Sunday, June 16, 2002

Radio Speak I'm obviously not as much of a Radio-geek as everyone else out there. What are blogrolls and channelrolls? Are they anywhere near as tasty as the albacore special roll? 1:52:35 PM    comment []

Sunday, June 09, 2002

REST and SQL Imperative programming has ruined us all. Analogy: ...within databases, you will likely find that something like SQL is great for queries, but you want to step back into the [stored] procedure world for updates.[Sam Ruby] This is a pretty good analogy because SQL is a unbelievably limited query language just as REST is an unbelievably limited, er, whatever it is supposed to be.[Patrick Logan] This is a terrible analogy. Don't stored procedures contain SQL? This is like saying that we should prefer Java over HTTP because you can write a simple Java method to fetch a Web resource. The conceptual API to a database consists of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. The conceptual API to the Web consists of GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. Notice the similiarites? Tuple spaces have similiarly generic interfaces. When implementing systems that use a database, the Web, or tuple spaces, you can (and should) encapsulate the code that interfaces with those systems into functions or classes or whatever but that doesn't mean that these systems' "native" API isn't powerful enough. It's their genericity that makes them so powerful! 3:32:48 PM    comment []

Sunday, April 28, 2002

ConsoleHost This is my version of Scott Guthrie's example demonstrating how to process ASP.NET requests outside of IIS. Mine automatically copies itself to the current directory's bin subdirectory (else it won't work) and also allows you to pass in parameters from the command line. I had trouble getting Radio to "upstream" this file until I changed the extension. Anybody know what's up with that? 11:20:03 PM    comment []

JavaML If I ever get a chance to (or if anybody else would like to) try generating Java bindings for RSDL, then JavaML might be worth looking into since it'd be a similiar approach to the Xml2CodeDom syntax that I output for the .NET languages. I have a vague recollection of finding a Java API for constructing source code trees (a la .NET's CodeDom) many months ago but seem to have lost the link. Did anybody else happen to come across this, too? 2:56:25 AM    comment []

Saturday, April 27, 2002

RSDL I've been playing around with generating code for web sevices done the REST way for a while now. RSDL is the result. It can generate proxies for web resources (using my Xml2CodeDom tool) for any of the big three .NET languages. The RSDL vocabulary is language agnostic, however, so it should be possible to generate proxies for any language. I thought it was about time I released it considering all of the discussions about SOAP vs. REST that's been going on recently. The vocabulary was originally based on Paul Prescod's WRDL but has since been simplified to my liking. It's not much but I think it has the potential to become more. Comments would be lovely. 8:26:26 PM    comment []

Monday, April 22, 2002

Generating Code For Fun and Profit I did something like this for work (using C++ and ADO Recordsets) though it was nowhere near as comprehensive. I'm just glad to see that more and more people are starting to see the light. 6:59:06 PM    comment []

Sunday, April 21, 2002

Dogfood In my neverending quest to amuse myself by confusing myself, I've reimplemented my Xml2CodeDom tool in XML so that it can now generate itself. It took over 1600 lines of XML to generate only 130 lines of C# code so I don't expect that developers will be flocking over to this new format anytime soon. It was a fun experiment while it lasted. This could, however, have some interesting applications for language agnostic code generation. Maybe tools like CollectionGen could use something like this in order to support all features for more than just one language without having to actually duplicate the logic for each language. 5:26:20 PM    comment []

Wednesday, April 17, 2002

Tim Tabor was kind of enough to point me in the direction of some useful writings on how to use Radio. I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels like he's been lead into a dark cave with no light and no map. 8:28:57 PM    comment []