From nand to tetris

This looks like a great course+book: The elements of computing systems.

Ext JS 2.1 now GPL :(

Unfortunately Ext JS 2.1 (and Ext GWT 1.0) have been released under the GPL. This will make Ext more difficult to sell to corporate clients.

Ext JS 2.0.2 is still available for download under a LGPL licence and can be used with the GWT integration found in the GWT-Ext project (not to be confused with Ext GWT). i.e. GWT-Ext 2.0.3 and Ext 2.0.2 are still both LGPL. I wonder if Ext GWT 1.0 (GPL) started life as GWT-Ext 2.0.3 (LGPL)…

I wonder if a fork will appear… or perhaps a Yahoo! UI on GWT or a Tibco GI on GWT. Both YUI and GI are BSD and so very business friendly.

I discovered a promise of a tibcogi4gwt project but nothing more

Update: more info can be found in a post by the author of GWT-Ext.

Super Mario in JavaScript

It’s amazing to see this implemented in JavaScript!

Note that there seems to be only one level to the game which isn’t entirely implemented. It’s the concept that such a beast can be implemented in JavaScript rather than Flash that’s interesting.

My Golden Compass “Daemon” personality

Xanthia

Rob Pike on concurrency

Watch this great Google talk with Rob Pike. He talks about concurrent processes and message passing in the context of Newsqueak - a programming language that he wrote 20 years ago. What he describes is very similar to the Erlang programming model except that channels are first class citizens.

Java Puzzlers

Go directly to here if you think you know all the dark corners of the Java language and APIs. It’s a really worthwhile Google TechTalk. You will come away thinking that you had better set up automated FindBugs analysis of your code!

First steps to Scala

If you’re interested in the Scala programming language then this article will come in handy. I learned a couple of things. In particular, I didn’t realise that you could instantiate an object with a trait (effectively changing the trait from the one specified in the class definition). Very interested in how that is implemented.

More praise for Wicket

Wicket has finally graduated to become a top level Apache project and is receiving a much praise as ever.

MacTax - Mac prices in the UK

I would really like to try a Mac as my next computer. I’ve been meaning to ever since they went UNIX . Haven’t decided yet between a MacBook, MacBook Pro or iMac. However, I keep coming back to the pricing … particularly here the UK and I hear it’s the same throughout Europe.

A basic spec 15″ MacBook Pro is £1,300 in the UK and only $2,000 in the US…
Almost 600USD more expensive

The standard iMac 24″ is £1,350 in the UK and only $2,000 in the US…
Almost 700USD more expensive

Where does the MacTax go?

Exceptions - checked or not?

The Java Posse #127 podcast talks about the possibility of removing checked exceptions from the Java language. The JavaPosse folks seem to universally like them. No one knew what Scala did with respect to checked exceptions. Turns out that it does not have them!

3.3. Why are there no throws annotations on methods, unlike in Java?

Compile-time checking of exceptions sounds good in theory, but in practice has not worked well. Programmers tend to write catch clauses that catch too many exceptions, thus swallowing exceptions and decreasing reliability.

If you haven’t seen the Scala language yet, check Martin Odersky’s Google Techtalk.

I tend to avoid checked exceptions. This is the way that the Spring folks have gone and - of course - Anders Hejlsberg. Anders did a great job designing the C# language.

I’m still digging into an article on dev2dev which promotes checked exceptions and points out that that the times they get annoying is where the Java API was poorly designed. For me this still points that checked exceptions are a experimental language feature perhaps best left out of industry programming languages for now.