techno.blog("Dion")

I feel like I need to clarify what I meant by having a Sun/BEA/Google/whoever taking part in Groovy.

I don’t want a big corporation to come in and take over and make it a marketing exersize.

What I really want is:

Full time leader(s) to push the language, show their passion, and move it along!

If someone stepped up to the plate to do this in their spare time, more power to them! The problem is that time is a tough commodity, so if a company could come in, see the value in Groovy, and allow for this leader to put all of their effort into the course, it will only be a good thing :)

Groovy needs strong leadership, direction, and to pick up momentum again…. much more so than a commitee. I worry about the JSR process since:

a) Design by commitee
b) Most importantly, what are we trying to standardize? Let’s get a kick arse implementation first, and *maybe* standardize later. Groovy currently fails the rule: “Never standardize a 1.0″

Although some people think that the JSR will give Groovy more of a chance in the corporate world… I don’t think it matters that much, and DEFINITELY doesn’t matter if we never get to a top notch implementation.

Those spammers, they get everywhere. MT-Blacklist has been good to me, but stuff still gets through and it drives me nuts.

I like MT::Scode which is a Moveable Type plugin that adds the typical security measure that you see more and more.. that being: “Type in what you see in this image”.

It is a really simple way to stop bots, and I need to get it working on this blog soon (almaer.com is moving to the adigio.com hosting provider and need to set everything up over there).

I would actually love to have a little Java filter / API that could wrap up:

- Generating images with words/letters in them
- Take in an id and make the match

And be able to apply it to different forms. Ideally declaritively :)

Mike has put together another well researched article on Groovy Closures.

He discusses what they are, how they work now, and some ideas on how he would fix them.

In Mikes world you would end up going from:

[1, 2, 3, 4].each { | param | println param }

to (params, clos keyword, no more |, no optional ;):

[1, 2, 3, 4].each (clos(param) { println param });

NOTE: Although Mike shows the form: { foo | … } Groovy supports { | foo | … } and has even talked about enforcing that.

I understand his points, and from a Java perspective it makes even more sense. However I think Charles Miller had a really good point… showing the power of perspective :)

Other things you complain about are very Ruby-like, but it helps to phrase them differently. For example, Ruby hackers wouldn’t say that a return statement was optional, they’d say that all methods return the value of the last statement in the method, but this behaviour can be overridden by an explicit return. (It’s a subtle difference of point-of-view).

Similarly, in Ruby, you wouldn’t say that semi-colons are optional. You’d say that the newline was the default statement separator, but you can force an end-of-statement with a semi-colon.

It is funny how actual work changes things. The more code I write in languages which don’t require a ‘;’ every 30 keystrokes, the more it bugs me when I have to go back to typing them, and more importantly seeing them on every line or so. What a load of clutter! :)

There has been another up-turn in critiques for Groovy. The like of Mike Spille, Hani, Cedric, and others, have ripped into the project.

People have asked me how I feel about it all, and I think they are a little surprised that I am not upset or something.

I am not upset as:

• The opinions are not just rants. They are educated responses about how they feel about Groovy
• Everyone is entitled to their opinion
• They seem to actually care (else why spend the time)

The last point is so important. A lot of people, in and out of the Groovy community are giving honest feedback because they care.

Noone is saying: “Groovy is a piece of merde, so scrap it already!”.

If anything, the general vibe is:

“Groovy has so much potential. I seem some problems, and someone needs to get in and fix things before it is too late”.

I am a strong believer in the potential of Groovy. Even if the language ‘groovy’ fails, I think it has been part of a more important factor… having Sun, and Java some developers, realise that the power of Java is in the platform. Java shouldn’t be the One True Language. It is one way of expressing yourself, and is very good for many problems. But it is pretty balsy to say “This one way of expressing yourself is definitely the only way, and the best, for all”. Come on. A language like Groovy (and many others) has many advantages. One, is the way it can grow and ‘try’ ideas. Can you imagine how hard it is to get a feature into the Java language (cheap shot: unless you persuade Sun that Microsoft is doing it :)).

So, I am sold on the potential of Groovy. I enjoy many languages and platforms, and I am really excited about having a language as fun to work with and productive as Groovy on the JVM platform (so I also have access to Spring, Hibernate/JDO/…, AspectWerkz/AspectJ, etc etc).

So, to the subject of this post!

I think Groovy would be helped in LEAPS and BOUNDS if a company (or two :) got behind it. If Sun wants to make a play for other languages, why don’t they hire some people to work on Groovy? SURELY it is worth having people around to work on that compared to some of the other ‘research’ projects they are playing with? Sun already allows John Rose to work on Groovy, and I think they part for some of his time working on it. Make that fulltime. Hire James, or Guillame, or someone else.

Groovy needs a full time LEADER. James is just too busy at the moment to take it all on. Noone should EXPECT him too. How can we? Groovy needs the loose strings ironed out, and it needs some grunt work done such as:

• Making it stable
• Refactoring for the new ANTLR parse
• Getting error reporting spot on, so you aren’t in debug hell
• Solid, top notch, IDE Support (Eclipse/IntelliJ plugins)
• Documentation

And it goes on and on. Sometimes you need to be working on a project full time, and having it be your focus, to get onto these tasks. This is where a company can come in.

BEA would be another great potential contributor. Maybe they could have even kept Sam Pullara if they just let him work on Groovy? ;)

A vendor can jump in and become a real leader in the dynamic language space. They could integrate with Groovy all over the shop, and I would certainly love them for it :)

The User Base Is There

From the talks that I give on Groovy, feedback I get, and the number of people jumping onto areas like Ruby, I have no doubt that people want functionality that Groovy can give them. Will anyone step up to the plate, take the potential energy, and run with it?

There has been another up-turn in critiques for Groovy. The like of Mike Spille, Hani, Cedric, and others, have ripped into the project.

People have asked me how I feel about it all, and I think they are a little surprised that I am not upset or something.

I am not upset as:

• The opinions are not just rants. They are educated responses about how they feel about Groovy
• Everyone is entitled to their opinion
• They seem to actually care (else why spend the time)

The last point is so important. A lot of people, in and out of the Groovy community are giving honest feedback because they care.

Noone is saying: “Groovy is a piece of merde, so scrap it already!”.

If anything, the general vibe is:

“Groovy has so much potential. I seem some problems, and someone needs to get in and fix things before it is too late”.

I am a strong believer in the potential of Groovy. Even if the language ‘groovy’ fails, I think it has been part of a more important factor… having Sun, and Java some developers, realise that the power of Java is in the platform. Java shouldn’t be the One True Language. It is one way of expressing yourself, and is very good for many problems. But it is pretty balsy to say “This one way of expressing yourself is definitely the only way, and the best, for all”. Come on. A language like Groovy (and many others) has many advantages. One, is the way it can grow and ‘try’ ideas. Can you imagine how hard it is to get a feature into the Java language (cheap shot: unless you persuade Sun that Microsoft is doing it :)).

So, I am sold on the potential of Groovy. I enjoy many languages and platforms, and I am really excited about having a language as fun to work with and productive as Groovy on the JVM platform (so I also have access to Spring, Hibernate/JDO/…, AspectWerkz/AspectJ, etc etc).

So, to the subject of this post!

I think Groovy would be helped in LEAPS and BOUNDS if a company (or two :) got behind it. If Sun wants to make a play for other languages, why don’t they hire some people to work on Groovy? SURELY it is worth having people around to work on that compared to some of the other ‘research’ projects they are playing with? Sun already allows John Rose to work on Groovy, and I think they part for some of his time working on it. Make that fulltime. Hire James, or Guillame, or someone else.

Groovy needs a full time LEADER. James is just too busy at the moment to take it all on. Noone should EXPECT him too. How can we? Groovy needs the loose strings ironed out, and it needs some grunt work done such as:

• Making it stable
• Refactoring for the new ANTLR parse
• Getting error reporting spot on, so you aren’t in debug hell
• Solid, top notch, IDE Support (Eclipse/IntelliJ plugins)
• Documentation

And it goes on and on. Sometimes you need to be working on a project full time, and having it be your focus, to get onto these tasks. This is where a company can come in.

BEA would be another great potential contributor. Maybe they could have even kept Sam Pullara if they just let him work on Groovy? ;)

A vendor can jump in and become a real leader in the dynamic language space. They could integrate with Groovy all over the shop, and I would certainly love them for it :)

The User Base Is There

From the talks that I give on Groovy, feedback I get, and the number of people jumping onto areas like Ruby, I have no doubt that people want functionality that Groovy can give them. Will anyone step up to the plate, take the potential energy, and run with it?

My case study about creating a better search for TSS using Lucene is finally up on the site at I Love Luc-ene. This is in the great Lucene in Action book.

Erik even makes fun of my 2010 bug. Doesn’t he realise that we need job security???? ;)

There are actually many things that I would do differently now, and many improvements that could be made. But, Lucene is really so nice to work with :)

I am often blogging about travel nightmares that I encounter.

Something good actually happened today.

I flew from Denver -> Dallas -> Miami. My original flight from Denver was delayed, and they got me on another one (which was actually earlier). The problem was that my bags were already set up, and they couldn’t change where they were.

I was 100% sure that my bags wouldn’t be there in Miami, but I was proven wrong!

It is nice to have a pleasant surprise for once :)

I am often blogging about travel nightmares that I encounter.

Something good actually happened today.

I flew from Denver -> Dallas -> Miami. My original flight from Denver was delayed, and they got me on another one (which was actually earlier). The problem was that my bags were already set up, and they couldn’t change where they were.

I was 100% sure that my bags wouldn’t be there in Miami, but I was proven wrong!

It is nice to have a pleasant surprise for once :)

There has been a lot of open source chatter recently. Is it good. Is it bad. What does it even mean to be open source. Etc.

A couple of interesting tid bits:

Coming out of the open source closet

Norman Richards of JBoss talks about the critique that JBoss is not Open Source. I can understand why Norman is frustrated. You can have issues with JBoss, Inc., and you can have issues with LGPL, but JBoss is a FORM of open source.

http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/java/coming_out_of_the_o.html

Open source injustice – a new gripe

Mike Keith of Oracle (TOPLink… or HOPLink) has a gripe.

He feels that there is an injustice in how tollerant people are to hear about a product pitch for a vendor, versus a product pitch for open source.

I agree. A product pitch is a product pitch. :)

Everyone was wondering if the ‘rub off effect’ would truly happen.

Apparently it did, as people acted on: “This iPod is cool. Maybe I could get a Mac?”

Apple Computer reported the highest quarterly revenue and earnings in the company’s history Wednesday, fueled by an unprecedented surge in sales of iPod portable music players and the rub-off effect on the Mac.

IPod’s allure propels Apple to record profit

There were also some other interesting tidbits:

However, Apple’s sales figures revealed a softening in the business for Apple’s traditional cash cow, the PowerMac tower computer used by graphic designers and other professionals. Unit sales fell 19 percent from the same time last year. And Apple predicted sales would not return to the levels of a year ago.

“I believe that a significant percentage of people who were buying the PowerMac G4 have shifted to iMac G5,” said Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations.

Sales of the PowerBook, Apple’s top-of-the-line laptop with the sleek aluminum cover, also fell 23 percent, as customers gravitated to the newly updated (and less expensive) white iBook notebook computers.

Again. I can’t wait to be able to run Tiger on Tiger! Gimme gimme gimme, I need, I need! :)