.html Mike hits the nail on the head with this one, while thinking about mock objects.

Rule 2 is especially interesting, because mock testing forces you to think of your code as an API - as you now have two 'clients' (your other code, and your tests). I think in the end it will lead to a much nicer architecture.

I think this is the absolutely #1 reason there is so much crappy code in the world. Folks, for some reason, view APIs as being in the realm of frameworks, libraries and other infrastructure, where it's not something to consider while writing an application. Though, we must not forget that the public, protected, private and in java's case, the wacky no keyword, but package protected all force us to think of several different APIs.

private The API used only within your class. It can be a very informal API, as as wicked as it may be, absolutely no one else has to suffer it. Feel free to live in your own filth.

package protected You're opening yourself up and telling your close friends some of your darkest secrets. These are things you don't necessarily want to whole world to know, but you should at least make them presentable to others.

protected This one is a bit weird. You're still sharing with your friends, but now, any moron who walks up and decides that you are his god has certain access to you.

public Most of the world cares about this, and you don't want to frighten, confuse or scare them. Simplicity is good. Interfaces, interfaces, interfaces.

Anyhow, yes, I agree, Mike. People who don't really consider their classes to be ultra-small APIs even to be used by other classes in the same package, they are basically just writing (possibly poor) procedural code glommed onto an object.

Ick.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-15T02:04:21+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000361_java_community_process.html James Strachan continues the JCP discussion, regarding his experience with JCACHE.

I totally agree with Cameron on this. JSRs should be developed in the open. Anyone should be able to comment on JSRs, while they are still under development and see the discussions that their comments cause. Right now any comments you send to a JSR from your perspective typically just go into a black hole.

I'm on quite a few JSRs, including the JCache JSR (and developed the first non-Oracle JCache implementation at my employer, SpiritSoft). I think its very sad that JSRs don't operate in the public.

Sun's reasoning behind this is that typically various companies on the expert group need to give away details of their intellectual property and so only want to do this in private amonst other people who have also signed NDAs. This NDA issue is a real problem in big business, but then maybe this highlights that standards should mostly be created by individuals, in a totally open manner (like most open source projects) rather than being vehicles for big business to gain competitive advantage.

I've often wondered if a new standards body could form, following the Apache style guidelines to running open source projects, where standards are created in an open manner using a meritocracy.

My only two direct experiences with the JCP were...

1. The JDOM JSR (102, I think). Pretty much developed around the refence implementation (JDOM) and in the open on the jdom-interest list. But, I'm annoyed that it isn't very clear to most people that JCP is merely a process and not necessarilyi some form of blessing form Sun. And as far as processes go, I think the JCP is a pretty bad one for all the reasons Strachan and others have outlined. With JDOM having a JSR, I've seen many folks assume that JDOM will become the officilal or sanctioned object model for XML. This is not the case, and if you read through the jdom-interest archives, you'll hear the founding members say as much.

   I was, for a while, a member of the JDOM expert group due to my contributions through the Jaxen XPath engine. Aside from adding some comments via jdom-interest, which anyone could do, I didn't really feel that special. The JDOM JSR is also probably one of the slowest moving on the JSR track.
   



2. As implementor of drools, I have an interest is JSR-94, the Java Rule Engine API. I had many many folks ask if drools would support JSR-94 even before it was publically available. It's a question that everyone asks and that no implementor can answer until actually able to judge the appropriateness of the JSR.

   I deemed JSR-94 to be inappropriate in its public-review form to give any effort towards making drools compliant.

   As requested during the public-review period, I compiled my comments and sent them to the comments address. I've heard absolutely nothing in response. I have no idea (and absolutely no faith) that JSR-94 will in any way be affected by my comments.
   

With a few exceptions, the JCP is most definitely a Cathedral and not a Bazaar. It's a cathedral behind a very tall, very thick hedge. Surrounded by a moat. With alligators and snakes.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-14T09:39:02+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000360_planning_and_scheduling.html As you might know, I've recently been working on a workflow/process engine known as werkflow. Some folks want to use it for large-scale business processes, some think it could drive UIs, and others think it might make a suitable EAI component.

I personally come from a resource planninng and scheduling background, of sorts. Workflow involves a lot of resource planning and scheduling but potentially on a different scale than I am used to. So, this is a call to all the readers out there...

I'm currently thinking that the workflow itself handles the planning aspects of activities to be performed. So, mostly it's a resource scheduling problem. Resource scheduling is NP-hard, but there are a ton of different heuristics that can be used. With werkflow , I'll at least have a pluggable scheduling framework, to allow for specialized scheduling algorithms. But, I'd really also like a general-purpose, tending towards real-time, scheduling engine to ship by default.

When dealing with longer scheduling horizons and activity execution times, we are afforded more time for complex scheduling. It's the short time horizon case that I'm unfamiliar with. Anyone out there have a favorite real-time algorithm? Ideally, it'd introduce very low overhead in a mostly contention-free environment. I'm thinking along the lines of werkflow being use to drive your typical web-app, where you have almost enough database connections, etc. Once we start scheduling trucks for cross-country hauls, I'm back on familiar ground.
So, anyone with any useful ideas or algorithm names I should plug into CiteSeer?

(Sorry folks, but I find problems like this infinitely more interesting that the RSS-Dialect-Of-The-Day or My-MVC-Framework-Is-Better-Than-Yours topics...)

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-14T01:43:08+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000359_net_legends.html For the longest time, the people who qualified as net legends was pretty small, and pretty much universally agreed upon. Sure, each group had their own legends, as the open-source community has ESR, RMS, or Bruce Perens The Original Author of The Open-Source Definition (yes, I think that's his full name). Others, like Knuth seem to rise above any particular community.

Now, with blogs and maturity of open-source organizations, it seems that communities are getting smaller and therefore it takes less to become a luminary within any particular community. Strangely, it seems that luminary status is somewhat transitive. Joe might be the luminary in the Froboz community, which only has 5 members, but he's respected by luminaries of other, much larger, communities. Sorta like the Senators from Rhode Island.

I recently found the java.blog community and pretty quickly established that Brett Morgan and Russel Beattie are people to listen to. I'm not a part of the RSS community, but I seem to understand that Sam Ruby and Dave Winer are at least making a lot of noise.

Over in jakarta, even that small community is fragmented. The maven community listens to Jason van Zyl (jvz) while, once again, the gump community looks to Sam I think. James Strachan (jstrachan) crosses several communities both in and out of jakarta.

One thing to note, is most luminaries tend to be known by their logins, initials, or some handle. A few are known by their whole names. I'm certain that RMS knows he's a net legend, but do all net legends recognize their status? Do they realize the power they throw around, necessarily, whenever they make an idle comment?

Sorry, no links, excerpts or references. Just random thoughts.

]]> Opinion bob 2002-10-12T14:15:48+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000358_article_about_maven.html Maven ties together tools for better code management is an article by Jeff Linwood talking about some of the highlights of maven.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-12T01:02:26+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000357_petri_net_reading.html The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management - van der Aalst (ResearchIndex) is probably what I'd call the starting-point in your journey through CiteSeer to accumulate knowledge of Petri nets.

Brett Morgan had asked that I produce references to the papers I read to go from zero to Petri in 2 days.

Overall, W.M.P. van der Aalst seems to be the shinig light in the world of Petri nets for workflow systems.

For what it's worth, petridish supports coloured petrinets, but werkflow does not take advantage of them. Werkflow has exactly one colour of token flowing through the network: bare java.lang.Object s.

Anyhow, Brett and others, start with that paper and explore CiteSeer. Aalst is The Man.

(One of his papers was also recommended by a commentor).

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-11T09:04:33+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000356_cmm_is_not_a_methodology.html Capability Maturity Model for Software, also known as SW-CMM is an assessment tool to measure a given methodology. I'm sure many of you guys know this. But, lots of folks writing for software development journals and HR staff writing help-wanted adverts apparently do not realize this.

I'm just tired of reading articles that describe the extremes of metholodies ranging from XP to CMM. XP is a process. CMM is a way to assess your implementation of your selected process. All processes, and even not-using-a-process can be considered 'CMM', though just CMM Level 0.

At my current gig, we're doing a pretty consistent SCRUM process. While it's a light-weight method that has produced very little paperwork, I think we could be assessed higher than level-0.

The Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM or SW-CMM) is a model for judging the maturity of the software processes of an organization and for identifying the key practices that are required to increase the maturity of these processes.

Anyhow, just trying to do my part to clear up confusion in the world. I hope it helped.]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-11T02:39:06+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000355_web_services_gartner_has_an_opinion.html Gartner grades the Web services standards really isn't all that insightful. But then again, the companies I've worked for who were Gartner clients were wasting money as far as I could tell. Buy a couple of your neighborhood gurus a few espressos and they'll give you an opinion as worthy as Gartner's.

Somewhat funny quote though...

Higher up the Web services stack, Perlstein gave BPEL4WS a Promising rating, and called it the "worst-named specification."

]]> Opinion bob 2002-10-11T01:05:42+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000354_petri_nets_awareness.html petridish: the petri net framework is yet-another BobProject(tm).

I'd originally planned on building werkflow using blissed, which is a finite-state-machine framework. But, then, a few folks chatted with me about Petri nets, and I did a lot of reading from CiteSeer. I have decided that yes, Petri nets are indeed the way to go.

Hence, the new project.

No release yet, but just trying to raise awareness, since workflow seems to be a somewhat hot meme these days.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-10-09T02:21:10+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000353_masturabatory_blogging.html I've seriously reduced the number of blogs I read in the past weeks, as the main topic of conversation has turned towards RSS and aggregation. While that's all well-and-good, it's really not something I want to read about in 12 places every day. I know there's a (r)evolution going on in the RSS world, but all of these blogs about blogging and aggregation just seem a tad masturabatory. When I pick up a newspaper, I'm pretty much hoping that it'll contain information aside from that about the printing industry. Likewise, I read blogs to learn about non-blog ideas. Sure, there's a certain sense in dog-fooding the experimental RSS technologies, but I'll stick to Russell, Strachan and other folks who don't feel the need to make RSS/Blogging 98% of the content on their blog.

]]> Opinion bob 2002-10-01T10:53:20+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000352_pretty_urls.html User-Centered URL Design touches on a meme I've noticed recently. I personally got frustrated with jakarta-struts and the fact that it required me to produce ugly URLs in my particular use-case. Russel has recently complained about ugly radio URLs.

The article references Tufte...

But despite the universality of URLs, we often forget that they're not just a handy way to address network resources. They're also valuable communication tools. They help orient users in your architecture, and can suggest whether other options are available.

In Edward Tufte's classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, he coins the term chartjunk to refer to needless visual flourishes that contribute nothing to the effectiveness of an information design in communicating to its audience. These days, our URLs are loaded down with something very similar: long strings of characters that exist only to satisfy some technical constraint, detracting from the effectiveness of our URLs as communication tools. Call it CMSjunk.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-27T23:01:38+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000351_drools20beta7.html Well, I just released version 2.0-beta-7 of drools. You can read the full announcement.

I've tagged CVS (DROOLS_2_0_BETA_7) and released new source and binary distributions. I've also pushed a new jar to the repo if you're using drools from a mavenized project. http://drools.org/releases.html

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-27T22:50:18+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000350_nontech_freedom_of_speech.html I guess I'm glad to know that political ad restrictions don't affect Leno and Letterman (what about Conan?). There mere fact that the feds have to clarify that entertainers can talk about an election near polling day shows us just how close we've gotten to losing some of our guaranteed freedoms.

I'll take freedom instead of security any day. But then again, I'm a libertarian.

Jay Leno ( news - Y! TV) and David Letterman ( news - Y! TV) still will be able to joke about federal political candidates in the weeks before an election. The Federal Election Commission ( news - web sites) says comments like theirs are not covered by the new campaign finance law.

The law, which takes effect Nov. 6, prohibits special interest groups from airing ads identifying federal candidates within one month of a primary or two months of a general election.

]]> Opinion bob 2002-09-27T11:26:59+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000349_scariest_clown_ever.html This evening, Rebecca and I watched Vulgar. Produced by Kevin Smith of Clerks fame and having a clown as the main character, we thought it might be a fun movie. It's a good movie that I certainly recommend. But it most definitely is not in the same genre as Clerks. It's somewhat a mix between Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shakes The Clown and Deliverance.

Plot Outline: A young man finds fame as a transvestite clown named Vulgar.

Tangentially, my all-time-favorite movie is probably Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch. The soundtrack by Neil Young is especially cool.

]]> Opinion bob 2002-09-26T02:16:52+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000348_qdox.html QDox caught my attention today. I'm not sure how/if it's better than XDoclet (having never really looked at XDoclet). I have no idea when I might use it. But, it just seems like one of those projects I should remember for a later date.

QDox is a high speed, small footprint parser for extracting class/interface/method definitions from source files complete with JavaDoc @tags. It is designed to be used by active code generators or documentation tools.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-26T00:03:59+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000347_classworlds10beta1.html classworlds 1.0-beta-1 has now been released. Still might not be ready for prime time, but we'll never know if you don't try it out and give it a spin.

Also, fwiw, classworlds is intended as a full replacement for forehead.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-24T17:13:03+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000346_classloading_differently.html It's not quite ready for prime-time, I don't think, but James Strachan already blogged me, so I might as well blog myself. I've started classworlds, a new project to hopefully help rid ourselves of classloader psychosis once and for all.

It effectively turns the ClassLoader tree hierarchy into a directed graph of ClassLoaders. Effectively, a ClassLoader can have multiple 'parents' from which it can load classes. The relationship between ClassLoaders can be constrained to only allow classes belonging to certain packages to be loaded across ClassLoaders. Effectively, you get fine-grained firewalling with a sort of mix-in flavor to it.

classworlds is a framework for container developers who require complex manipulation of Java's ClassLoaders. Java's native ClassLoader mechanims and classes can cause much headache and confusion for certain types of application developers. Projects which involve dynamic loading of components or otherwise represent a 'container' can benefit from the classloading control provided by classworlds.

classworlds provides a richer set of semantics for class loading than Java's normal mechanisms, while still being able to provide a ClassLoader interface to integrate seamlessly with the Java environment.

The classworlds model does away with the hierarchy normally associated with ClassLoaders. Instead, there is a pool of ClassRealms which can import arbitrary packages from other ClassRealms. Effectively, classworlds turns the old-style hierarchy into a directed graph.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-24T04:05:16+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000345_classloading.html Advanced Classloading in J2EE is a pretty good explanation of the various intricacies of Java classloaders. I'm planning on taking knowledge gained from this (and other) articles and incorporating it into forehead, my classloader management project.

Classloading can be one of the nasty issues in a J2EE environment. Questions come to mind like: How to integrate with 3rd party libraries, which have conflicting classes, how to use remote stubs, etc.

This article will describe an especially sophisticated classloading system that combines ease of use with efficiency and compliant behaviour in order to deal with the mentioned questions. This classloading approach also contains a mechanism to separate internally used libraries from user-installable libraries that could potentially conflict with each other.

As an example, such advanced classloading mechanisms are implemented in IONA's Orbix E2A Application Server. It's classloading techniques will be illustrated and their usage demonstrated.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-22T02:21:04+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000344_jelly_docs.html James Strachan's Radio Weblog tells us that...

Jelly documentation finally starting to improve :-)

Jelly has just gotten a getting started guide and an introductory tutorial.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-20T11:57:37+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000343_blissed10beta1.html Following up on yesterday's ramblings about blissed, I'm pleased to announce that blissed-1.0-beta-1 has been released.

blissed is a very small framework to assist in the creation, management and execution of processes and states.

blissed is not intended to be useful on its own, but rather may support a larger workflow system or other process-based application. To allow it to be easy to integrate with other projects, a Jelly tag library is provided.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-19T11:15:09+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000342_calendar_taglib.html Mike and someone else were chatting about needing a Calendar taglib...

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-19T09:49:40+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000341_xom_rustys_xml_object_model.html Rusty has hinted about it for a while, but he's finally made XOM available after presenting it to the NY XML SIG.

XOM is a new XML object model. It is an open source (LGPL), tree-based API for processing XML with Java that strives for correctness and simplicity.

His pages contains the presentation given, which includes a nice overview comparison to JDOM, EXML DOM and dom4j.

fwiw, I think XOM more closely resembles earlier versions of EXML. I've got to wonder if the world will accept yet-another object model, even if it is superior. We'd all like to hope so, of course. But, I think we're bordering on xml object-model exhaustion.

Regardless, jaxen will probably support it sometime soon, bringing to the total number of models supported by jaxen to 5.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-19T02:51:16+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000340_grand_flow_unification_theory.html Oracle's Modest Proposal is a quick little article talking about Oracle's appeal to the W3C and others with regards to coming up with a unified flow language.

I'm not certain that Oracle's intentions are altruistic or even if I care.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-19T02:05:18+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000339_blissful_state_machines.html Thanks to funding from Zenplex, I have been hacking blissed quite a lot lately. blissed will be the underpinnings for the werkflow project, also sponsored by Zenplex.

blissed supports all sorts of inter-process interaction and is generic enough to be directly embedded in your application with whatever semantics you desire. A process instance can call into another process or it may spawn additional process instances.

The very familiar concepts of Process, State, Transition, Guard and Activity are modelled in a generic way to reduce imposed constraints.

I'm also particularly proud that I have no Checkstyle violations and Clover tells me I'm 98.9% covered.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-18T14:27:10+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000338_jsr147_workspace_versioning.html WVCM API is yet-another JSR. In a previous life, I did revision-control software, so this JSR does look interesting to me.

This specification will address these problems by defining a client side library that will expose the full DeltaV functionality, but will:

• automatically provide client-side file maintenance required by any operation
• hide whether or not DeltaV or some other protocol is being used to communicate with the server
• hide the distinction between a client workspace and a server workspace in the client side library implementation, so that a user of the library is presented with a single uniform workspace interface.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-17T18:57:32+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000337_geek_diversity.html The description of abcm2ps just tickles me. I'm amazed and impressed that someone concerned with organ scores for Baroque music is also a person who can hack Postscript. The geeks of the world are certainly diverse.

abcm2ps is a package that converts music tunes from ABC format to PostScript. Based on abc2ps version 1.2.5, it was developed mainly to print baroque organ scores that have independant voices played on one or more keyboards, and a pedal-board. It introduces many extensions to the ABC language that make it suitable for classical music.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-16T12:12:05+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000336_wsfl_chapter.html Web Services and Flows (WSFL) is Chapter 18 from Java Web Services Unleashed by Brunner et al. I'm in werkflow mode, so this is interesting.

Complete representations of complex service interactions rely on two basic concepts: service flow and service composition. The service flow is a description of how the service operates. In business environments, the service flow is a representation of the business process that it implements. By revealing the internal operation of the service, the flow lets users and possible business partners know how the service should be used. In particular, the flow describes the order in which the operations the service provides should be used, and the logic the service follows to process requests. Following a long-standing tradition in the field of business process modeling, WSFL uses a flow model to represent service flows. The flow model itself is presented in the section Flow Modeling Concepts.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-16T02:22:19+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000335_webby_mvc_webwork_and_struts.html It's been cool, lately, to debate the various parts of Struts, WebWork and other web MVC frameworks.

I've recently played with Struts and it's not exactly making me happy. I'm a big fan of using regular expressions to take synthetic URLs and remap them to actual URLs, changing parts of the path to query parameters. Struts simply does not play friendly with that concept. It must work in terms of static URL patterns instead of Regexps. Since it's ignorant of URL rewriting, I cannot submit forms to URLs that I know are valid (or will be after rewriting), and thus Struts forces me into the world of Ugly URLs.

So, I've looked at WebWork. I finally understand the concept of WebWork, since it's exactly the same concept that Jelly uses. A WebWork Action is like a Jelly Tag. Something pulls your tag, instantiates it, calls some settors, and then executes it. Possibly then wash, rinse and repeat.

So, why am I not using WebWork? It's not mavenized. Too many dependencies that don't currently exist in the ibiblio maven repository. So, what would get me using WebWork? If someone would either Mavenize WebWork, or at least point me to a tarball that I could use to easily get all WebWork-based jars into the ibiblio repository with the correct structure.

Bottom line: if it's hard to use in a mavenized project, I won't use it.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-14T14:12:28+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000334_topic_maps.html xml.com is running an article What Are Topic Maps? I'm only now getting into the Semantic Web, RDF and other meta-data types of things with XML and this article seems very well-written.

Many years ago, I started looking into SGML and XML as a way to make information more manageable and findable, which was something I had been working on for a long time. It took me several years to discover that, although SGML and XML helped, they did not actually solve the problem. Later I discovered topic maps, and it seemed to me that here was the missing piece that would make it possible to really find what you were looking for. This article is about why I still think so.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-12T11:27:26+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000333_rerun_jsr94_comments.html Just reblogging my own JSR-94 Comments since the comment period ends tomorrow.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-10T13:38:52+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000332_the_aussies_again.html Tridgell gets AUUG special achievement award which also mentions Peter Miller (of Recursive Make Considered Harmful fame).

The Aussies are certainly taking over. Maybe it's time to move south.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-08T14:57:01+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000331_ibm_and_the_grid.html You might think it's fluff, but IBM's grid conversion talks about IBM's view of The Grid.

I think p2p and grids will certainly take off sometime soon. I was even working on a grid project, which is why I created beep4j to use as an internode protocol layer.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-08T13:12:22+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000330_shortest_path_to_a_semaphore.html Edsger Dijkstra has just decremented his last semaphore.

So much of what we do is because of Dijkstra's great ideas.

]]> Opinion bob 2002-09-08T13:07:56+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000329_business_process_automation.html Duncan Child sent me a link to Business process automation made easy with Java, Part 1.

These days, severe market demands drive enterprises to reduce costs and increase shareholder value. In such an environment, businesses can realize significant cost reductions and efficiencies by automating business process flows, eliminating nonvalue-adding human interventions, and allowing enterprise applications to communicate and intelligently and seamlessly share information. In this two-part series, we present the technology building blocks for automating an enterprise, how those blocks fit within an enterprise component architecture such as J2EE, and how you can design and build a business rule engine solution based on this architecture.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-08T12:02:56+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000328_from_wither_came_the_aussies.html Here recently, every time I turn around I trip across another cool project from some Australians. There's the Atlassian folks and the guys who produce Clover, and Greg & the Jetty team, just to name a few.

Is this a new occurence? Or have I previously been amerikacentric and just in denial of things coming from the southern hemisphere? Did .au universities recently start producing more and better engineers?

What gives? Regardless, it's a Good Thing.

]]> bob 2002-09-07T14:04:59+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000327_rich_webbased_xml_editing.html James Strachan pointed me towards Xopus.org, which is browser-based rich XML text editor. That's just cool.

Xopus is a browser based in-place wysiwyg XML editor. Xopus allows users to edit their XML data in an intuitive word processor alike way.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-04T10:07:53+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000326_jsr94_im_grumpy.html It's public-review time for JSR-94 and here are my JSR-94 comments.

I spent a few hours today trying to make drools compliant and it wasn't a happy experience.

I'm hoping the JSR expert group is truly taking public-review comments serious and won't just push what they have through the finish line. JSR-94 is in several places under-defined while in others it seems to place too many constraints and burdens upon implementors.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-04T00:45:05+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000325_jaxen_and_exml.html EXML 6.0 now includes seamless integration with jaxen, the multi-model XPath engine project I founded a while ago.

If you're not already using jaxen for your Java and XPath needs, you probably should.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-09-03T02:44:47+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000324_my_wonderful_wife.html Well, Rebecca's insanity has now lasted a tad over two years. We celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary by visiting recently-relocated friends in Pennsylvania, which is positively beautiful.

But of course, not nearly as lovely as my wife.

]]> Home bob 2002-09-03T02:29:48+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000323_drools_20beta6_released.html Read the announcement.

drools 2.0-beta-6 has been released. Pick up the flavor of distribution that you like from:

http://drools.org/releases.html

Major points:
Removed dependency on JDRing.
Created Python Semantic Module (using jython).
Fixed several show-stopper Rete-OO bugs.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-29T11:04:04+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000322_different_persistence.html An introduction to object prevalence.

Why persistence as you know it is bad Today, data persistence for object-oriented systems is an incredibly cumbersome task to deal with when building many kinds of applications. The developer must map objects to database tables, XML files or use some other non-OO way to represent data, destroying encapsulation completely. One solution to this problem is object prevalence.

The Prevalent way
Object prevalence is a concept that was developed by Klaus Wuestefeld and some colleagues at Objective Solutions. Its first implementation, known as Prevayler, became available in November 2001 as an open-source project. (See Resources.) Today, Prevayler is at version 1.3.0 and has about 350 lines of code. You may think that the code is too small to do anything useful but, based upon my experience on a recent porject, I can confirm that Prevayler is several orers of magnitude faster than one of the leading open source relational databases. It is all about simplicity.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-28T23:38:19+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000321_java_wikiblog.html Dave Cramer told me about SnipSnap. It's Java. It's a Wiki. It's a Blog. All are Good Things.

A personal content management system and WikiLog. It's easy to install and has a powerful text formatting system. See install to run it yourself. This software will primary serve our needs.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-28T23:02:45+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000320_dogs_tech.html Yes, we have a dog now. We have exactly one dog to accompany our five cats, thus, she's been named Only.

Technology: bought a little USB nugget to read Flashcards since Rebecca doesn't like sharing her Mac. Darn simple to just plug it in, reboot and mount the flashcard. Hence, the photo of the dog.

Who says linux isn't easy to use. I don't even claim to have much sysadmin knowledge. Just ask my sysadmin.

]]> Home bob 2002-08-28T17:08:29+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000319_drools_snakes_can_drool.html drools 2.0-beta-6-dev API: Package org.drools.semantics.python

Package org.drools.semantics.python

Python Semantic Module.

Ayup. drools does python, now.

Figured since Mike got a kick out my blogging a bug in my Jira that he might enjoy one that points to Javadocs.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-28T14:39:46+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000318_drools_test_coverage.html drools test coverage information is now available. Only about 28% tested, overall. But at least I can now visualize the weak parts.

Have you run clover on your codebase lately?

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-28T03:23:52+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000317_1000_of_beer.html It arrived in my inbox.

The note is titled "Stock (Tymeless, Aug 24 00:37)" If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. If you had bought $1000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then traded in the cans at a redemption center for the nickel deposit, you would have $107.00.

Given the current conditions of the economy, my advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

Something to think about.

]]> Opinion bob 2002-08-27T21:30:56+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000316_scrum_xp_without_the_insanity.html Talking to Jason van Zyl, of maven fame, and discovered that not everyone konws about Scrum.

Extreme Programming (XP) frightens many people, myself included. It seems a tad... hackish. Scrum, though, is another agile methodology that seems to have a little bit less insanity and more planning/thought behind it.

Scrum naturally focuses an entire organization on building successful products. Without major changes -often within thirty days - teams are building useful, demonstrable product functionality. Scrum can be implemented at the beginning of a project or in the middle of a project or product development effort that is in trouble.

Scrum is a set of interrelated practices and rules that optimize the development environment, reduce organizational overhead, and closely synchronize market requirements with iterative prototyes. Based in modern process control theory, Scrum causes the best possible software to be constructed given the available resources, acceptable quality, and required release dates. Useful product functionality is delivered every thirty days as requirements, architecture, and design emerge, even when using unstable technologies.

I know this is a religious war to you agile zealots out there, but I say that Scrum is the best, so it must be true.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-27T14:30:46+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000315_good_music_at_079.html Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited - The Fluid Soundbox is a great CD I owned a while ago. Today, I repurchased it since my CD-organizationl skills are next-to-nil, and I'd lost my original copy. Anyhow, it thinks it's a soundtrack to a 60's spy movie. There was no movie. It isn't a soundtrack. But it has that surfabilly/mission-impossible sound to it.

Anyhow, in searching for a page to blog, I came across the above link and was surpised to learn I could buy each song on the CD, over the internet, for 79 cents apiece. Too bad its RealAudio and not Ogg Vorbis or even MP3. Oh well.

Cool thought, though.

]]> Opinion bob 2002-08-27T01:11:40+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000314_effecient_jython_embedding.html Geocrawler.com - jython-users - [Jython-users] Advanced Jython embedding is a message that describes embedding jython efficiently. The jython.org docs aren't all that great, so I'm just bookmarking this for myself as I hack drools+jython.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-26T13:33:26+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000313_drools_jellyconsequence_tag.html [#DROOLS-19] Jelly Semantics <consequence> tag indicates that drools now supports a <jelly:consequence> tag so that the consequence of a rule can be any arbitrary jellyscript.

An example exists (the sisters example) that mixes the Java semantic module for object-types and conditions, while using the jelly semantic module for the consequence of a rule match.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-25T18:37:46+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000312_latex_and_pdf.html The AcroTeX website is a pretty nice resource for folks wanting to do advanced PDF generation with (La)TeX. I'm a big fan of using LaTeX for documentation. I attempted to use DocBook way back when, but was unimpressed with the output produced by FOP. Using the dsssl stylesheets and jade produces beautiful output, but I decided that if I need to have TeX installed, I might as well use it natively. XML is not a fun way to mark up technical documentation.

Try this: write lots of docs in plaintext. Convert to PDF. Would you rather insert the occasional \section{...} tag, or worry about balancing pairs of XML tags, marking each and every paragraph, etc?

LaTeX rocks. PDF rocks. There ya go.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-25T01:28:54+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000311_state_and_taskbased_workflow.html The wftk: Background page has the author of Wftk's thoughts about state-based versus task-based workflow.

One of the basic problems that I have had while coming to terms with workflow systems is simply that there are two basic approaches to workflow. In the first, which was more strongly supported by early wftk prototypes, a process, once activated, then activates various tasks which must be done (this may include loops, decisions, and so forth, but the basic item here is the task.) Meanwhile, a lot of the material I was reading about workflow was firmly based in a transition-diagram model, where the process may be in a certain state, and the state of the process determined what various people might do. This dichotomy caused me a lot of grief before I realized that I was missing a point: state-based and task-based processes are simply different aspects of the same thing.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-24T18:48:03+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000310_junit.html JUnit 3.8 Released

The theme of this release is easier access, see the README for details.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-24T02:11:09+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000309_xpath_tips.html XML.com: Top Ten Tips to Using XPath and XPointer

XPath and XPointer allow XML developers and document authors to find and manipulate specific needles of content in an XML document's haystack. From mindful use of predicates, to processor efficiency, to exploring both the standards themselves and extensions to them, this article offers ten tips -- techniques and gotchas -- to bear in mind as you use XPath and XPointer in your own work.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-23T20:43:02+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000308_drools_20beta5_released.html drools-2.0-beta-5 has now been released.

It includes a massive refactoring and reorganization effort, along with bundles of new tests. A robust XML rule-language based upon Jelly is now consistent across all semantic modules.

Here's the full announcement.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-23T14:39:56+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000307_automatic_investment_managmenet.html AIM is described by Jack Park at ThinkAlong seems cool. I see rules rules rules.

(Yes, it's been a heavy drools week for me.)

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-22T15:28:17+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000306_graph_structures_in_xml_gsix.html So, XML-DEV discussion header towards talking about tuples and graphs, I mentioned drools has to deal with the issues. One thing led to another, and now I'm aware of GSIX thanks to Peter Jones.

GSIX seems to encompass a lot of cool ideas. I'm definitely going to investigate it more.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-22T15:06:33+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000305_icons.html The Iconfactory: Your Quality Freeware Icons Hub seems to have a garantuan collection of high-quality, free icons.

Open-source graphics is cool. Especially when it's something as cool as this and not just bad scans of out-of-copyright turn-of-the-century clip-art collections.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-22T00:44:28+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000304_music_for_coding.html Just noting that phish is excellent music to code to. Especially the new live series they are releasing quarterly.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-19T11:15:25+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000303_jnlp_via_ant_and_thus_maven.html Just tripped across Venus Application Publisher's Ant Task Suite. I've started getting interested in JNLP after I noticed mike@atlassian using it.

Will probably make a Maven plugin for it.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-14T19:49:16+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000302_workflow.html Patrick Lightbody, of OSWorkflow, and I had a nice chat about workflow and our two projects.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-14T17:05:13+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000301_code_generation.html I keep tripping across random projects touting code generation as a nice feature, and I'm not certain I quite share their enthusiasm.

I think code generation as a process of turning the abstract into the concrete is a Good Thing. For example, ANTLR allows you to specify a language grammar is an abstract form and then make it concrete as Java, C++ or Sather (Sather?!) code. I definitely support code-generation as used by ANTLR and other similar device.

The other extreme of code generation seems to target wrapping and adapting. For example, some projects enable you to generate code to make your JavaBean a web-service.Somewhere in the middle resides mapping generators. Object-relational mapping layers map an Object to a relational database.
One could argue that wrapping is a form of mapping. You are conceivably mapping Java linking constructs to XML-over-port-80 semantics when you wrap a JavaBean as a web-service.

Most of the wrapping and mapping cases seem to use code generation as an efficiency mechanism. Compiled Java runs faster than interpreted code. Projects exist that allow you to provide a web-service face to a javabean without code generation by using introspection and run-time interpreters.

Code generation has many downsides, in my opinion. In many languages, loading new code into a running process is less than fun. Also, a developer weilding a compiler must be in the loop to still do something useful with the generated code.

Dynamic and interpreted systems allow easier customization and modification to a running system. Of course, the cost is extra CPU cycles. With code-generation though, the cost is typically developer hours. A trade-off must be made, and I personally will always favor a dynamic solution that reduces developer idle time (waiting for generation and compilation).

Even better, of course, is run-time bytecode modification and instrumentation. But that's a topic for another day.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-14T15:53:41+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000300_thin_is_cool_apparently.html Well, not long after mentioning Thinlet, Mike came up with ThinRSS.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-14T01:04:23+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000299_java_rules_engine_api.html JSR-94, the Java Rule Engine API has entered public review and will remain available until 11 September 2002.

My own drools project will be implementing JSR-94 sometime soon.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-13T20:27:16+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000298_maven_10beta5_released.html Maven the coolio build-system has released 1.0-beta-5 which solidifies the new Jelly-based core.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-13T20:04:34+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000297_thin_java_gui.html Tripped across Thinlet a super-thin xml-based UI layer for java. Definitely usable in applets or JNLP types of applications.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-08-13T20:00:35+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000296_jira_rocks.html Mike Cannon-Brookes, the guru behind Atlassian has given us a license for Jira for our open-source projects.

Check out the Jira server now and go right ahead and signup and add bugs, issues and features.

Thanks Mike!

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-07-14T10:18:51+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000295_cool_software.html I've just got to say, I've been completely blown away by MovableType, the blog software that drives a lot of Werkenland. It's so clean, intuitive and fun to use. I do have a few complains, with regards to setting up a large number of blogs. I'm not much of a Perl hacker so there may be some perl interface to configure new blogs hiding somewhere that I haven't looked, yet.

Jira, from Atlassian also looks pretty cool, and they have free licenses for open-source software. I know the winds seem to be blowing towards Scarab, but I think I'm going to give Jira a shot. Sure, it's not free for commercial use, but people have to make a dollar every now and again, ya know.

]]> Software Engineering bob 2002-07-14T01:21:48+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000294_werken_infrastructure.html Well, you've all probably noticed the increased movement within the werken.com domain.

I've decided to take The Werken Company in a new direction, emphasizing non-commodity engagements. We've amassed a fair number of open-source projects that are being fairly widely used. Hopefully some of our users will come out and have us help them with their problems, or fund us to develop more open-source projects.

Part of this direction includes having more of a public identity and participating much more visibly in both the open-source and general software-engineering communities.

To this end, we're migrating all of our projects back to our own infrastructure, and increasing the tools available.

For example, each project will soon be getting its own blog, for tracking the status in a more informal way than CVS changelogs, and more visible than mailling lists.

So, now we have the following:

• CVS server
• blog (MovableType) server
• lists (mailman) server
• web

Soon we'll have Jira setup for issue-tracking for the projects. Might find a nice Wiki, but I think that's of a lower priority.

Additionally, we're donating usage of our cluster to the Jakarta Maven project for their global project reactor.

Anyhow, that's how I'm spending my days.

]]> bob 2002-07-10T23:35:55+00:00 http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bob/archives/000293_werkflow.html As noted on Hard Werken, I've started work on a new workflow engine, called werkflow.

Come, check it out. It promises to be lots of fun.

]]> bob 2002-07-10T23:33:38+00:00