January 24, 2003
Hoo hum. My first application.
Admittedly, it's one of those small steps for humanity, and a unproportionally big step for myself, but I somehow released my first application today. Yep. I'm one of these guys who lives in meta-land, escaping from real work with would-be languages such as XSLT, still being utterly capable of pretending to understand how stuff works, without participating in the actual masonry. Which makes me the ultimate clueless test user, the ideal cardboard engineer, or the guy you don't want in that requirements gathering meeting, since he will always come up with strange, unthought features which somehow stretch the envisioned architecture of an application until it breaks. That type of guy who knows enough about everything to not know anything in detail. Bah. :-)That being said, and given my forced extended leave of absence, and given my recent enthusiasm and disappointment with some Python tools, and given the fact I'm surrounded with many true object believers, I acquired half a bookshelf of Python books (yep, I'm a bibliophile, too). Of that heap of books, four books look actually useful: Learn to program using Python, Python Essential Reference, Python Cookbook and Core Python Programming. Programming Python and Python&XML are quite crappy, maybe due to my lack of understanding. Even worse: I now own two copies of Programming Python, one outdated one, and one who is updated to reflect the latest foobar, as publishers use to say. Half of that book is about GUI programming with Python, which is not what I intend, nor am capable of doing. Anyway, I worked my way around the clueless newbie book, which went quite well, and started browsing happily in the excellent reference. Mind you, I'm seriously drowned in object thinking by my colleagues, so I skipped most of that string handling and program flow stuff, and dove right into modules and classes. And somehow, I must have overheard enough about this wonderful world to actually be able to transpose this vague knowledge about programming into actual understanding (and some yearn to get something done, of course, which is quite important).
This complicated state of mind biased me for action, and some recent issues with tracking changes on the Cocoon Wiki I host gave me something to do: sending mails of wikidiffs to the cocoon-docs list. The Cocoon Wiki runs on top of JSPWiki, and JSPWiki offers an XMLRPC interface. Being the lazy type of guy, XMLRPC is about as far as my comprehension of useful interprocess communication using XML and HTTP goes. And I know enough about ReST and the stuff underneath to not feel ashamed by being utterly unimpressed by this SOAP and WebServices hype anyhow. Hence my genuine interest to participate with that new Pluto project proposal, but not the Charon thing. Python has an XMLRPC library, I had some motivation, and I managed to wrap the XMLRPC stuff and the JSPWiki XMLRPC API in some useful classes. Next to that, I wrote a small script using my little library which goes off and fetches the list of changed pages, and retrieves the two latest versions of those pages, diffs them and sends the result to the cocoon-docs list. Mostly thanks to Python, it didn't took me weeks, so I was rewarded quite fast for my new eagerness.
But stuff is getting worse right now. I have some philosophical issues with the interface my own library presents. I want my script to work for different JSPWiki instances at the same time. I want the configuration to be externalized. I have only been 'programming' for some days and am already longing for refactoring. I want to work on that little thing until I'm not ashamed to post it somewhere. Oh, and I want to actually read (instead of browse) another book about Python, too. Does it get any worse than this? I assume so. The language is strangely addictive, even for a poor soul like me.