Halogen Labs Weblog

According to this announcement, 2.1rc1 has been released. Congratulations everyone!

Congrats are also in order to Guido Casper who was put up for commit access.

I just noticed people hitting my site searching for “slow iTerm”, which takes them to my entry about iTerm which I wrote about quote a while ago.

I decided to check in on iTerm lately, and according to this comment on VersionTracker, they managed to fix the slowness with multiple tabs. Looks like I’ll be checking it out again. Tabbed terminals is fun fun fun.

I just spotted this article on XML.com about getting started with publishing data online with Cocoon. Good source of beginner info.

Well, it’s Thursday, and tomorrow is Independence Day here in the US, so I’ll be gone all weekend up at a cabin shooting off fireworks and sitting in a nice cold lake in my swimtrunks. Thusly, openWeather probably won’t go beta until sometime after I get back. Expect the beta service to open up next week.

Things left to do:

• Canadian & Euro Feeds
• Slightly revamp backend
• Tidy after openWxBot
• Convert to intermediate format after Tidy
• Correctly embed a timestamp using exslt’s date:date-time() func
• Finish FAQ, Legal Disclaimer
• Look into starting an LLC :)

Damn, that’s one ugly-ass bulleted list.

(via Be Blogging)

Russell Beattie gives up on Cocoon:

Well, I’ve spent the last week or so working with Cocoon and I give up. I can’t get any real work done with it, so I’m moving on.

He goes on:

I OBVIOUSLY just don’t know how to use Cocoon properly, but the fact is that after absorbing two big-ass books and spending a hell of a lot of time on it, if I’m not getting any work done, then it’s not the right technology for me. Cocoon generally goes against my way of thinking about things anyways.

It’s too bad, because he hasn’t even seen the Flow layer yet, either. It looks like he’s been having bad problems with strange characters. I wonder what version he used, and what errors he’s been having. Never saw a flash of him on either of the mail lists, either. It’s too bad, because he would have gotten plenty of help.

Yep, cocoon.apache.org has ‘gone live’, and it’s now running off Forrest. There’s some rudimentrary pages there now, but it’s nice seeing the different site versions and all of the sites Forrest-ize :)

Alex Krut continues his Cocoon Flow in Java with some more advancements. It looks like he’s managed to squash the Java code down to a reasonable amount of lines :) This thread is the discussion on cocoon-dev about it all.

Luca Morandini and the Geoid team announces the first public version of Geoid, a set of components which connect Cocoon to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Geoid is currently being hosted at CocoonDev.

I took particular interest in this because I used to work on NHGIS, and we were going to be needing a way of connecting ArcIMS with Cocoon. I’m not at there anymore, but this still holds a high level of interest with me. And I’ve forwarded the announcement to some former coworkers who may find it interesting, and want to use it (and hire a Cocoon mastermind *nudge, wink*).

Reinhard Pötz noticed this page about using Java (Not Javascript!!) in Cocoon for Flow control. (via Oividiu’s Blog). Interesting. I wonder how heavier this will be over the Javascript implementation.

Although…

Looking at the “guess the number” example, there’s quite a bit more code in the Java version versus my Javascript version that I did for the Wiki.

Code like this:
number = Integer.parseInt(ObjectModelHelper.getRequest(environment.getObjectModel()).getParameter(”number”));

Can be written like this in Javascript:
var guess = parseInt( cocoon.request.get(”guess”) );

Yes, please.

Questions:

How much heavier is the Java version over the Javascript version?

Are the Java continuations handled with the ContinuationsManager?

How long until we get Python to define Flow control? IMO the ultimate would be Python Flow control. I’ve seen stuff about stackless Python, and I’ve read messages asking the Jython people about a stackless version. They said it was impossible, but somehow I doubt that. I think they’re just lazy.

I think I’ll stick with Javascript for Flow control, if only to keep the # of lines down to a minimum. Simplicity is good. So is the interpretation.

Sylvain also weighs in on Java Flow Control.

(XML.com via Dive Into Mark)

Berkeley DB XML is an open source, embedded XML database created by Sleepycat Software. It’s built on top of Berkeley DB, a “key-value” database which provides record storage and transaction management. Unlike relational databases, which store data in relational tables, Berkeley DB XML is designed to store arbitrary trees of XML data.

I’ll give a cookie to the first person who gets Cocoon working with this… :)