Mentioned by Bruce Eckel in his recent Talk blogged earlier, D is another programming language in the C/C++/C#/Java stable. This Language Comparison Table is a good place to start as is this Paper and Presentation. Another Blogger (Kurt Zhou) also also picked up on this.

First review of Rod Johnson’s new book J2EE Development without EJB by Dion Almaer on the ServerSide. As I’ve just had email from Amazon.co.uk that my copy was dispatched last week, I’ll reserve judgment for now. However, I’m hoping for some useful insights that will help in the redevelopment of my “Client Server Programming in Java” course. Pity it arrives too late to go into the booklist!

Bruce gave a talk at UC Berkley and 9 July 2004. This is his blog entry 7-9-04 Java Issues & Directions which popped under my radar cover via the Dion on Tech who blogged a ServerSide new forum announcement (which has comments). The blog links to a 2 hour 16 minute streamed video. “Be warned, those of you who feel Java is the best language, forever and without bounds, and that it has no limitations: herein I critize Java, but in the spirit of understanding the limitations of the language.

I have today announced the availability of a revised RST plugin that does most of the proposed functionality discussed here and announced in this Blog last Thursday. This is my first chance to give something nack to the open source community! It’s purely selfish of course! I need this functionality and I’ve just scratched my own itch!

Posted today to the Leo Developer’s forum. Context I have used the RST2 plugin for a couple of days translating a lab sheet for a programming exercise and think I have gotten a feel for how it works, and perhaps how it should work. Tracking back through the forums it seems clear that the original rst plugin (developed by Josef Dalcolmo) was intended only to produce reST documents. All the nodes of an @rst tree would become an reST document with the headlines becoming different levels of heading.

Warp is a new literate programming tool created by Harold Thimbleby of UCL to help accurately write about programs. The approach is described more fully in Explaining code for publication. The idea, in a nutshell, is to mark-up source code with commented XML tags so that code can then be extracted by the warp tool into a file that can be included in a word document or LaTeX file or even (using JavaScript) an HTML file.

Quickstart to installing and using Docutils.

Online, and seemingly publicly accessible, course on Java (for people with prior programming experience) with some very rich multimedia resources including streaming videos of lectures.

Today was an open day at UWS. Every department and school was expected to lay something on for potential students. Every admissions tutor (who usually gets lumbered with this sort of thing) is expected to take time off to be pleasant and show the little kiddies around. Except that all the labs that I would have shown were locked because no one had told the technicians that they should be opened!

I am following Ron Smith’s 15 June 2004 article Python development with Eclipse and Ant from IBM developerWorks. The first step is to install the PyDev plugin which is available at Eclipse update site http://pydef.sf.net/updates/. First problem is that when I try to call the python interpreter to run the test I get a launch error. Don’t know if this is an Eclipse, PyDev or Python problem. Launch configuration seems ok!

I have just downloaded and installed Eclipse 3.0. For safety’s sake I backed up my old workspace and deleted the .metadata folder. I also unzipped Eclipse into a clean directory. On startup, Eclipse now asks for a default workspace. This feature should make installation much easier on the School network, cause we can leave it to the students.

This interactive diagram to the Java universe is a flash application that links to the documentation. I thank Malcolm Davies on Java.Net for drawing our attention to this excellent resource. In a nutshell: “Developers learn and use Java _*to create and run *_Programs _*that make *_Devices _*and the *_Internet _*useful for *_People.”