Recent blog entries for elj

Published elj-daily for 02 Feb 2001 (sorry about 01 Feb 2001):

• Grant Cheston details his experiences in - ``getting a moderate size collection of Eiffel projects to run on ISE Eiffel, Visual Eiffel and SmallEiffel'' - NICE is working hard at addressing these issues.

• Sven submit's a link to GTI's Linux Gnome Desktop for Windows

• Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas took his life in his hands - presented Ruby to the local Perl Monger's chapter. It went very well: they were very receptive to the ideas behind Ruby, and we all had a great time

Worked on ccl's PROGRESSBAR control with some success. Further testing is required before commiting to the CVS.

Used SmallEiffel to generate a dll from a simple test class using lcc-win32. Loaded the resulting dll from a C program and called a function successfully. On the second invocation, the program crashed. Will look into further, but this is a good start - must writeup details! Starting resources include Dynamic Libraries With C++ (for win32/Linux) (highly recommended), SmallEiffel dll summary and Jacob Navia's excellent lcc-win32 documentation.

Updated elj-daily for the 31 Jan 2001:

• Paul Cohen releases his EiffelOpenGL SDK (an Eiffel interface to the OpenGL libraries.

• Phil Malin discusses his SmallEiffel interface to the Berkely DB Database - Berkeley DB is damn fast. I used it in a project which performed domain name searches on the com,net,org zonefile (the search program was written as a CGI program). We extracted all the domain names from the zonefiles and populated a DB with the domain name as the key (and an empty STRING as the value). Initially we used mySQL (one table with one field) and were getting about 30,000 queries per minute. When we switched to Berkeley DB it went up to about 100,000. - (I've asked him for a copy).

• Victor Putz talks up the SmallEiffel compiler - he refers to some interesting benchmarks he did between SmallEiffel and g++ last year.

• Eric Raymond interview at O'Reilly leads to an interesting paper by Lars Risan titled The Identity Games of Hacker Culture

On other matters, received some code for X_CON from RainbowSally (he is keeping me busy and I think he will surprise a few people - keep up the good work).

The SARITH project (Safe ARITHmetic) came up again onthe SmallEiffel mailing list. Posted a long summary of the projects history and current status.

Updated elj-daily for 30 Jan 2001

• Steve Thompson provides some interesting observations about SmallEiffel after a 12 month break where he explored Squeak, Python and Ruby. - seeing the ease and elegance of applying SE, I then considered its obscurity. A language with such power and expressiveness should have greater recognition. I decided that the following factors must play into this [ .. ]

• Bjarne Stroustrup on oop and generic programming - What I find truly beautiful is when a combination of generic programming and object-oriented programming yields results that are cleaner and more elegant than either could do on its own

Coded up some examples demonstrating how to interface C structures from SmallEiffel without using any intermediate C code. Not sure how well this will be received by various people striving for compiler interoperable libraries. Anyway, I think it is pretty neat. Will hack my Perl script to handle the automatic generation of the Eiffel code for all options.

Published elj-daily for 29 Jan 2001 - sorry about the 25 Jan and 26 Jan:

• Some interesting discussion revolving around BON and EiffelCase. Enjoyed this quote: Personally I avoid UML like I avoid OO programming languages without garbage collection, generics, multiple inheritance and contracts

• Marcio makes another release of yaesockets (portable TCP/IP for SmallEiffel and ISE , Windows or Unix)

• Got a laugh out of this post Programming Languages as Beverages

• Sad but true .. Eiffel?! [..]. Eiffel has such negative juice, there's probably been more written about Eiffel than in Eiffel. [ from a Slashdot poster ]

Did post some ideas on a WIN32_HANDLE class.

Clarified some points on the fact that Eiffel is not proprietary language. Wont matter though .. yes, I know Eiffel is a dead in the water B&D language with 3 users and no libraries unlike xyz language.

Received a long email from Steve - an Eiffelist that has finally found SmallEiffel after Visual Eiffel, Squeak, Python and Ruby. He has provided some useful insights which might find there way to elj-daily.

Published elj-daily for 24 Jan 2001:

• Uwe details the current status of ccl and kk

• New Eiffel Book ready for 01 Feb 2001 release.

• Stumbled across TidyCOM and TidyGUI

  for TidyHTML

• ``Any language which can drive a programmer to make rage-filled and furious marginal notes in his copy of the C++ language spec (as it's driven me to do) is a language I think people will actually find useful.'' from Why does it seem that everything in C++ is broken?

Very quiet day. Was hoping Lothar would reply to yesterdays post. Maybe tomorrow?

Explained to Ron how the SmallEiffel loadpath facility works.

Try to adapt the win32_file_functions to phase 2 interface. Realise why handles are now pointers (not integers as they were)! Maybe we should encapsulate the handle into a class WIN32_HANDLE (as per pythonwin) to minimise impacts of future changes.

Published elj-daily for 23 Jan 2001:

• Jim Cochrane announces another release of his Market Analysis System [ hopefully, one day we will see a SmallEiffel version - for the moment for ISE Eiffel users only. ]

• Cameron and Kathryn splotlight the wxWindows library. [Dream one day that eljwin32all might attract similiar developer and user attention]

• Interesting comments regarding multiple inheritance - still like the Eiffel Approach myself. [ must update for the precursor construct ]

• Get the first elj-submit for the year. [ unfortunately. these have become a rarity. ]

Posted a couple of messages ( here and here ) to the SmallEiffel Mailing List.

Added a few more examples to the eljwin32all library. Uwe is learning html and developing reference documentation [ very well done].

RainbowSally continues console efforts [looking forward to a February release].

Still feel overwhelmed by it all - wish I had more skill and time.

Published elj-daily for 22 Jan 2001:

• Berend makes another release of his growing ePOSIX library (came second in the Eiffel Struggle 2000 )

• Christian Chouder has made an initial release of SEIF: the Small Eiffel Internet Facility

• Decided Bryce's writings on Starters, Finishers, and Sharers in relation to project work was worth an article in it's own right.

SmallEiffel cracks 90,000 visitors over the weekend. Note bad for a so-called B&D language. Also noticed a new beta release dated 15 Jan 2001 (wish Dominique would publish this fact along with the changes - the only thing I can gather is some changes to the Garbage Collector).

Other ground work:

• Posted a message to the SmallEiffel Examples Mailing List in relation to inlining C code into SmallEiffel source.

• Posted a message to the SmallEiffel Mailing List detailing the ISE Eiffel External Clause (looking for starter and finisher :-)

Too many unanswered email's as there is just too much going on. Hopefully, will catch later in the week.

Published elj-daily for the 19 Jan 2000 (realised I had been doing this for three years - I guess it has been worth it?)

• Look forward to reading the Larry Wall interview from Japan.

• Found Bryce's thoughts on Managing Developers In Net Projects quantified much of my own experiences (only wish I could write like that).

Dabbled with TinyPTC after seeing a comp.compilers.lcc posting (I use lcc-win32 as the backend C compiler for elj-win32).

Decided to hack a SmallEiffel interface to the TinyPTC api (three C functions - open, update, close) which resulted in posting a message to the SmallEiffel Mailing List - I used the C_InlineWithoutCurrent external feature and c_inline_c function as these are being used in the second phase of the eljwin32all project. It has been suggested that SDL would be a better approach than TinyPTC. Jan already has an Eiffel interface to SDL called jegl - must post this back to the SmallEiffel list (actually just found this old post)

Finally got my first elj- daily out for 2001.

• Good to see the results of the Eiffel Struggle 2000, but it was disappointing to see only half the number of entries from the previous year

• Glenn Maughan's Goanna demonstrates that Eiffel can be used to develop internet applications. [ Nice to see Marcio Marchini's yaesockets project being used in a broader context - no doubt the library will continue to evolve as SmallEiffel gets closer to a multiplatform concurrency implementation ]

I have had a nice break which included the Cook Islands (08-19 December 2000), Coffs Harbour (for Chrismas), Port Stephens (for New Year) and Perisher Valley for the last couple of weeks. While in the Cook Island I posted a summary of my experiences to the elj-win32-dev mailing list [ see Kia Orana from Rarotonga ]

Bought a Digital Camera for the break [ Cannon IXUS ] which has brought a new dimension to photography for me [captured some great sunset's and interesting shots of Snow Gums - did not realise the variation in bark colour].

The SmallEiffel project (getting close to 90,000 visitors now) is close to another -0.75 beta release - must check again.

I have started work again on the eljwin32all project. Uwe and Birgit have done a great job in starting the second phase of the project - we now have interfaces to scintilla and Postgresql and hopefully a couple of developers to finish off the interfaces and their integration into ccl/kk.