14 Jul 2004 chromatic   » (Master)

Just Do Something:

I've been experimenting lately with task lists, both at work and away. Since I have dozens of little things to keep track of in the next three months (roll on October!), only luck would have kept me on top of things.

Of course, being prone to yak shaving, I wrote a program to keep track of these tasks. Go on and laugh, I'll wait. Ready? It works phenomenally well.

I've mentioned how much I like Maypole. I've also always admired the way Ingy makes the installation and configuration experience easy, as exemplified by Kwiki. I've tried to do the same thing with the new installer for Everything, though that's a work in progress.

Anyhow, since I run Maypole through Jellybean to power my task manager, I've been doing a bit of work on Jellybean lately. In the spirit of my new goal to Just Do SOMETHING, I wrote Jellybean::App to simplify configuring and running a Jellybean application. It still requires you to know a little bit about how Jellybean works, but once you understand that there are servers that listen for incoming requests and named containers that respond to requests, you should find this much easier than writing a little driver script.

For example, the Jellybean::App-enabled launcher for my task manager has around four lines of code and around ten or so lines of configuration data. That beats some twenty-plus lines of code. It also gives much better diagnostics when you do things incorrectly; that by itself is a major improvement.

Sure, it's syntactic sugar, but it's quite a bit easier to explain and it took me under two hours.

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