Chaotic Java

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?

I guess I completely missed out on this because it seems like there was a better looking documentation of Java out there (still a prototype, but is stable) and I kept using the old JavaDoc one.

Anyway, if you’re using JavaDoc and want to have killer web documentations, take a look at this open source project, DocWeb!

I can see one good thing about it and one bad thing: It allows for dead-easy translation of the documentation using the community as translators – Great for open source projects that are relying on the community for so many things, just takes their minds off needing to manage it. However, it is being installed as a servlet which requires you to have some sort of container for it.

I wonder if the open-source hosts (SourceForge, Tigris, Google Projects, etc) are going to start supporting this feature?

I’ve been watching an interesting video on Google’s Tech Talks about Dasher – A new method for the input of text. To give a short review on what it is, it would be a very neat way to input text using navigation (using virtually any input device, including one-dimensional ones, as the speaker demonstrates). Dasher learns from given input texts such as collections of books and your own writing to offer the best prediction of what the next letters you might want to write.

I’ve been actually practicing myself with it, but not being in the greater target market of the application (named by the speaker as Japanese/Chineese/Korean language writer, disabled in a way that prevents me from using a keyboard or testing this writing method on a portable device), it is much slower than actually using my trusty ol’ keyboard.

Two things have grabbed my attention though, one that he specifically speaks of and one that he doesn’t and might be a figment of my imagination:
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