Thoughts on Oracle vs. Google »

Charles Nutter, an open-source Java developer and former Sun employer, looks at the history, patents, and likely outcomes of Oracle’s suit against Google’s Android.

Rich programmer food »

Steve Yegge, on why programmers should write compilers:

Whenever I gave even a moment’s thought to whether I needed to learn compilers, I’d think: I would need to know how compilers work in one of two scenarios. The first scenario is that I go work at Microsoft and somehow wind up in the Visual C++ group. Then I’d need to know how compilers work. The second scenario is that the urge suddenly comes upon me to grow a long beard and stop showering and make a pilgrimage to MIT where I beg Richard Stallman to let me live in a cot in some hallway and work on GCC with him like some sort of Jesuit vagabond.

The Perl 6 project is ten years old »

Carl Masak looks back over the past ten years of Perl 6’s development, from its catalyst and initial design, to budding implementations.

Nuke’em ‘Till They Glow »

Steve Blank talks about his job as an electrical engineer in a nuclear reactor in the 50s.

Steve’s mention of seeing Cerenkov radiation for the first time reminded me of a school excursion to the reactor at ANSTO, and the strange, at once both attractive and repulsive, thought that I had to dive into the fuel rod storage pool. Our guide at the time figured I’d be OK, as long as I didn’t go more than 3 meters deep, or stay in too long. In the end, I erred to stay on the dry side.

jsoup 0.3.1 released »

I’ve just released version 0.3.1 of jsoup, the Java library for working with real-world HTML.

This version adds bulk HTML methods to the Elements collection, supports easy form validation of HTML user input, improves bulk attribute matching, and includes fixes for some minor bugs.

A hearty thanks to everyone that has tried jsoup and written in to me or to the mailing list with their experiences. Your input is directly shaping jsoup for the better.

A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular »

I’ve heard the argument “you don’t need a compiler, since PHP is rarely the bottleneck” for many years. I think its complete bollox. But I wrote a compiler for PHP, so I would say that.

Unless your PHP server is sitting there idling (which is probably the case for many PHP servers out there), then you could make use of a PHP compiler. For small timers, all components of your application are going to be sitting on the same box, contending for the same resources. Even if you assume the DB is the bottleneck, the resources the interpreter consumes could be more profitably spent on the DB.

New version of jsoup released »

I’ve just released version 0.2.2 of jsoup. This release adds some new class name and HTML manipulation methods, improved document normalisation, and nicer HTML pretty-printing.

jsoup is now also available on the Maven central repository, so getting started is easier. See the details on the download page.

API design matters »

Michi Henning writes about the cost of bad APIs, and how to design good interfaces:

A great way to get usable APIs is to let the customer (namely, the caller) write the function signature, and to give that signature to a programmer to implement. This step alone eliminates at least half of poor APIs: too often, the implementers of APIs never use their own creations, with disastrous consequences for usability. Moreover, an API is not about programming, data structures, or algorithms—an API is a user interface, just as much as a GUI. The user at the using end of the API is a programmer—that is, a human being. Even though we tend to think of APIs as machine interfaces, they are not: they are human-machine interfaces.

Event-driven webserver Tornado is now open source »

FriendFeed has released Tornado, a Python non-blocking event-driven webserver and framework, as open source.

The framework is distinct from most mainstream web server frameworks (and certainly most Python frameworks) because it is non-blocking and reasonably fast. Because it is non-blocking and uses epoll, it can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means it is ideal for real-time web services. We built the web server specifically to handle FriendFeed’s real-time features — every active user maintains an open connection to the FriendFeed servers.

Lucene 2.9 Release Imminent »

Mark Miller reports that:

The third release candidate for Lucene 2.9 is about to hit and the final release is likely to be only days behind. Almost one year in the making, Lucene 2.9 is feature packed and progressively faster. With Solr 1.4 planning to release very shortly after 2.9, things are shaping up very nicely in Lucene land.

In anticipation of the Solr 1.4 release, Eric Pugh has announced that the first book on Solr, Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server, has been published and is available for purchase.