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Another great presentation from last year’s JavaPolis, Tim Bray, inventor of XML, discusses dynamic languages and their relationship to Java. One of the earliest discussions on the topic of scripting languages and their potential to make a revolutionary impact on software development was, I believe, first mooted by Johm Oosterhout, the inventor of TCL, in IEEE Computer Magazine back in 1998 [1]. Tim Bray makes an updated case for using scripting (or dynamic) languages on the Java platform for many of the same reasons originally cited by Oosterhout....

Here in the UK, Universities typically send students off on holiday for the four weeks around the period in March-April when Easter falls. At the University of Wales Swansea (or Swansea University as it prefers to call itself [for marketing purposes)]) our Easter break is right in the middle of the teaching period. There are still three weeks of lecturing to go after Easter, and quite a lot of course preparation, marking, exam setting, course reviews and other admin stuff, but nonetheless it’s still a period for taking a breather, catching up on interesting stuff and adding stuff to this Blog....

Level 1 ICCT will be doing the first Ethereal lab to come out of my student Richard Owen’s final year project. Richard has created a wikipage on the ICCT wiki. Richard is looking for comments so hopefully the students will have some.

While reading Robert C. (Uncle Bob) Martin’s “UML for Java Programmers” [Prentice Hall, 2003] I came accross a reference to “Fitnesse” a wiki-based acceptance testing system. Looks very interesting and well worth a deeper look. I added Uncle Bob’s blog feed to Blogger.com (see my Blogroll) to track other interesting bits and bobs (pun unintended).

These are the articles I read while doing today’s Bloglines trawl that I thought worthy of note. Test driven development in Python by Jason Diamond in OnLamp.com Python Devcenter. Three-tier development with PHP5 by Luis Yordano Cruz in OnLamp.com PHP Devecenter