Tuesday, March 29, 2011

conduit.com

What to make of the claims of conduit.com ?

Here are three links:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/conduit

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/13/conduit-network/

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-engagement/conduit-network-boosts-browserbased-apps-in-a-big-way-008062.php

 

Simple TclOO and static class variables

The discussion of class-side slots for TclOO is instructive in light of Carl Sassenrath's blog on defining "simple" in Rebol and in-the-large.  But in the real world things are not so simple.

The TclOO architect offers his snippet from the view of the code internals of his framework.

Tcl 8.6 is in a slow beta while Rebol3 remains alpha - and in fairness TclOO was already a library for 8.5

A Curl (as in www.curl.com) architect in Boston once gave me his take on Tcl ... but again, in fairness, not having access to the internals of how mixins are implemented in Curl ...

The simple view: use traits where they are useful in maintaining separation.  Much harder: to get a project to adopt traits effectively (e.g., non-HTML output for Smalltalk Seaside or Scala Lift.)  Perhaps not possible: getting traits into ObjectIcon.

Anecdote: the Avro Arrow had a compontentized "open-bay" in its belly - long before the ISS universal docking spec.

Question: is re-motoring aircraft types always "simple" ?  DC-8?  And new wings for C5 Galaxy?  Will the Shuttle engines be re-used?

Question: Should the Canadarm2 have been coded in Erlang or Oz instead of Ada? Erlang would offer X, Oz X, Y and Z.  But for Ada there are tools and staff.

What is the "simple" approach to handling text in the age of Unicode?  My test candidate: Octavio Paz' "Blanco" as the intended "dynamic text".

Monday, March 28, 2011

Apache Wicket

Igor Vaynberg has an Apache Wicket Cookbook over at packtpub.com

A bit price-y for an epub in that genre.

Wicket has some virtues: it was not near impossible to convert to non-HTML/non-XML web content markup (unlike Scala Lift which is, well, ahem.)

Okay Lift: they have no excuse for the XML-lockstep as they have something like Traits available in the Scala language.  Type of output should be orthogonal to HTTP forwarding, redirecting and the rest.  But Lift has a project leader first, and a framework second.  Scala itself has more promise.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Mercury programming

There is a new blog to follow on the Mercury logic programming project: http://adventuresinmercury.blogspot.com/

It has a specific focus and is sure welcome.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Monday, March 14, 2011

Pharo Smalltalk 1.2RC2

 
Over at pharo-project.org the next release of Pharo is almost ready.

I had some issues today trying to load a MetaCello configuration of O2 - the traits-compatible version of OmniBrowser - perhaps the build already has the latest O2 ?

I did manage to load Aida/Web into the Pharo image (a separate Aida image is also available as part of the continuous build process).

This comes after a few days of freeing my PC from an attack which appears to have come through having Java enabled in default IE (although the attack began in a new Google Chrome while I was in that browser.)  AVG, Ad-Aware and SpyBot were of no more help than Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool.  The real target appears to have been Firefox - but because I don't use it, that tampering was easier to detect in explorer alone.  A few bogus DLL's and many hidden files later I appear to have survived.  One casualty was my recent Google bookmarks.  Browser Helper Objects.  Yeah, right.

Rather than rant, this much was funny: Ad-Aware made some suggestions but also had a high-lighted "read more" which I clicked on in their application window - but it did not open a dialog - it opened IE with add-on's running!  Gee, thanks, folks ....