Groovy: Dynamic Language for the JVM... Groovy! - I'm continuously encouraged by the influence dynamic languages such as Ruby and Python have had on mainstream runtimes like the CLR and JVM. Direct ports like JRuby, Jython to the JVM and IronRuby and IronPython to the CLR are truly exciting. More exciting still are languages like Boo that are built from the ground up for mainstream runtimes. I've finally had the chance to fool around with a language I've been dying to dig in to that was built specifically for the JVM: Groovy. Groovy is an agile, dynamically-typed, well supported language that is perhaps most famous as the basis for Groovy on Grails, a rails-like web development framework. Example As I typically do I'll show you a quick twitter status example to get your feet wet. Consider the following class...
Clojure, A Lisp for the JVM and CLR - I've been becoming increasingly interested in functional languages in the last few years and I'm apparently not the only one. It's pretty hard to listen to any general purpose software development podcast without hearing about Erlang, Haskell or F#. Another one came up recently that I just had to play with. It's a Lisp variant named Clojure. The reason I find Clojure particularly interesting is that it's designed to be hosted in the Java Virtual Machine and the .Net Common Language Runtime (via the DLR). From a practical perspective that's wonderful considering integration with other commonly used libraries in the business world is a snap. I'm sure it annoys Lisp purists, but it makes Clojure much more adoptable between 9 and 5. As is frequently the case this is not something...
Notes on Cloure XML Parsing - I figured I'd share some quick notes I had on a simple task that's not exactly strait forward in Clojure to the Lisp neophyte, like myself: XML Parsing. Clojure goes a long way to making it easy with clojure.xml.parse/xml-seq but complete/concise examples can be difficult to come by. XML All of the examples I'll outline below will depend on the following xml living in a file named "settings.xml" in the current working directory. <settings> <timeout>5000</timeout> <email>example@mail.com</email> <hosts> <host url="http://computer1.domain.com">COMPUTER1</host> <host url="http://computer2.domain.com">COMPUTER2</host> <host url="http://computer3.domain.com">COMPUTER3</host> </hosts> </settings> Basic Requirements In order to prepare clojure for the task at hand we'll need to make use of java.io.File and clojure.xml. (import '(java.io File)) (use 'clojure.xml) Examples Just to get warmed up, consider the following. All this does is load the contents of "settings.xml" into a...
