Oliver Steele

Here are some of the weekend projects that I didn’t finish this year. These aren’t good enough to put on my project list or my sources page. Some of these aren’t even working, and some of them I might not finish at all (most of my weekends are spoken for). And some of them I can’t bear to look at (I’m not proud of the code, and don’t want to be judged by it…), but I’m making myself put them out there anyway. I feel bad for the neglected little things, trapped on my hard drive, and I’d like to let them see the sun, even if just briefly before they flicker out and die.

Libraries:
* LzOSUtils — jQuery-compatible ajax function, Flash->JS bridge with callbacks, declarative Flash 8 filter effects, console that reports to Firebug, dashed lines, Prototype-compatible string and collection methods, etc. Completely undocumented and fairly disorganized.
* LzTestKit — mocks and asynchronous and automated testing for OpenLaszlo; still pretty raw.
* HopKit — a “higher order programming kit”, for constructed chained APIs such as in LzTestKit’s mocks and expectations; still somewhat buggy and undocumented.
* MVars — a port of Haskell MVar’s to JavaScript. I realized that what I actually needed for real-world applications was an implementation of the join calculus (a la JoCaml). I haven’t written the join calculus version.
* Protodoc — I wrote this to extract the docs from the source files and to implement the live examples in Functional and Sequentially; it includes a version of the wonderful doctest, for JavaScript. I got part way through refactoring it into something that isn’t quite put together again. I haven’t decided whether to finish it or whether there’s an existing project that’s close enough.
* [No link yet] Updates to OpenLaszlo JSON and ropenlaszlo, from using them over the past year. (No, those links go to the old versions — I haven’t uploaded the updates
* Implementations in Ruby and JavaScript of the awesome CFDG. I wrote these a couple of years ago, and really want to update and clean them up to point where I can donate them to Hackety Hack, or someone else who might use them.

Applets:
* Tiles — HTML port of my mid-nineties Java version (which was a port of my mid-eighties C version), uses the Canvas tag; probably doesn’t work in MSIE
* IFS — a few minutes of pair programming with my son to show him some stuff about matrices; probably doesn’t work in MSIE
* On this day — iPhone applet; the feed is down right now
* Force-directed layout for my home page — this was my experiment using HTML instead of Flash; I got discouraged when I saw how bad the frame rate for full-page animation is was even in Firefox, let alone MSIE (Safari rocks now, though!)

Plus a couple dozen essays that are half or three-quarters written (programming, software development, math education), a couple of AJAX presentations, and two workbooks for teaching abstract math at the elementary level. It takes me longer to write an essay than a program, though!

More weekends, please.

It was months in the conception, weeks in the making, and minutes in the configuration, but the OpenLaszlo project now has a blog.  That blog is intended for project-related news, announcements, documentation, and musings, posted by members of the OpenLaszlo project and some of our co-workers at Laszlo Systems. And I’ll be returning this blog to more personal and broader topics. (Those are two overlapping categories, not one.) Plenty of Laszlo and RIA stuff where it goes beyond the immediate project work, but more other topics too.

On a related topic, Laszlo Systems has launched Laszlo Mail, a high-polish web mail product focused on cross-browser portability and on user experience . I first wrote about Laszlo Mail here. Laszlo Mail is an excellent example of the kind of application that we created OpenLaszlo in order to enable.  As Jonathan Boutelle says :” It feels like a candy-coated swiss army knife, an appealing mix of aesthetics and pragmatic design.”

Congratulations to the Laszlo Mail team on getting this done. The Laszlo Mail team has a blog too, here.

As of today, the Laszlo platform for building rich internet applications is open source. This includes everything: the server software, the client software, the examples, the documentation, the language — the whole platform. Like Mozilla, this is open source with a corporate sponsor; and like Mozilla, it’s honest-to-goodness open source — no dual licensing, no poison pill. It uses the Common Public License, listed on OpenSource.org.

OpenLaszlo.org has the source distribution for our new release, LPS 2.2, which also includes support for SOAP and XML-RPC, and over 500 new pages of documentation. For developing Laszlo applications, as opposed to hacking on the source to the Laszlo compiler and runtime, I recommend the binary distribution instead, which comes with installers for MacOS, Linux, and Windows. (You don’t have to actually write any code to see some neat stuff in the standard installation.) If you want to see some examples of the kinds of applications you can write, take a look at the customer showcase, the demos, and at MyLaszlo.com. If you want to dive into the source code, look at Laszlo Explorer and the Developers Guide.

Today is part one: the source code is available, the license is free. Part two is to open up our development process, including our source repository and bug tracking systems, so that you don’t have to be at Laszlo Systems (the company) to see what’s going with Laszlo (the open source project). Currently we’re in send-mail-to-the-dev-list mode for questions, and send-us-a-patch mode for contributions — about on a par with some of my other open source projects, but we can use those corporate sponsorship $$ to do better.

I’ve worked on open source projects before, and I’ve worked for companies before. One of these gets your software into the hands of those with the time to figure it out without training, and lets you work with great people who are able to find an excuse to use it in their work or free time. The other pays the rent, backs your product up with training and support, and lets you work with great people who need to pay their rent. I’m looking forward to doing both at the same time.

(By the way, if you want to work on Laszlo and fit the first category, sign up for the dev list. If you fit the second, send us a resume.)

After a spate of requests and a contribution from Wei-Hao Lin, I’ve finally gotten around to releasing an update of PyWordNet that works with the WordNet 2.0 database files. (WordNet 2.0 adds lexical links for derivational morphology and topical classification. This broke the PyWordNet 1.4 dictionary file parser.)

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