May 27th, 2004
10:04 am
Java
With a view to adding Atom support to Informa, I started looking into the specification in more detail. Just before I started looking at adding support for the syndication format, and found out that Niko (Informa’s product manager) was already looking at it. Instead, I decided to look at the posting and editing API. A WSDL file was available, but Axis wasn’t too successful at converting it into a Java API. To get wsdl2java to actually process the file, I had to remove the DELETE operation. I then hit the limitations of my knowledge as far as we services are concerned, so this has been put on the back burner while I read over some tutorials. I’ll keep you informed as to Niko’s progress on adding Atom syndication support to Informa
May 27th, 2004
9:58 am
Java
Using HttpClient I knocked up a simple Java API for del.icio.us. It worked, but I quickly hit limitations of what the del.icio.us API itself would let me do – for example there is no way to get all bookmarks for a category. I sent off a feature request, so we’ll see what happens – but for what I wanted to do the current API isn’t good enough.
HttpClient itself did exactly what I wanted, which I guess is all you can ask of an OS project. The documentation was a little lacking, and the dependencies on commons-codec and commons-logging was annoying, however it worked well and gave sensible errors when required.
Along the way I looked at using XStream. I was planning to use it to process the results from the calls to del.icio.us, but the nature of the XML meant that this isn’t possible without transforming the results first. I would have no hesitation in recommending XStream for XML serialization, assuming you aren’t already constrained in the nature of your XML schema.
A rather long gap between posts, this has not been down to laziness on my part, nor the fact that I have noting to post, more the fact that I’ve been doing things rather than actually posting about it. Anyway, more details to follow…
Thanks to some code from Stuart Langridge, I’ve managed to implement a live comment system supporting Textile. Originally inspired by Jon Hick’s comment system, as you type comment the text is parsed and formatted as HTML, and inserted into another div. The Javascript doesn’t support all Textile formatting, but supports all of the quick tags (apart from Span) and some of the block formatting (such as blockquotes). I may add support for more of Textile’s formatting commands later – I’ll see how much people use it. Anyway, feel free to give it a go and let me know if you experience any problems.
May 17th, 2004
5:46 pm
Java
For some time now I’ve been using @DateFormat@ (actually @SimpleDateFormat@) to parse user inputted dates it situations where a decent date chooser wasn’t available. Some simple bit of code like this would normally suffice:
private static final SimpleDateFormat DATE_FORMAT = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/mm/YYYY");
...
try {
DATE_FORMAT.parse(someString);
} catch (ParseException pe) {
//date is invalid
}
I learnt two things about this approach. Firstly, DateFormat is not thread safe. This fact was only documented in Java 1.4 despite it having never been thread safe. This is one of those things you learn, and is easily put right.
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May 17th, 2004
5:26 pm
Java
I have long since come to the conclusion that JSP pages are evil. Not just bad, oh no. Nothing which can result in such unmaintainable crufty code can be considered merely bad – only evil will suffice. This opinion has been reinforced over the last few days, and this single gem stands out.
I was using a struts logic tag (asshats, I have no choice in this – the first person to tell me to use webwork instead is getting eaten by rats) to assert a boolean condition. It looked a little something like this:
I hate JSP
For some reason even if boolProperty returned false, “I hate JSP” was still being printed out. It being late in the day (and a Monday) I was slow to spot the closing / on what I took to be an opening logic:equal. Despite the fact that I had a closing logic:equal, no parse error was thrown. Apart from the fact that a logic:equal tag is of no use to man nor beast without a body (and therefore a validation error should of been thrown by Evil Struts) I would of expected the JSP compiler to notice an extra closing logic:equal. Of course assumptions are a dangerous thing when it comes to JSP…
The Overall Aim
Eat lunch.
My aim
Eat Cake.
The scenario
Ten programmers in the centre of London.
The result
No clear vision, everyone wanting to achieve the aim of eating lunch in a different way. Group fragments – some go for bagels, others opt for fish and chips. Lunch takes 30 minutes more than it should, and I don’t get any cake.
The moral
Stuff working as a team, go eat alone…
Whilst leaving a comment over at Jon Hicks site, I noticed his excellent live preview for comments. As you type it displays how your comment will look, all in real time. I would love to do something similar for this site, however Jon uses HTML for comments so lets the browser do the parsing – I’ve decided to use textile which means I’d have to do the parsing myself in Javascript, which doesn’t sound too easy…
Bloglines continues to add enhancements to their excellent free online feed aggregator service, and further improvements are being added by others – Chad Everett has developed a very nice plugin for Mozilla and Firebird which embeds the bloglines notifier in the browser’s status bar, and also adds a right-click context menu which allows quick subscription to pages you are currently viewing (I assume this will require embedded RDF in the page in question to support auto-discovery, unless it searches bloglines itself). All of this could be done by downloading the notifier separately and using a bookmarklet, but Chad’s work provides a nicer package with a decent interface, and the fact that it will work on any platform capable of running a recent Mozilla build probably makes these features available to more people than ever.
May 11th, 2004
9:20 am
Java
One of the few benefits of a long commute, is the fact that I’m not doing it alone. The time afford to me each morning on the train to and from work also provides and opportunity for discussion on all kinds of topics, ranging from the poor state of journalism in the daily free newspaper the Metro, to some more esoteric issues at least tentatively connected with work. One discussion which fell between these two concerned the notion of naming – be it the naming of classes, methods or packages.
One of my colleagues asserts that naming is actually one of the hardest things he has to do as part of his day-to-day development. I agree tentatively with that statement – however the problem is not a lack of vocabulary, more that when naming is a problem we often just don’t understand what we are trying to name. The more we mentally consider the code to be an amorphous blob, the more naming becomes difficult. Once our understanding of the code coalesces into something more concrete, naming often becomes trivial.
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