It’s high time we linked to this post where Locke asks IBM to build Scala support into Eclipse. Yes please! Though, in the event that IBM doesn’t lead the way, the community-developed Eclipse plug-in will only get better. And the Idea plug-in sounds better already (unseen software always does), but its development has stalled with no explanation. Perhaps the coders want some payback, either from JetBrains or by selling direct? [correction] That would be fine, actually! If IBM won’t do the job, there’s money on the table for someone else. (And uh, hey—how about a referral program?)

Coderspiel’s speculation about the inert Scala plug-in for Idea got it backward, as usual. A reader writes in that the plug-in was done in-house (in the JetBrains house) and points to a forum thread where a dev says there’s no active work on that plug-in because it has “little business value.” Ha ha, nonsense! Shall we compile a list of cheapskate Eclipse users that would switch to Idea if it supported Scala better? No, because on-line petitions are lame, but there are a number of people for whom that feature is a deal-maker, and they are exactly the kind of people you want using your programming tools. Plus, there’s a chicken, and an egg here, and if JetBrains isn’t too chicken to lay the egg they’ll be greatly rewarded when it hatches.

Was wondering how fellow $600 iPhone sucker John Gruber would take the news of the $200 price drop. For two hours no sounds emerged from his den—we imagine him to have been in a fairly complicated yoga pose. Now, he speaketh: “And for those of you who’ve already bought one and are pissed about the price cut, if you didn’t think the iPhone was worth $599, you shouldn’t have bought it. That’s how supply and demand works.” Thanks for the lesson! It would be nice, though, if Apple had told us of their unprecedented plan to engage in rapid market pricing, you know, in advance. An informed market might still have paid a $100 premium to be first. But this way they got to screw over their best customers, to make an extra $100. Goooo Apple!

Hello world. This weblog is mostly sort of running on Scala, which is supposed to be some kind of “academic” language but nobody told Typeturner so it’s using Scala for entirely practical purposes.

Wow. Scala is hilariously faster than Groovy:
ray.java…12.89s
ray.scala…11.224s
ray.groovy…2h 31m 42s

It’s because the JVM is optimized for static typing, of course. We knew that already, but it’s nice to see it in such dramatic numbers. The first comment says to try using a Groovy compiler or something. Whatever. Break out your groovyc and we will see how much that defies reality. (And presumably Groovy’s interpreter doesn’t recompile code at every loop iteration.) So, um JetBrains… do they still think Groovy is the profitable, business-y Java successor?

Remember yesterday when we said that $200 was too high of a first-adopter premium for iPhones, and that $100 is what people might have paid if they’d known Apple was planning to drop the price insanely greatly? And how Daring Fireball thought the poo-poo surprise was hunky dory? As is usually the case, the favorite acolyte is not the most loyal but the most honest. Steve likes us better—got that?—and he’s reducing the premium to $100, the very amount we suggested. Add that to your supply and demand calculations. (Oh and D.F. has changed its tune on a dime, though the Steve fluffing in that post is practically NSFW.)

Finally an explanation of HTTP caching and ETags that were able to make it through! The good news is that using last-modified is the best available method, and Wicket negotiates it if you supply a timestamp, as Typeturner does for feeds. (Just double checked with Live HTTP Headers and it works correctly.) The bad news is that people are lazy, and don’t always implement last-modifed. For example, we are lazy. None of Typeturner’s regular pages serve the header. That is why ETags are so great: they can cover up for lazy programmers. The server still has to render the full content, but if its hash matches that supplied by the client it doesn’t serve it and you save big bucks on bandwith. Rails 2.0 does auto-ETags; Wicket doesn’t yet. Patches are welcome, as they say.

So tired of this made-up word.

Company recklessly makes its content-oriented web site in Wicket: “We really liked the flexibility of Wicket. … our templates can be 100% pure HTML … all links to pages, static stylesheets or graphics are valid at development time (even in embedded templates) and Wicket corrects them for us.” Haven’t they heard of crappy generic CMSes? How dare they just sit down and code a site that better serves their needs. Anarchists.

Scala 2.6.0 is out.

The NYT is worried about the software crisis all over again: “increasingly complex networks and even technology headaches from corporate mergers can make computer systems less reliable. Meanwhile, society as a whole is growing ever more dependent on computers and computer networks.” The weird, unnecessary angle is that bugs are more of a threat than Crash Override and Acid Burn.

Giving the people what they want: ”Wicket Web Beans … is project that allows you to use the JavaBeans specification to quickly, and I really mean quickly create CRUD type user interfaces.” The people want scaffolds and they will not be ignored! As soon as there’s a version for 1.3.0 land we’ll give it a spin. But, why not look at Wicket templates and object definitions as dense form descriptors and just generate those instead of introducing a new grammar and a gulf between these forms and regular Wicket components? Some day we’ll have to try that.

It’s a blogademic: ”Programmers are expensive. Geez… they are getting more expensive every year. And the oftware they build is getting more complex. And more essential to whatever you do. Starting almost any kind of company these days involves hiring programmers.” { cough, cough }

If you use Epiphany for your browser—and if GNOME is your desktop, you should be—you need to set your image animation preference (“none”, obviously) in gconf instead of about:config or else it will be reset every time you open Epif.

The MacBook Pro memory upgrade instructions call for a Phillips size “00” screwdriver. Of course you have one of these or an eyeglass screwdriver somewhere. Everyone does. They’re so handy! And tiny. When you get tired of looking for it, a cheap paring knife will open the pod bay door just as well. Enjoy the new memory!

The religion of DAO (rhymes with “tao,” appropriately) is now being blasphemed even on the sacred island of Java: “Recently there has been some discussion as to whether or not the Java Persistence API (JPA) has killed the Data Access Object (DAO).” Well well well (WWW). Funny how this is okay, by some people, with Sun sponsored standards but wasn’t with their functional equivalent and inspiration. { previously }

Thought exercise of the week: what if your data was not relational? CouchDb should be perfect for weblog software like Typeturner, but it’s hard to imagine getting by without our old friend the primary key. Posts refer to a separate author table which has more than one field, for example. But then posts only use one of those fields, and if it got out of “sync” with the central author data it would not be a big deal. In fact that might even be desirable. And ORM sure is easier without the R.

Sean McDirmid’s rewritten Scala plug-in for Eclipse is now available for testing: ”I’m happy to announce that it is kind of done and I’d like to start BETA testing in the community.” Who needs JetBrains, maybe? The beta is expected to be crash happy, mitigated by its awesome feature list that includes everything we’ve been hoping for. Thanks, Sean!

Begun, this clone war has. Gavin sez: “In this article on JavaLobby, Daniel Spiewak, the creator of something called ActiveObjects takes some pot shots at Hibernate, and compares Hibernate negatively with Ruby’s ActiveRecord and ActiveObjects.” He responds by mischaracterizing ActiveObjects at least as badly as Daniel did Hibernate. (It isn’t hard to find impl entity classes, e.g., in the very article Gavin’s mad about.) You know, nobody is a bigger fan of Hibernate Annotations than we are, but we also like it when people try new things and cross pollinate between programming fiefdoms. Hibernate is coming off as a grumpy old man lately—it’s not a good look. Update: Wham! Pow! { previously }

Seam Text is a new text markup format similar to Markdown and Textile. It’s rare that anyone in Java will work on these regex-y things, or even understand that they are needed—so that’s progress. But it’s too bad Seam invented its own format (with its own new problems) instead of writing a better Java version of the already proven, familiar formats. Seam Text’s use of slash for italic looks cute, /I'm slanted/, but in practice it breaks everything from AC/DC to a resource locator. You only need to look at this hoppin’ thread to see its high instance of failure. Markdown gets people as well, but not so often. (Plus, when it breaks comments, we fix them!) Guess we’ll keep on phoning in to Ruby.

NCC-1701: “Native English speakers might think an ’enterprise’ is something brave, noble, and dangerous, such as starting a small business, but in this case, ‘enterprise’ is used to mean the opposite.” Obviously, this person went back to 2005 in a time machine to cover up plagiarizing a post of ours from June.

Relationships not dead yet: “everything you know about data and relations still holds. In this example I wanted to illustrate how I can join data pulled over HTTP from a Web service.” Well that’s a relief! That thought exercise was giving us a headache. But does CouchDb know about this whole relative link thing? They seem to still be joining by id, like in the old days.

Cute. Except it didn’t start there, it started here. Unless we’re only talking about the Gavin vs. ActiveRecord part of it, in which case it really started back in May when Gavin went after object databases but also made some bizarre “cracks” about Ruby that totally fell flat. That post, interestingly, has disappeared from the JBoss homebrew, um, wikiblog. No worries though, Google never forgets! [Update: Google forgot.] Perhaps this dude will find that post, leading to an even more belligerent—we mean humorous—anti-Java list accompanied by an even bigger mug that we will have to position off-screen.

Session state is evil because “someone wants to store a shopping cart in HttpSession” and it’s a big pain to cluster it. Well, someone else wants to use the session to virtualize application state. A lot of people, actually. Wicket, Seaside, and Lift all defy REST’s principles (broadly applied) by maintaining state on the server. Not to antagonize REST or its patron god HTTP, but because application state is useful. As for scaling, nothing complex is painless (Rails, are we kidding?) but performance comes to those who work for it { A, B }. Can we just agree that REST is the lingua franca between web applications, because of course it is, and end this holy war? We’ll expose web resources as needed, but code our user interactions as we choose. REST will please lay off it.