[EVALUATION] - E01: The Java Failure - May Ruby Helps?

[Austin Ziegler]

Wes Moxam wrote:
[snip]
This guy has been asking these sorts of questions on various
comp.lang.* lists. He's been banned from several. I hate to be an ass,
but I really think this thread is a waste of time.

Mr. Moxam,

is it possible that i've invested all this time to do this research and
to write everything down on my website, just for having some fun on some
forums?

Yes, yes it is.

You've got an awful lot of detailed information from some very helpful and
patient people, so maybe it's time to actually try the language now?

no, it not the time.

Please avoid further off-topic replies.

Okay. I'm through.

If you're not going to go through and actually look at the *extensive*
list of technologies in Ruby that I provided you and actually *try*
the language, then you're not worth any more of my time. Your
requirements are vague, unrealistic, and indicative of someone not
familiar with software development. There's no silver bullet for you
in Ruby. Yes, you will have to do some -- likely quite a bit -- work.
But you'll enjoy writing your software more in Ruby than probably in
any other language.

People who are developing a web application are typically not
developing a GUI or CLI application at the same time. If they are,
then they're developing a service (perhaps a "web service") and
different front ends for said service (e.g., they develop the business
logic in the service and then provide GUI, WUI, and CLI interfaces to
it). It's how I'll be doing Bug Traction when I get around to it
again. When I get PDF::Writer ready for release, I'll put a web
front-end around part of it, too.

I choose various technologies based on the needs that I have. Ruwiki
solves some of those. PDF::Writer solves others. I have a half-dozen
*other* projects that I have written, and various little utilities,
too, that solve other problems. People use the things that I write in
surprising ways -- I was quite surprised to hear that Hieraki uses
Text::Format (and to whomever was talking to me about that last month,
I'm not ignoring Text::Format changes that I've promised, either --
I'm just very much overloaded right now).

It *is* time for you to sit down and see if any of the pieces
mentioned will work well enough for you to fill in the gaps for your
stated needs. It's not *our* responsibility to provide them to you on
a silver platter wrapped in gold foil with a satin bow. The individual
technologies exist out there. They haven't been made into the fictive
jamStack because it turns out that no one else has needed them. If you
need them, *you* figure out which of those dozen or so projects I
mentioned yesterday fit your needs.

Until then, I'm done. You aren't providing specifics and you're being
quite silly in your expectations. It's time for you to do some work
for yourself.

-austin

 

[Tim Ferrell]

What might also help ... you will be in a better position to ask good questions if you familiarize yourself with the language at hand first... yes, this
would require more time and effort on your part than just asking "blind" questions or submitting a (vague) list of requirements for comment, but others will
usually be more open to help if they can see more effort on the part of the one asking...

That being said, I would look at this differently if I were in your position. Rather than searching for a language that "does it all" (or 70%, as you said)
I would look for a language that is capable enough to meet the requirements, but moreover, something that truly makes life as a developer more productive
and less stressful, you know? That is the kind of language I would want to base a framework on - even if I had to develop it myself.

Of course, that really explains why I am a Ruby developer in the first place... I don't like having to wrestle with a language to make it behave

Cheers ... and good luck on your search.

Tim

Fair enough. As a follow up question...Have you found any technology
suite that has fullfilled your requirements list?

not yet.

I'm evaluating some python stuff, but the reaction of the community on a
simple questionaire has distracted me very mouch.

[EVALUATION] - E02 - Support for MinGW Open Source Compiler
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/f5cd74aa26617f17

-

If i find e.g. 70% fo my requirements fulfilled within ruby, I would
possibly start to implement the remaining 30%.

But possibly I should split my requirements down into smaller chunks,
and ask step by step.

-Tom

..

 

[Ilias Lazaridis]

Austin Ziegler wrote:
[...]

Okay. I'm through.

If you're not going to go through and actually look at the *extensive*

[...] - (off-context comments)

Sorry, but I did not read your writings.

You increase the complexity in a direction which is not of any relevance
for me.

I've replied a few times

My courtesy for replying to off-topic and off-context comments [of the
community in general] has its limits.

..

 

[Ilias Lazaridis]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Ilias Lazaridis defenestrated me:

Thomas E Enebo wrote:

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Ilias Lazaridis defenestrated me:

I simply need to produce software.

Just Download & start?



What Java bundles exist where you just download and start?
Especially that does a fraction of what you are talking
about. Many frameworks and tools exist in Java, but they all
require research and I cannot think of a single-stop
solution. Enterprise highly scalable stuff exists for java,
but that stuff is never really simple software production.
It also always seems to need plenty of plumbing.



One reason for leaving JAVA.




Fair enough. As a follow up question...Have you found any
technology suite that has fullfilled your requirements list?

not yet.

I'm evaluating some python stuff, but the reaction of the community
on a simple questionaire has distracted me very mouch.

[EVALUATION] - E02 - Support for MinGW Open Source Compiler
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/f5cd74aa26617f17



-

If i find e.g. 70% fo my requirements fulfilled within ruby, I
would possibly start to implement the remaining 30%.

But possibly I should split my requirements down into smaller
chunks, and ask step by step.

What might also help ... you will be in a better position to ask good

[...] - (process suggestions)

Sorry, cannot alter my process.

That being said, I would look at this differently if I were in your
position. Rather than searching for a language that "does it all" (or
70%, as you said) I would look for a language that is capable enough
to meet the requirements, but moreover, something that truly makes
life as a developer more productive and less stressful, you know?
That is the kind of language I would want to base a framework on -
even if I had to develop it myself.

I understand what you mean.

But I have some timing constraints, thus depending on some existing
coverage.

Of course, that really explains why I am a Ruby developer in the
first place... I don't like having to wrestle with a language to make
it behave

Cheers ... and good luck on your search.

Thank you very much.

Tim

..

 

[Austin Ziegler]

Okay. I'm through.
If you're not going to go through and actually look at the *extensive*

[...] - (off-context comments)
Sorry, but I did not read your writings.

You increase the complexity in a direction which is not of any relevance
for me.

Wrong. I did not increase the complexity; I addressed your ignorance.

Maybe that is increasing the complexity. Read what I wrote. It has
everything you need to actually do some real work, rather than trying
to get others to do the work for you. Except maybe URLs, and since
you've demonstrated that you can use Google Groups, you can certainly
use Google to get the URLs needed.

The fact is that all of the replies have been on-topic and to the
point of your response. They just aren't what you want to hear. It's
called "do your own homework."

-austin

 

[Ilias Lazaridis]

Please avoid further off-topic replies.

Okay. I'm through.
If you're not going to go through and actually look at the *extensive*

[...] - (off-context comments)
Sorry, but I did not read your writings.

You increase the complexity in a direction which is not of any relevance
for me.

Wrong. I did not increase the complexity; I addressed your ignorance.

[...] - (omitted reading)

This is not of relevance at this stage.

Please have the gentleness to avoid further off-context comments.

I have a limited processing capacity, which I cannot exhaust with [at
least at this time] non-relevant constructs.

..

 

[Stephen Kellett]

no, it not the time.

Wrong answer.

Please avoid further off-topic replies.

His reply was on-topic. He answered a question you asked. Except you
thought it was a rhetorical question.

Stephen

 

[Stephen Kellett]

[...] - (process suggestions)

Sorry, cannot alter my process.

Translation: "I am driving in a straight line. A bend approaches. I will
drive off the road despite the advice to the contrary from the people I
have solicited advice from".

Stephen

 

[Stephen Kellett]

is it possible that i've invested all this time to do this research and
to write everything down on my website, just for having some fun on
some forums?

You aren't doing research. You are asking other people to do your
research for you. Which is why I, and others, in multiple newsgroups
will continue to implore you to do some work yourself. You've stated in
some posts that are not willing to even use a search engine. In the
Python newsgroup after about 5 days you asked the infamous "Who's
Guido?" question. A question that any that *had* done some research
about Python would never ask - they would know.

I ask you friendly to avoid further off-topic posts.

I ask you to do some work yourself rather than expect others to do it
for you.

Stephen

 

[Luke Graham]

This person is not asking for information. He is a successful troll.
Well done to him.

[...] - (process suggestions)

Sorry, cannot alter my process.

Translation: "I am driving in a straight line. A bend approaches. I will
drive off the road despite the advice to the contrary from the people I
have solicited advice from".

Stephen

 

[Dick Davies]

Wrong answer.


His reply was on-topic. He answered a question you asked. Except you
thought it was a rhetorical question.

I call troll, sorry for feeding.

 

[zimba.tm]

Easy.

HOWTO be Ilias Lazaridis :

"
A cooperation between Sun Microsystems and IBM&Co. in conjunction with
liberal & high evolutive communities would result in an nearly
unbeatable programming platform.

My evaluation has shown:

(affirmation with no backup)

What I want is to takeover the world, please think like me.
Also please take a look at my buzzword generated website.

Thus I leave all those ridiculous folks behind,

(Java bashing)

Because I have a high sense of what a community IS, please only talk
about what I want to hear. Everything that answeres my questions will
be noted as irrelevant.

-

"
Of course It's a sad day.

(censorship notes)

Censorship is ok for me to takeover the world

http://lazaridis.com/core/project/open.html
"

please first read http://goat.cx/

-

"I'm sure there is one community out there which will realize immediatly
the benefits of an high-evolutive system. "

-

please define high-evolutive


[...]

During the 6 months evaluation i've extracted several constructs.

"How it should be to become high evolutive"

-

please define high-evolutive

I don't know Ruby.

Basicly I would like to do everything in C++.

But development must go quicker.

You could do like me, try to use the community to do the work for
yourself. Language selection is not a matter of taste and needs, but of
how much monkeys uses it.

[...]

Sorry I got tired at that point

 

[Stephen Kellett]

please first read http://goat.cx/

That is probably the most offensive (and painful) image I have seen in a
very long time. Yuck.

 

[Alexander Kellett]

omg! blasphemy! a ruby user thats never wasted hours reading slashdot
at -1!!!

Alex

 

[Stephen Kellett]

omg! blasphemy! a ruby user thats never wasted hours reading slashdot

at -1!!!

Slashdot - at times interesting, but the lack of insight in some of the
article postings, and especially in the comments in amazing. The signal
to noise is so low its not worth reading the comments much, if at all.

That said, I do read it every day as there may be a good article or 2 to
follow. Even if the "insightful" comment isn't up to much, often the
original article or company mentioned is interesting (The AlphaGrip was
good, plus an email to them got a quick and informative reply from one
of the creators).

Stephen

 

[James Britt]

Slashdot - at times interesting, but the lack of insight in some of the
article postings, and especially in the comments in amazing. The signal
to noise is so low its not worth reading the comments much, if at all.

Handy though to read comments a +3 or higher just to see the (possibly)
goos stuff.

That said, I do read it every day as there may be a good article or 2 to
follow. Even if the "insightful" comment isn't up to much, often the
original article or company mentioned is interesting (The AlphaGrip was
good, plus an email to them got a quick and informative reply from one
of the creators).

I seem to get mod points every other week, so I go looking for positive
mentions of Ruby to mod up.


James

 

[Markus Pilzecker]

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Austin Ziegler wrote:
| On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 04:34:53 +0900, Ilias Lazaridis
|
....
|
| Actually, Ilias, it is 100% accurate. There is no system in
| existence -- no CASE tool in existence -- which will allow you to:

Would you subsume an MDA-based model transformer and generator
framework under your understanding of ``CASE tool''?


| 1) generate any random application in the world that can use an
| embedded database or an external database and perform well in any
| use case; and

I think, this is a point, where a generator indeed helps. It helps a
lot to keep domain knowledge in the model [of the domain -- you see,
it's about to become a tautology] and to concentrate the diverse
aspects of technology projections into the transformation engine.


| 2) program against platform-agnostic GUI to run on systems from Sun
| to Linux to Windows to MacOS X to PalmOS or even something
| embedded in your toaster, OR run as a web application at whim.
|
| That's basically what you're wanting. There's no such commercial
| application and there's no such open source application. Why?

Only, if you exclude transformer|generator frameworks from the
understanding of CASE tool.


| Because such a tool would SUCK. As every single CASE tool in
| existence has ever done. CASE tools generally require that you run a
| very large runtime, program *their* way, often in *their* language
| (which isn't related to anyone else's), and then tend to fall behind
| both operating system releases and the technology curve.
|
Transformer|generator frameworks concentrate the knowledge of the
target technology in the transformation engine. At least for simpler
scenarios, this does not at all imply generation or use of a runtime
system: e.g., if you have modelled your system in ArcStyler and use
its Java2-cartridge to generate code of it, there is nothing near to
a runtime system, which comes into the game. And the result is [at
least beyond javac] as slim as what you could code by hand.

Of course, if one utilises external libraries[, which is usually the
case], your domain model has a surface against a model of these
libraries, or an abstraction thereof. And then, you will link your
application against a runtime lib, when it comes to build it.

If, at some time in the future, javadoc is replaced by the model of
the world, represented by the lib, your transformer|generator were able
to _generate_ exactly this part of the lib, which is needed together
with your application. You can regard this as on-the-fly generation of
the runtime system. Seen from this perspective, a lib of nowadays is
nothing else than a cache of the generated products. Consider e.g. a
state machine like it is used in lex or a table-based L2-engine as in
some LALR-parser: why shouldn't you want to ``cache'' it in a library?

A clear advantage of a generator is, that you can easily customise the
generated products. And [e.g. with ArcStyler] it is already possible,
to use one and the same model and generate Java code from it or C# code
[or both] and the artefacts, you need to build, and, if you like, deploy
it to an application server.

Present experience shows, that all structural decisions[, e.g., which
patterns you apply, what a deployment descriptor is or the syntax of a
make file, ...] get materialised in the transformation engine and
can be kept separate from the domain world to quite a high degree.
Just to say it a bit more explicit: programming diverts into two
activities: programming the transformer and programming the domain
dynamics.

Certainly, you have the freedom to be unclever and interrelate model
and transformer tightly. But this is less the fault of a methodology,
but an inherent property of any knowledge engineering process: you
have the freedom to be dumb. The question is: does it help you to be
un-dumb?

So much,

~ Markus



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[Markus Pilzecker]

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Markus Pilzecker wrote:
|
| Austin Ziegler wrote:
| | On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 04:34:53 +0900, Ilias Lazaridis
| |
| ...
| |
| | Actually, Ilias, it is 100% accurate. There is no system in
| | existence -- no CASE tool in existence -- which will allow you to:
|
....
| Just to say it a bit more explicit: programming diverts into two
| activities: programming the transformer and programming the domain
| dynamics.
|
Oh yes, one thing left: you invest into a transformer. At least yet,
before transformers are standardised by something like QVT, ..., you
invest in proprietary transformer technology. But this was the same
story for UI projection tools, like the old XVT, which made you
independent from the windowing system: it made you dependent on the
vendor of the projector. But this is the price for riding the
bleeding edge: it is ahead of standardisation.


For now,

~ Markus


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[Glenn Parker]

Slashdot - at times interesting, but the lack of insight in some of the
article postings, and especially in the comments in amazing. The signal
to noise is so low its not worth reading the comments much, if at all.

Pre-filtered SlashDot with S/N graphs: http://alterslash.org/

The way ruby-talk traffic keeps growing, we may need something similar.

 

[Austin Ziegler]

Austin Ziegler wrote:
| Actually, Ilias, it is 100% accurate. There is no system in
| existence -- no CASE tool in existence -- which will allow you
| to:
Would you subsume an MDA-based model transformer and generator
framework under your understanding of ``CASE tool''?

A "generic" model transformer and generator, yes. A framework,
maybe. It depends on the capabilities. However, properly stated,
code generation is a toolbox, not a tool.

| 1) generate any random application in the world that can use an
| embedded database or an external database and perform well in
| any use case; and
I think, this is a point, where a generator indeed helps. It helps
a lot to keep domain knowledge in the model [of the domain -- you
see, it's about to become a tautology] and to concentrate the
diverse aspects of technology projections into the transformation
engine.

Yes, but a generator isn't necessarily the same as what was being
talked about. All of the generators that I've ever used have been
domain and application specific. Additionally, proper generation
techniques indicate that you should know how to implement at least
one of the items you're generating (e.g., if you're developing a
generated GUI, you should develop at least one screen by hand; the
same applies to web interfaces, etc.)

| 2) program against platform-agnostic GUI to run on systems from Sun
| to Linux to Windows to MacOS X to PalmOS or even something
| embedded in your toaster, OR run as a web application at whim.
|
| That's basically what you're wanting. There's no such commercial
| application and there's no such open source application. Why?
Only, if you exclude transformer|generator frameworks from the
understanding of CASE tool.

Not at all. Code generation is a technique -- a toolbox -- and not a
silver bullet. It's a very valuable technique, and various tools can
help with the technique, but there's still *no such (singular) tool*
to generate an application and make it run everywhere in every way
that makes it feel right for those platforms. It's a non-soluble
problem, especially when you get to user interaction and platform
look-and-feel.

To take a simple example, there's a development tool for mobile
development called "AppForge". This plugs into a Visual Basic
development environment and allows you to generate mobile apps for
the PocketPC, PalmOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Windows SmartPhone,
and a few other targets, I think. The application thus generated
requires a massive runtime (300Kb on PalmOS systems) and doesn't
look like native applications. Similarly, Java's Swing doesn't look
or act like any other application on a platform.

If a developer for the platforms in question can't do it, what makes
you think that a transformer/generator will be able to do it?

| Because such a tool would SUCK. As every single CASE tool in
| existence has ever done. CASE tools generally require that you
| run a very large runtime, program *their* way, often in *their*
| language (which isn't related to anyone else's), and then tend to
| fall behind both operating system releases and the technology
| curve.
Transformer|generator frameworks concentrate the knowledge of the
target technology in the transformation engine. At least for
simpler scenarios, this does not at all imply generation or use of
a runtime system: e.g., if you have modelled your system in
ArcStyler and use its Java2-cartridge to generate code of it,
there is nothing near to a runtime system, which comes into the
game. And the result is [at least beyond javac] as slim as what
you could code by hand.

Maybe. I'm very skeptical of claims in this direction. Indeed, what
the OP wanted was something that could be run on an embedded device,
a workstation, or a cluster of servers. I'm sorry, but I stand by my
original statement: there's no such tool -- not even ArcStyler --
which can do that. (And I'm unsurprised that UML is being pushed
this way. UML is good for very few things, and the most important
part of making an n-tier database applications is one of the things
that UML is worst at: data modeling. It's too based on OO
technologies to even remotely come close to properly modeling data
relationships other than hierarchical.)

[major snippage]

Present experience shows, that all structural decisions[, e.g., which
patterns you apply, what a deployment descriptor is or the syntax of a
make file, ...] get materialised in the transformation engine and
can be kept separate from the domain world to quite a high degree.
Just to say it a bit more explicit: programming diverts into two
activities: programming the transformer and programming the domain
dynamics.

Again, maybe. ArcStyler and other OMG-driven insanities won't help.
Being able to state requirements clearly will.

-austin