From a guy at work:
The readability of generated code is inversely proportional to the readability of the code which generated it.
The first law of software engineering (and until I heard the one above the only one I thought existed) is:
(See also http://www.news.com.au/common/printpage/0,6093,11009375,00.html
for an expanded explaination of that formula..)
Seriously, though - is it better to have readable generated code or readable generation code?
The Rome Fetcher now supports RFC3229 Delta-Encoded feeds (in CVS). The Rome Fetcher already supports GZipped feeds and conditional get. Hopefully, this additional feature should ease the burden on syndication client authors.
There are test cases in CVS, but I have failed to find any real world servers to test the delta-encoding support against, so any stories of succesful use (because obviously there could not possibly be any bugs…) would be appreciated.
Those of you with a GMail account might like this. It retrieves the GMail
Atom feed of you inbox status using the Rome Syndication libraries (Grab Rome 0.4 and Rome Fetcher 0.4 from http://rome.dev.java.net). You'll need to edit the BasicAuthenticator
class to set your username and password.
Gmail currently doesn't support conditional-gets or ETags, so unfortunately
it has to retrieve the entire feed each time.
public class Main {
public static void main(String args[] ) throws IllegalArgumentException,
MalformedURLException, IOException, FeedException, FetcherException {
FeedFetcherCache feedInfoCache = HashMapFeedInfoCache.getInstance();
FeedFetcher fetcher = new HttpURLFeedFetcher(feedInfoCache);
java.net.Authenticator.setDefault(new BasicAuthenticator()); // turn on authentication
SyndFeed feed = fetcher.retrieveFeed(new URL("https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom"));
System.out.println(feed.getTitle());
int feedSize = feed.getEntries().size();
System.out.println("Contains " + feedSize + " items");
for (Iterator iter = feed.getEntries().iterator(); iter.hasNext(); )
{
SyndEntry entry = (SyndEntry) iter.next();
System.out.println(entry.getTitle());
System.out.println("\t excerpt: " +
entry.getDescription().getValue());
}
while (true) {
try {
Thread.sleep(1000 * 60 * 10); // check every 10 minutes
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// ignore } System.err.print("Retrieving..");
feed = fetcher.retrieveFeed(new
URL("https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom"));
System.err.println("Done.");
int newFeedSize = feed.getEntries().size();
// note that this won't detect new items if the feed size is at maximum
if (feedSize != newFeedSize) {
System.out.println("New messages detected. There are now " +
newFeedSize + " items");
int itemsToShow = newFeedSize - feedSize;
int count = 0;
for (Iterator iter = feed.getEntries().iterator();
iter.hasNext();) {
SyndEntry entry = (SyndEntry) iter.next();
System.out.println(entry.getTitle());
System.out.println("\t excerpt: " +
entry.getDescription().getValue());
count++;
if (count >= itemsToShow) {
break;
}
}
feedSize = newFeedSize;
}
}
}
static class BasicAuthenticator extends Authenticator {
/**
* @see java.net.Authenticator#getPasswordAuthentication()
*/
protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
if ("gmail.google.com".equals(getRequestingHost())) {
return new PasswordAuthentication("user.name", "password".toCharArray());
} else {
return null;
}
}
}
}
Ryan Whitaker has just released NClassifier (”the greatest thing you'll ever see in your life”).
To quote:
Why did I create it? For one thing, it pushed my wife over the edge of just loving me. Now she really loves me. Hint: Women love the text classification engines and the men who build them.
Who could argue with that?!
A few people have been complaining about the bandwidth things like PodCasting take up ( Duh!).
I'd recommend they look at using the Coral cache. If you haven't tried it, it is a free content distribution network (think Akamai). It does run on port 8090, so people behind some firewals can't use it, but for for a lot of people it will both give them quicker downloads and save you bandwidth.
For instance, the Coralled version of this page is http://www.mackmo.com.nyud.net:8090/nick/blog/.
Ted & Don are arguing the point of JavaContainersNG (Spring, Pico, HiveMind etc).
I'm a little surprised - the main point of them all is a very Microsoftish concept - reduce the amount code you have to write.
At TechEd this year (in the few product sessions I went to) it was all about “.NET 2.0 will reduce the number of lines of code you write by 1000%” (or whatever). That's what Spring etc do - no more worrying about wiring code, and just concentrate on your business logic.
Yes, they have other features, too, and yes, they can let you run your code outside EJBs, and yes it is cool that you can test you logic easier, and yes the AOP stuff can be very useful, but the main point is you don't need to write all that stupid wiring code that pollutes most programs.
Don's right to be puzzled why Spring is easier than EJB - you still need stupid XML configuration files, and it doesn't magically make EJBs as easy as .NET development. BUT - and I suspect this is what you miss unless you've actually suffered through EJBs - Spring is easier than using POEJBs (Plain-Old EJBs) because is hides 90% of the things you don't need to worry about.
Don's right about ORM mappers, too, and I don't think any Java person would disagree. There are 3 current JCPs for ORM, not counting the SDO (Service Data Object) one, and that also exclude Hibernate, Apache OBJ and iBatis, which all have pretty reasonable mind/marketshare. That's just so stupid - but the competition makes it interesting.