Al Hoang

From Artima’s Developer Buzz feed I picked up this story on someone managing to sell to management the use of Scala in a project. There is a little bit talk about performance and ease of deployment which could be good points depending on your environment…

We also had an occasion to have 2,000 simultaneous (as in at the same time, pounding on their keyboards) connections … thanks to Jetty Continuations … and an average of 700 requests per second on a dual core opteron with a load average of around 0.24… try that with your Rails app.

So, to this customer’s JVM, the Scala and lift code looks, smells and tastes just like Java code. If I renamed the scala-library.jar file to apache-closures.jar, nobody would know the difference… at all.

For a Java shop deploying a Scala app might not be AS big a deal. However, when you have a clean slate and don’t even need to sell Java just a solution selling Scala becomes a little bit more blurred.

Read it yourself

From Ranchero’s Weblog I saw this Weblog Entry on getting the Rhino JavaScript engine setup in OS X. This is pretty neat especially for people who are heavy into ECMA/JavaScript hacking as it allows them to leverage all of their sensibilities of JavaScript for doing scripting tasks.

The breakdown of tasks you need to do are:

1. Grab the Rhino Tarball from the Mozilla site
2. Then do some customizations to your shell environment to be able to run it easily

One thing to note is that Rhino relies on a Java VM to be installed as it is basically a JAR file with a bunch of extra functionality. One bonus for OS X is that Java is already installed with OS X (isn’t it nice not having to go hunting around Sun’s website looking for a bloody JVM then waiting for some huuuuge download to finish?). However a detractor is that it’s Java. I’ve tried writing some command line tools using Java and I find them clunky as you have to do lots of annoying contortions to just run it correctly at the command line. For a seasoned Java programmer it’s probably business as usual…

However, I already know my way around Ruby, Python, and am fluent enough in plain Bourne SHell syntax that I don’t see the point of adding yet another tool to compete with my CLI tasks. Right now, I’ve truly decided on Ruby as my scripting language once it gets outside of the realm of too much difficult logic in Bourne Shell (I still use this when the needs are simple). I like Python but it sucks trying to get Python working properly in a command pipeline. But if you do the normal, write a file, then run it in the interpreter it won’t make a big difference. OR if you use some fancy IDE.

But either way, choice is good and I’m sure JavaScript fans will be able to benefit most from this

Link to getting JavaScript up on OS X

I’m sure this would make piles of Perl Hackers happy.  A port of the perl language to the Java JVM.   The project is stopped due to the original author wrote a proof of concept and has moved on to other things but it seems this would be amusing.

Here’s the link

http://www.ebb.org/perljvm/

This link is classic Greenspun all the way. But it drives a good point home about Java.

“The final third, which seems to be struggling the most, is using Java Server Pages (JSP) with Oracle on Linux.  JSP is fantastically simpler than “J2EE”, which is the recommended-by-Sun way of building applications, but still it seems to be too complex for seniors and graduate students in the MIT computer science program, despite the fact that they all had at least one semester of Java experience in 6.170.”