Beautiful or Otherwise

Two of the chapters from Beautiful Code Alberto Savoia chapter Beautiful Tests and Simon Peyton Jones on concurrency are available in PDF form. Beautiful Tests covers most of the different kinds of tests and how to make changes to code to make it more testable and starts to cover creating and validating theories.

Speaking of tests, Scala, DSLs, Behavior Driven Development?, talks about how Java is poor at creating DSLs specifically compared to Scala. And what's the application? Behavior driven development in a Java project called beanSpec (which superficially looks similar to Instinct probably as they're both based on RSpec and using the same stack example). So you have this neat sort of convergence where people are looking at testing Java better in ways that are more declarative (functional even).

Making Java more functional is on the cards for Java 7 in, Will Java 7 be Beautiful?, it links to point free programming in Java and Haskell and how the new language proposals (closures) make Java 7 look a lot like Haskell with the suggestion that all Java 7 functions should be curried.

While the syntax is potentially getting more beautiful, the user interfaces are traditionally pretty poor in Java (even with OS X support) but even that is changing. I've been following Chet Haase's blog and recently Filthy Rich Clients was made available to purchase. It's all about improving the look and feel of Java and to finally approach the richness of native OS X and Windows applications. He even has some links about language proposals too, including bringing back line numbers. Some examples of their work are on the web site and on Roman Guy's blog which includes an entry called Beautiful Swing.

Roman also linked to a movie of *7 the prototype handheld device running Green (Java). Who knew Duke had a house?

Java 7 with Closures

Closures for Java "I'm co-author of a draft proposal for adding closures and local functions to the Java programming language for the Dolphin (JDK 7) release. An abbreviated version of its current state is reproduced below. It was carefully designed to interoperate with the current idiom of one-method interfaces."

Based on the example, "int(int) plus2b = (int x) : x+2;" you know it must be Java when you have the type in there three times. Something like Groovy's closures or Ruby's seems better syntactically. There's also some other ideas to add such as currying and iterators.

Supping from the Information Firehose

* Oracle 10g Support for RDF "There are procedures provided to search the RDF models with a language that looks like a bit like SPARQL...The search is pretty nice because you can join your search on standard SQL tables, thus combining both your triple model and relational models together.

Oracle also has Rule support, in the form of Rule Indexes. A builtin set of rules for RDF Schema (RDFS) semantics is provided, which is a very nice touch. You are also free to create your own rules, both with the query pattern matching and filters."
* An Atom Store With links to people wanting to create a non-SQL store for Atom, including the very good Bosworth's Web of Data (original here) which is largely about why new databases should not be like Oracle but should distribute the processing (no views, triggers, etc).
* RDFAuthor does SPARQL "Damian is working on a new version of RDFAuthor that generates SPARQL queries (instead of the older Squish notation). It can also (not sure which protocol(s)) get results from a query service." I liked the original RDFAuthor - good to see an update is underway.
* Wrapping rdflib's Graph around a 4RDF Model "I wrote a 4Suite RDF model backend for rdflib, that allows the wrapping of Graph around a live 4Suite RDF model. Finally, I used this backend to execute a sparql-p query..."
* Secrets of lightweight development success, Part 7: Java alternatives Closures, Continuations, Metaprogramming and Reflection: "In short, the Java language just isn't a very productive applications language. The founders made some wise compromises to wrestle control away from C++, but we're starting to pay for those compromises."
* ONJava 2005 Reader Survey Results, Part 1 "Eclipse (76 percent), NetBeans (21 percent), None (17 percent), IntelliJ (13 percent)...JBoss (38 percent), None (28 percent), WebSphere (21 percent), WebLogic (20 percent)"
* Language Innovation: C# 3.0 explained "...most of the features of C# 3.0 are, arguably, nothing but syntactic sugar designed to make programming more productive..." One of the things that was (originally) good about Java was the lack of syntax (I thought anyway!).
* KVM over IP