Groovy gets the best meta programming elements

The second time I have taken a deeper look at Groovy (this happened sometime last year), there were a couple of things about its meta programming capabilities that even if looking good were not so easy and not so advanced as the offerings in other languages.

At that time, I’ve looked at what other languages (like Ruby, Python, etc.) were offering in this field and I have tried to sell them to the Groovy dev team. But, due to the lack of time I had to stop after a while.

Fortunately enough, Graeme Rocher, project lead of Grails, have been constantly pushing for most of those proposals and even for more advanced/useful features. And now, with the release of Groovy beta3 I can say that Groovy has just got the best meta programming elements.

Well, I am not gonna present them here because they are already very well documented on the Groovy site:

• Using invokeMethod and getProperty
• Using methodMissing and propertyMissing
• Evaluating the MetaClass runtime
• Using ExpandoMetaClass to add behaviour
• Customizing MetaClass for a single instance

The whole Groovy team is wishing you: Happy Groovying!

PS: Yes, I agree that using the word “best” is gonna make my statement arguable (and probably it is 🙂 ), but I truely believe that Groovy offers now a wonderful meta programming environment.

Update: I have posted a while ago a couple of links about meta object protocol.

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JavaZone totally… Rocks!

Well, I just realized that there is already one week since JavaZone has closed its doors for this year. And even if it is so late, I couldn’t resist posting about how great this conference is. I mean starting with the great organization, the venue, those “weird” ideas (f.e. the opening with a Norwegian Rammstein group) and ending with the sessions, everything there is great. Not to mentioned the organizers! They really rock! The whole conference rocks!

This year I was happy to see that more local guys have presented in English which is great for the strangers like me. The single weird thing was that the companies present in the conference lobby were prepared with lots of norwegian only matterials, but I hope next year they will become more i18n-compatible ;-).

If you have never been there, then my advise is to plan for joining it next year. If you have already been there, then I am more than 100% sure that you will want to go next year too :-). At least I have already marked the September 2008 for JavaZone!

Thanks you guys! It was once again a great experience and I am looking forward for the next year surprises.

CSSVista… what’s that?

Well, it is definitely not a stylesheet editor for your Vista Windows OS. In fact it has nothing to do with Vista OS, but only with CSS.

It is a free product that should provide you the ability to edit live the CSS of your site on both IE and Firefox. That’s sounds cool! Editing live sites on Firefox has been available for a long time through the usage of Web Developer extension or the great Firebug plugin. But nothing similar, not even close, was available for IE. Now having this product will hopefully make our web dev life a bit easier, and having it for free is even great. Congrats to the Litmus guys!

You can find the product here.

MetaObject Protocol Reference Links

A first set of links about MetaObject Protocol (theory and different implementations including Lisp, Ruby, Python, etc.)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-object_protocol
• Serial Parrot/Cardinal Interview: Episode II
• In-process cross-language object interaction: adapters or navigators?
• perl.perl6.internals
• Jim Hugunin’s The One True Object: Part1 and Part 2
• MOP Specification
• http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/goops/Metaobjects-and-the-Metaobject-Protocol.html
• The Common Lisp Object System MetaObject Protocol
• Seeing Metaclasses Clearly

People have recommended also The Art of the Metaobject Protocol by G.Kiczales, but unfortunately I haven’t put my hands on it yet.

Code Querying Made Easy!

This free Eclipse plugin seems quite intersting. I think I remember some other approaches in this direction, but none went so far. According to their front page the following features are supported:

• Search and Navigate code – search semantic properties of code (both source and bytecode), and define customized tree-views.
• Find bugs – use SemmleCode’s standard library to detect common bugs; adjust existing code queries to search for bug patterns that are specific to your projects and frameworks.
• Compute metrics – do change impact analysis, spot bad code smells and explore dependencies, all with the library of metrics queries.
• Enforce coding conventions – introduce your own checks with intuitive custom queries; show violations as errors or warnings in Eclipse.
• Generate charts and graphs – view analysis results in no less than seven different ways, including charts and graphs; navigation is further simplified as each view is linked back to the source code.

You can read more here. I really hope to have the time to try it out.

Should I definitively move from Blogger?

Since I upgraded my account from Blogger 1 to Blogger 2, I have started to have problems accessing my account. Not that I have been writing a there a lot, but still it was very frustrating. Things where getting slower and slower every day and finally for the last couple of weeks I haven’t been able to access it anymore. I don’t know if anybody else has notice something in this direction.

So for now, I am creating an account on WordPress (which by the way makes things easy to migrate your blogger account) and I will try this new solution. Hopefully, I will have a better experience with it (and I must confess that so far I’ve been happy with the free offering).