Stuart Herbert

… and hopefully this one will survive Sven

The important changes between v1.9 and v1.10 are:

• we now use hard links rather than symlinks
• webapp-config now supports files and directories that contain spaces in their name
• webapp-config is now a lot faster than it used to be

Plan is to make v1.10 the last version of webapp-config written in bash. The python version is slowly catching up, and the sooner I can switch over to that the happier I\’ll be. Well, except that I still think python\’s overrated, but it\’s definitely better than keeping webapp-config as a bash script for the next few years!

… but my time hasn\’t been my own this last week or so. Should be able to resume my freshmeat cherry-picking at the weekend.

Here\’s what caught my eye, web-based wise, amongst yesterday\’s Freshmeat announcements:

• Vilistextum, a small and fast HTML to text convertor
• WebCit, a web-based front end to Citadel/UX BBS systems
• rdiff-backup, a remote incremental backup solution (okay, it\’s not a web-based app, but I reckon you can\’t take backups too seriously)
• Achievo ATK, a programming framework for PHP
• Moodss, a graphical monitoring application
• Room Juice, a multi-user jukebox application
• Gallery, a web-based photo-album
• ibWebAdmin, a web frontend for the Interbase and Firebird database server
• PhpBars, an easy solution to draw bar graphs on an image
• php-syslog-ng, a web front-end for viewing syslog-ng messages logged to MySQL
• ht://Check, a broken link checker than can also be used to perform site-wide accessibility checking
• phpBB Blog, a blog tool for phpBB
• WebScarab, a tool that allows the user to view the traffic between the Web browser and server, and modify it in transit
• FCKeditor, Javascript-based HTML editor

Wow. A much better turn-out than yesterday\’s list

I also spotted an announcement for Visual Paradigm, a Java-based UML modelling tool. It\’s a commercial product, but the Community edition looks pretty well featured, and (the reason for it getting a mention) is that it claims to support robustness analysis notation. Robustness analysis is something that developers just don\’t do enough of

Can\’t help it – this one also caught my eye (although this one is GPL\’d). Stellarium uses OpenGL to render 3D photo-realistic skies in real-time. I\’ve only tried the Windows version – which seemed to work just fine – but it looked very tasty to me.

… because so far I\’m not particularly impressed. I thought Python was the scripting language for serious programmers, but it seems to favour the academic sterility of computer science over the practical needs of software engineering.

Let me take managing change as an example of what I mean.

As anyone with a Software Configuration Management (SCM) background will know, software defects (bugs to you and me) are caused by changes to the software source code. If you\’re changing a large file, there\’s more risk of introducing bugs than if you\’re changing a small file. The safest changes to manage are small, localised changes to code.

So why does Python not provide an easy way to store a class inside a separate .py file on disk?

Modules and packages are the way that Python provides basic namespace support – as I understand the language so far. So, the language allows me to have a class called gpfr.args.processor, but to do so I have to defined the class processor inside the file gpfr/args.py. And if I want to add any more classes to the gpfr.args namespace, they also have to into the file gpfr/args.py.

If I was using Python in a multi-user project, this apparent limitation in Python\’s design would soon lead to one of two situations. If checking out a file locked the file (which is what many source control tools do), then you\’re always going to have developers waiting for files to become available before they can do their work. (This gets to be an annoyance at the 20 developer mark from past experience.) Or, if checking out a file doesn\’t lock the file (the cvs approach to version control), then when changes are committed, you\’ve got larger files being merged, and increased risk.

I\’m trying to think of another object-orientated programming language that I use that has this limitation – and I can\’t think of one. Java, C#, VB – yes, even VB!!!, PHP, C++ … all of these languages allow you to put an individual class into a separate file if you wish.

So help me out here. What am I missing?

(And yes, I understand that modules are objects in Python, but a quick look at a module\’s __class__ attribute will tell you that modules are not classes – and sooner or later I\’m sure that\’ll matter)

And I haven\’t even begun to compare Python\’s online manual to the one provided for PHP

Here\’s what caught my eye on Monday, web-wise on Freshmeat:

• Webfwlog, a log analysis and reporting tool for firewall logs
• Dolda Webmail, a webmail client that connects to an IMAP server
• WebAbility, \”PHP5 Web Application Server\”. Tbh, this sounds like a really bad idea (I think it totally misses the point of PHP), but best of luck to them.

There were more proprietry web-based apps on Freshmeat than freeware apps this time around. I\’ve decided that I won\’t be covering proprietry apps, unless I come across something really special.