On Friday I posted an idea about declarative web services which had been growing for a while. As luck would have it today we had a hack day at local.ch, so I got to spend a workday on that idea. I got positive feedback from my co-workers, so I have now published the skeleton on github. The project is called “servicegen” for now - no nice name has come up yet. ;-) See the README on github for information about the ideas. ...
I’ve been developing a lot of web services lately. I usually do this with Okapi and web.py. Somehow the tasks for creating a web service are always more or less the same. Specify URL schema Validate input parameters Request data: either from a database or from at least one other web service Identify output format using URL or HTTP headers Output data in the correct format And I think that even web.py doesn’t do a good enough job of making this easy and really fast. ...
I’m pretty programming language agnostic and fluent in a handful of different languages. That means I use the language that gets the job done. But I tend to lean towards dynamic programming languages specifically PHP, Python and Ruby. Last week I had to solve a non-trivial problem for my background: clustering of content. I had to write a program which takes a bunch of search results and clusters them together by content. So similar results would go into the same group. ...
I recently stumbled over Dasher. It’s a text input method which can work without any keyboard. It can be controlled with mouse, touch pad or even an eye tracker. It would be very interesting to try out the same approach for source code. Basically you could use source code - e.g. your current project - as the learning source. And then by having a more efficient input method than the current demo it might actually be an efficient way to re-use code. ...