Archive for January, 2006

Persistence

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006

The Java Virtual Machine that I adopted provided a feature called orthogonal persistence.

Ever since being introduced to the idea I have been convinced that developers are unnecessarily burdened by the need to manually manage storage and retrieval of persistent data.

Although several systems have implemented various ways of providing persistence to developers and end-users, it has never become mainstream.

See persistent operating systems on DMOZ for a description of the persistent Java project at Sun and the L3 system.

Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Beyond Java

Monday, January 2nd, 2006
Python logo
Squeak logo
Lisp logo

 Over time I have become disillusioned with Java and the effort to produce an Open Source JVM and clean-room Java libraries.

Despite the massive popularity of Java and Microsoft technologies, there are many alternative high-level languages available to programmers today:

Python is very popular and a powerful tool for rapid development of small projects. Squeak Smalltalk is a versatile graphical development environment which also allows rapid prototyping. The best thing about Squeak is the ability to modify code and have the system updated immediately.

I also looked at slate, a modern incarnation of Smalltalk that has a more powerful dispatch system (allowing better organization of code) and uses prototyping instead of a class hierarchy.

I was drawn to Lisp after watching Rainier Joswig’s Slime demo and reading a couple of chapters of Practical Common Lisp.

Posted in Open Source, Programming | 1 Comment »

Projects I have contributed to

Sunday, January 1st, 2006
Gnu head

Debian logo

In late 1999 I developed kissme, an Open Source Java Virtual Machine. This project required the GNU Classpath Java libraries, which I contributed to for some time.

In 2000 I joined the Debian project. I maintained various Java-related packages including GNU Classpath.

I created the initial port of the IBM Jikes Research Virtual Machine (Jikes RVM) to GNU Classpath.

Posted in Open Source, Programming | No Comments »