The last time I paid any attention to Groovy was when Mike Spille blogged about it, and when the Bile Blog chimed in (links below). Basically they wrote off the project (albeit giving lots of details about why). But recently the Java Posse talked about it in slightly different tones, so it made me start wondering.

On previous road trips, I've been able to fill my driving time by listening to ITConversations, but I ran out. So I started looking, via iTunes, for other podcasts that were IT based. There are plenty, and some are quite good.

Prefactoring has generated some discussion among developers. Some developers have formed opinions about it based upon the editorial summary in Amazon. Unforunately that summary was not approved by me and was full of marketing hype that did not represent prefactoring. This entry hopes to clarify the issues.

I've put up the page for Thinking in Java, fourth edition. On it you can find a sample including the first 7 chapters, the source code and installation instructions, and links to sites which are taking orders for the book.

I have recently discovered the somewhat unknown and understated language, Joy. A pure functional language, without lambda operations!

In of itself not that exciting, but it can enable some interesting paradigms.

And now for something completely different... Nokia has released the source code for its Python port to the S60 high-end phone platform as open source. Yay Nokia! I'm using this blog entry also to plug (again!) the art project MobiLenin by Jürgen Scheible.

The XML crowd don't seem to get it. I don't *want* to use XML in my templates. Now can they leave me alone and stop telling me that I want XML?

I finally got some time to play with Cheetah and Django templates. After maybe an hour with each, I like Django best. Hopefully people are still watching this space...

This is an interim response to the discussion that followed my previous web frameworks blog. I need to do much more research, but I have some quick thoughts.

Google makes me think about lots of stuff. Today I'm thinking about the state of web frameworks.

In a recent discussion Kresimir Cosic said the following thing to me: "I think that subtyping a-posteriori is great.". When thinking about case classes ala Scala (which I believe was inspired by Haskell), I couldn't help but wonder, why not have case classes a-posteriori?

My previous posting about Ruby generated a lot of noise and very little light -- that is, not much in the way of compelling reasons to learn the language. So I went to a couple of Seattle.rb Ruby users group meetings and spent time with 3 uber-geeks. Now I at least have the beginning of an understanding of what's interesting about this language.

The folks at FtpVoyager have done it again. First, they created the best interface for remote syncrhonization I've ever seen. Now they've come up with the best online support tool. It's even better than my design...something I've given a *lot* of thought.

Good question. Here is a brief summary of where I'm at and where I'm thinking of going.