Janko in a Jar

Finally, I am about to release FotoLOAD mini. I had the app almost ready for months, my sister made the website design now and it looks that the thing will get out of the house in the next week or so. Website is still not totally finished but here it is..

The page and app is in Slovene language for now, but it is already being translated to English and some other languages. It’s an application that photo-studios can use to offer their customers fast and simple way to upload photos for printing. I made such web-app for one studio like 7 years ago (with PHP and REBOL), I later made better one for another studio few years back, but this solution is made for “them all” and brings big improvements to the previous two. FotoLOAD mini is a mini and is somewhat limited but also free. There is also a non-mini which won’t be free , but I think it will still be very accessible.

So if you have (or know anyone who has) a photo studio, test it out and tell me what you think. English version will be out before fifth may also.

I didn’t have real time to further experiment with Factor for the last month or more. I only took one Sunday weeks back and wrote a really mini mini CMS like thing to see my still very crude and young web-dev Factor libs in action for the first time.

Factor has it’s own webdev framework/libraries (and you should check it out), but I am experimenting a little here so I am making a sort of lower level and minimalistic libraries of my own. I don’t have time to install a VPS with Factor currently so I just made a quick video of it and posted the code at Factor’s paste. Here is the video..

And here is the Factor code + HTML templates.

It consists of roughly 27 lines of Factor code, 14 lines of HTML template code and 19 lines of JavaScript. For a cms to be somewhat useful I would need to add some user authentication also. Basically you can display, create, edit and delete pages and you get a flat menu for navigating them.

My almost 2 year old son is sick with a fewer so he is just trying to sleep but wakes up every few minutes coughing. Really depressing when your kid is sick and anything you do doesn’t really help him much… For few hours I was staring in the air in minutes when he sleeps but now I got of my ass and wrote these slides to tell somethin more concrete about ex. tinyIMS that I mentioned yesterday and which I now named IMSGY. It’s all WIP..

Not awesome

OK, so why do I think python is nice but not the most awesome language there is.

I can not make in-browser (flash) games with python like I can for example in Haxe (swf).

I can not make cpu intensive games with it like I can for example in Java or Processing (like this). And these games can still run in a browser via applets, even with openGL if you are lucky.

I can use wxPython to make desktop apps, positive is that they have native GUI, negative is that I have to program in a dirty low level of a c++ to do it. You even look at c++ wxWidgets API docs to program python (at least few years back you did). Swing (yes from “horrible clumsy Java” that gets compared to py a lot) is the most advanced and elegant GUI thing I have ever seen for example. So at the end, I don’t want to use python to do GUI apps.

Python as a language is nice, but I would like something like OCaml with some added elegance 150x more, I want more FP power, I want revolutionary progressive/aggressive languages… like Lua, OCaml, Factor and Haxe/nekoML/neko-vm or clojure.. Guido guides python on too safe paths IMHO..

OKeyish

I will probably use python for not cpu intense casual games via pycap. Rabbyt and pyglet are also cool but only for non casual games (no DX) where I usually have different needs for cpu or if I don’t I do them in haxe to get flash deployment option too.

Python has a very nice set of 3d engines (Panda3d, pythonOgre, irrlich binding…) and if I was making something 3d and light on the cpu I could use it. ( Well, a big competitor for this use case for me is Luxinia with lua which I played with a lot and like it a lot ) but python still is strong in light 3d.

I might use it for web-apps also. I think there has some very good points compared to scripting relatives (php, ruby, perl..), it’s quite faster and I wouldn’t use Java for web-apps because I have a feeling it imposes to much structure for a web-app. But all these langs would loose my focus immediately if something like OCaml would have a good low level web server base to build upon. Currently my favorite here is Factor but I am in experimental phase with it.

I will write one more post about this.

Image via Wikipedia I quite like python. I used python as a first language for 2 years couple of years back.

I made a relatively complex web-app in it (using Zope, back then there were no Django’s and likes). Kids could create accounts and then create their relatively free-form multi-page websites and similar stuff.. it was sort of myspace before myspace… Later I rewrote the app in php because after I got 3000 daily users I had to reset the server every few days and getting into that ZODB mentality to fix and upgrade things was beginning to get hard for me.

I made 2 relatively complex GUI business apps in it (with wxPython), first was a complete program for managing a “snail” shop (not e-shop) and selling in it. As an interesting tidbit, python talked via serial port directly to that small printer to print recipes which was cool .

Another was more graphical and was used to graphically manage an industrial warehouse of stacked boxes and shelved packs and you would put boxes apart, take 2 packs and put the rest on XY shelf.. basically you simulated actions on a pc, got a “action recipe” and someone would then do it in real so you could then always know what pack is on which shelf or box and how many there are by looking at your computer.

Both apps still run today, the first one on multiple shops.

I also used python for millions of small things and everyday hacking and learning (from pygame to twisted matrix, pyAIML, medusa server, xmlrpc, panda3d, pyOGRE …)

For example I am sure I made the first AIML bot that could talk in slovene language (Robotek ROBI). I used pyAIML and made a custom XML server with Twisted that would talk to the flash front end. I stopped running it because I had to switch webhost and the new one didn’t let me run a custom python server and I basically didn’t like the AIML concept (back then there were no $5 VPS options like there are now, at least I didn’t know for them).

I will continue this topic as I haven’t really got to what I wanted to say at all. By “you” I mean all the python fans on reddit and everywhere else… Python is nice and I would use it in a lot of cases but I don’t see it as order of magnitudes different or better than most other solutions or the best choice for most of the use cases.

Image from WikipediaIt struck me today. There are basically just two kinds of programming languages and programmers in the world..

The first one can make output without even blinking but complex algorithms don’t smell to good to it..

The second one elegantly calculates complex sequences of useless numbers but you will need a degree if you want to print them out..

—

OK, there is a group of languages that bite the big chunk of elegance from the second with the careless (power) of first one.

To me a evolution towards more functional coding came by itself by just writing a lot of code and slowly progressing my imperative based coding style (before I even knew what FP is).

As a quick example of FP-ish solution vs. the Imperativ-ish. I was writing some AS3 code yesterday and I figured out that AS3 is less FP-ish than the very similar Haxe language that I am more used to.

Haxe..

function sayHi(name:String)
{
    return "Hi" if (name != "") " " + name else "";
}

It hurt me but in AS3 I had to do it “yer olde” way

function sayHi(name:String)
{
    var t = "Hi";
    if (name != '') t += " " + name;
    return t;
}

It’s not about lines of code. It’s about that in haxe I made simple “direct” expression. In AS3 I had to make some state, then modify it if certain case is true and then return it.

This solution is so ugly for this very simple problem that I am not sure if I didn’t miss some better way to do it imperatively too.

Source: WikipediaI finally committed itmchat sources to the google code. The whole thing is a work in progress. I rewrote a lot of it so that it has more features and will be easier to extend in future. Right now I am testing and debugging it. I would like to stabilize it and put it online so this version gets tested in real too. Then I intend to add some new features and then clean it up and optimise it.

The 0.01 version is running on some portal for few months now and hadn’t had any problems so far. I wasn’t in the name-making mood when I was opening the Google code project so the name is a little stupid, but who cares.

Itmchat is written in Haxe (server, flash client) and some javascript(JS client) and uses Haxe remoting for all comunication.

Factor gets a lot of bashing at reddit. That is not that bad because traction always produces more energy and output than a soapy you are OK, I am OK, we are all OK stuff.

Few days back certain Factor non-fan amongst many other things wrote:

Because such Forth-like untyped languages have been around for decades and I was using them around 1990. Adapting the concept to 2008 may be fun for you and help you suck in a few naive developers but it doesn’t make it a serious platform; read up a little

While people on factor’s irc channel look highly educated programmers to me I recognised myself in this. Not that I am proud, but reality is I am sort of naive developer and I did get sucked into Factor. I am not formally educated as a programmer. I am more like the guy who once jumped into the river and managed not to sink, and then just stayed there, gradually improving his swimming, but never took time to learn the official butterfly stroke because he was too busy catching the fish.

Well I am “naive developer” in some way but I am also very pragmatic because the “useful working maintainable output” vs. the “sh*t that went into making it” is the only thing that matters to me at the end. I don’t code to learn, I learn to code.

And that’s why I now think that Factor will be my web-dev tool? Because I have tested and got very good results with 3 sides of web-development so far:

As my first Factor lines of code I tried to see how I could extract some data out of text. This simple and small vocab is what I came up with, and was amazed by cleanness and obviousness. So I see that making nice vocabularies that will help me parse strings will reall NOT be a problem with factor.

"i:1;name:Jon;age:3;surname:Wu;;i:2;name:Jill;age:9;surname:Huan;;"
      "i:2" cut-to "name:" cut-off ";" snatch-to
      "surname:" cut-off ";" get-to .s
! "Jill"
! "Huan"

So factor can read, but can it generate? Next, I wanted to se how I can generate SQL, this came out so far:

: get-users ( -- )
   SELECT*
      "users" FROM
      "enabled = 1" WHERE
      "username" ORDER get-rows ;

get-users
! SELECT *  FROM users
! WHERE enabled = 1  ORDER BY username ;

: get-users-of-group+ ( orderby group fields -- )
   SELECT
      "users" FROM
      swap "enabled = 1 AND group = ##" ##1' WHERE
      swap ORDER ;

"email" 51 "email, username" get-users-of-group+
! SELECT email, username  FROM users
! WHERE enabled = 1 AND group = 51  ORDER BY email ;

: change-email ( id email -- )
   "users" UPDATE
      "email = ##" ##1' SET
      swap WHERE-id exec ;

123 "j@a.com" change-email
! UPDATE users  SET email = 'j@a.com'
! WHERE id = 123 ;

Then I tried to make the XHTML forms generating vocabulary:

: show_user-form ( -- )
   "post" "./user" start-form
      "your info" start-fieldset
         "Email" label (*) endlbl
            "email" "" "class='big'" text-input endrow
         "Name" label  endlbl
            "name" "" "size='12'" text-input endrow
         no-label endlbl
            "action_add-user" "Save" "" submit-input endrow
      end-fieldset
   end-form show! ;

The code creates the first form on this page.

Any part of my web-dev toolkit I tried to create in Factor so far was better looking than the ones I had developed in other languages. That’s why I will continue with Factor. I know and used only the “primitive” stuff of Factor until now so I am excited to see what’s ahead.

Source: ShutterstockJava : I liked Java but some of my love for all c++/java like languages is gone now. I see the elegance and power in some different paradigms now. If I would have to do a GUI, CAD like thing again I would still use it. I still love Swing, Piccolo and some other things about it. I am not sure if I will make the WATERISK game in it as I said previously.

Factor : I am 90% sure I will use it as my default web-dev platform. I am building core webdev utilities when I have some spare time.

OCaml : I Tried to find a use for it in web-dev but after looking at things decided not to. I will continue to learn it and write another GL/SDL tutorial (but not tomorrow) or just try to make WATERISK in it.

PHP : Will continue using it for webdev where clients request it or where deployment is very important.

Haxe : Will continue to use it for swf (flash games) development. I hope to work on and release open source chat server written with it soon.

Lua : Will probably use it for a 3d project made in Luxinia engine. I would really love to, but a chance is I will cave to the f****** business senses and use Adobe Director just because of in-browser deployment.

Flex, AS3 : I have a very concrete project with Flex that will start ASAP. First time using it.

Erlang : After OCaml I was looking at Erlang for webdev (mochiweb, erlyweb, jaws). After a lot of consideration I decided I will not for now.

Clojure : I want to dip my fingers into Lisp family of languages and this one seems most intriguing to me (rich data structures, concurency, JVM). Maybe it could substitute some cases where I used java before. LWJGL, JOGL, Swing come to play… maybe some web stuff, who knows..

And why should you care?
you really should not, did you just read all this?

(edit: zemantified… cool)