Chaotic Java

So, let’s de-annonymize ourselves! I invite everyone who reads this (and those who don’t but I don’t see how they’ll know otherwise… ) to join me on IRC in server irc.freenode.net, channel #chaoticjava (direct link) .

My virtual existence will be there for the entire next week (starting today), and I will try to be behind the keyboard and type a few words of wisdom most of the time, providing that there’ll be someone to listen. The main point of this is to get some real, live feedback from whoever’s reading this blog. Maybe you have suggestions, ideas for topics you’d want to see covered, or complaints you want to give in person (or the closest option to that). Since I’m not going to publish my email, and sometimes people find it uncomfortable leaving a comment on a blog, I’ve decided to try out this IRC idea.

(Somehow I get the feeling that I’ll be there all alone in that IRC room…)

A week ago, Michael Barker wrote a use case for yielder, where he uses the yielding ability to implement “Mini-Axon”, the Kamaelia learning experience usually done in Python, where generators are a built-in feature of the language. I thought it was good to mention it here, to show how yielder can be used for more than just an easy way to implement iterators – for example, to yield results of processing requests as soon as they arrive at the processing box, in the case of Mini-Axon.

Also, if you have downloaded Yielder in the past, go and download the new version which sports two new main features, one of allowing hierarchies under the Yielder class (before, your implementation had to be a direct subclass) and the second is not using debugging information at all, making the tool work with any environment as it relies solely on the bytecode itself. (If you never downloaded yielder, what are you waiting for?)

It’s definitely been an exciting couple of weeks. Ever since I published the code for the yield-like feature (project site here) there has been a few mentions of it over other blogs (Tech Sweep, Neal Gafter’s blog, Lambda the Ultimate and even a reminder of when not to use such a framework from WarpedJavaGuy).

In a very short time, downloads reached 75. And it makes me wonder: How many of these used it, tried it, had trouble with it? I didn’t get any feedback; and I’d really like some! As for myself, I wrote the yielder for tree iterations, and I use it for that at the moment. It works great, creates the implicit stack and returns the elements at the order chosen – and I’m really happy with it. But what about you?