Summary
Jim Baker emailed me about talking to Tobias Ivarsson from Sweden, who is one of the two Google "Summer of Code" students working on bringing Jython up to conformance with Python version 2.5.

Tobias will be working on code generation and the other person will be working independently on parsing. Jim is Tobias' coach, and Tobias will be working exclusively on this project from mid-June when his classes end, until end of August or mid September. He said, however, that he's not sure he'll be able to just drop it at that time. And knowing Jim, I think there's going to be a great deal of progress on the project; it's entirely possible they'll get it up to 2.5 in that time.

Tobias hopes to use TDD right from the beginning and he plans to publish on sourceforge or some other place so that people can follow and participate. When I find out where it's being published I'll post it.

Before I was able to meet with Tobias I got pulled into a press meeting about the Sun open grid computing system, Network.com. This allows you to buy relatively cheap time on as many nodes as you want, in order to solve parallel computational problems or even just to offload some tasks. For me the most important nugget from this meeting was that you can use any language that runs on Solaris, whereas before I thought it was only Java. So you could, for example, express your parallel problem in Python or Ruby.

James Ward and I continued to have ineffective coffee experiences -- neither of us could get much of a buzz from our coffees, something we suspected might be linked to being inside for too long. After poking at a Flex problem for a little while, we went on the great power supply hunt (James' had broken), from CompUSA to Radio Shack, finally achieving success at Best Buy -- but alas, when he finally opened the package, which had been returned but was covered with "inspected" stickers, he discovered that it was only the brick, no cables. From there we ended up at the Adobe Offices where we happened to encounter Jongseck Byun and Soo Yeol Yang from Korea who were very friendly and enthusiastic about meeting us. I envison a future Flex/Apollo Jam in Korea. Then a small Adobe contingent including Gordon Smith and Todd Rein eventually arrived at the Burma Superstar restaurant, a very small, very packed and fantastic place where we ate too much because it tasted SO good.

(Maybe there's too much detail here but that's what forced blogging produces. I told the Sun people I would blog for my press pass and I am keeping my word!)

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About the Blogger

Bruce Eckel (www.BruceEckel.com) provides development assistance in Python with user interfaces in Flex. He is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2005), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), C++ Inside & Out (Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1993), among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences.