My blog is now at http://www.freeroller.net/page/aeden/.

I just bought a copy of Reason from Propellerhead Software. It is by far the coolest piece of software I have seen in quite some time. Reason is a virtual studio. You actually see a "rack" where you can install modules. Reason 1.0 includes an "analog" style synth, sample based synth, sample-based drum machine, loop manipulator, mixer, an old-style "analog" sequencer, and a digital sequence. All of the units look like the real thing: they've got knobs and buttons and sliders which are all fashioned after real synth components. Even cooler: hit the Tab button and you see the backs of the units, complete with patch plugs and CV plugs. You can route any output through any other component. This is so cool it is beyond words. Version 2.0 also includes a brand grainular/wave table synth as well as a more advanced sampler. All in all one bad ass piece of software and for under $300 (buy the 1.0 version now at your local retailer and get a free upgrade to 2.0!). Check it out at http://www.propellerheads.se. If you are a musician, especially one who writes dance music, you won't be disappointed.

I am trying to set up Roller Weblogger so that I can have a more powerful blog tool which supports news feeds, RSS version of the blog, etc. Have been having some difficulties, but after moving to Tomcat 4.0.4 it finally seems to work on my local machine. Hopefully I can put it up for public consumption shortly and perhaps even provide blogging for others. :-)

I just posted the 1.0 release of JPublish to SourceForge as well as a myrad of other locations. I am happy to have JPublish out and available in a production release. I am confident that JPublish is in a usable state (otherwise I wouldn't have released it as 1.0) but I am sure some people will complain or flame. Knowing that I will have to put on my flame-retardant suit in the morning for something which I do for free is kind of a bummer, but that is the price open source developers must pay. I will say one thing: developing open source projects definitely forces you to improve your coding skills. Everyone is looking at your code so flaws are pointed out rather quickly.

Open source web frameworks seem to be a hot topic right now. I just read Mike Cannon-Brookes' blog entry which is a response to David M Johnson's entry asking why we need Yet Another Web Framework. Well, here's why:

Each development group, even each developer, approaches building web applications in a different way. Some developers may like to put extension tags in HTML for web applications (a la Struts and WebWork) others prefer frameworks which use a template language like Velocity to pull data from a map which was setup by the action (a la Turbine and my own framework JPublish). Still others prefer to write Swing-like programs with NO HTML whatsoever (a la wingS). Each of these approaches has benefits and drawbacks - and it largely depends on what kind of web application you are buidling.

Within each of those paradigms you also have evolution. For example, Web Work evolved from Struts, taking some elements of Struts and adding new elements which are unique to Web Work. JPublish evolved from Turbine much like Web Work's evolution from Struts. The beauty of Open Source is that this is possible, even encouraged, because we can look at each others code and say: "I like this a lot, but...".

Personally I hope that the evolution continues and we see new frameworks which provide an even faster path to production with fewer possibilities for programmer error.

In the meantime, check out the Wafer project for more information on the vast number of open source Java web frameworks which are available, as well as ongoing attempts to compare and constrast these frameworks. And if you develop a framework then please contribute so that other developers can benefit from your knowledge.

OK, so I haven't blogged in over a week, time to get back on the horse. OBE is progressing well, but I have been trying to divide my time amongst several things (familt, other projects, work around the house, etc.) I have to finish the XPDL serializer implementation and tweek the engine a bit but then I will release the first alpha version. I still have a lot of work on data types as well as facilities for monitoring the engine at runtime. The devil's in the details.

OBE

Got quite a bit done in OBE today. Conditions using Jython now work properly. Added implementations of procedures. Current implementations include a procedure which executes a Java method with reflection and a procedure which executes a Jython script. Also got looping working now including fixing a bug in the XPDL parser which caused the Loop attribute to not be loaded correctly.