First I thought that such a plugin would need (or could at least profit from) sem***ic web technologies (no dirty words on this blog, please), but it probably wouldn’t. All we need is a global registry that maps package names to the URLs of the web interfaces of the respective source repositories. (Maybe Google Code Search could be such a repository, but its results are often pretty bad.) The plugin would also have to include a reasonably good Java parser, and maybe a heuristic to distinguish betweeen Java and non-Java text.

Why would I want such a thing? Well, I often have to dig through the code of some open source library in order to understand a bug, or just to figure out what I can do with it, and how, because the documentation is incomplete or wrong. Usually I create an Eclipse project and import the code from the source repository, but that’s quite a lot of overhead if I just need to browse the code for ten minutes or so. On the other hand, digging through source code on web pages, without the help of links between the pages, is just a nuisance.

And wouldn’t it just be so cool to have one of the most important features of an IDE as a browser plugin, enhanced by the power of the world wide web?

P.S.: Or maybe I don’t want a browser plugin – maybe I just want Google to put some more effort into Code Search? Come on, guys, you’ve got all it takes – the global repository, the parsers, the heuristics…

A crucial part for dynamic languages today (at least in my eyes) is the creation of domain-specific language, which Groovy also supports. Gant, for example, is a Groovy DSL for Ant scripts. Another example (take from the Tutorial Domain-Specific Languages in Groovy, PDF) I find very practical is a DSL for creating query criteria for Hibernate in the Grails framework (formerly known as Groovy on Rails, so its purpose should be clear):

def c = Account.createCriteria()
def results = c {
  like("holderFirstName", "Fred%")
  and {
    between("balance", 500, 1000)
    eq("branch", "London")
  }
  maxResults(10)
  order("holderLastName", "desc")
}

A good thing, but looks too java-y for my taste, I miss the feeling I get when using a Ruby DSL, such as SQL-DSL, for example:

statement = Select[:column1, 'book', 10].from[:table1, :table2].where do
  equal :column1, 99
  not_equal :column1, 100
  less_than :column2, 'foo'
  less_than_or_equal :column3, :column4
  greater_than :column1, 0
  greater_than_or_equal :column2, 'bar'
  like :column1, 'any'
  is_not_null :column1
  is_in :column1, [1,2]
  is_not_in :column2, [3, 4]
  exists 0
  not_exists 0
end

But maybe that’s just personal preference.

From a few first glance I get the impression, that Groovy is quite successful as a scripting sidekick to Java and I’m curious to learn more about it.

Update: I did not read the document thoroughly enough. The answers to my questions:

“We had some contact with potential teams from the Python arena, but there were not sufficiently many who were qualified enough. In the end, only one formal request for participation was submitted, so we did not admit Python into the contest.”
“It was impossible to find Ruby-on-Rails teams (“we are too busyâ€?). “

For every Architecture Astronaut out there, there is at least one coder who thinks that being “Agile” is a perfect substitute for foresight.

If you wonder what Architecture Astronauts are, its a term coined by Joel Spolsky with regard to people climbing up the abstraction ladder a little too far:

When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all. These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts.

I know that I tend to be an Architecture Astronaut sometimes, probably it’s because thinking meta keeps me from the exhausting work of bothering with all the real-world problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the main reason for developers to become Architecture Astronauts at all.

But Architectural Outer Space isn’t a place where I stay very long usually, because its my experience that the lack of oxygen disrupts any attempts of getting actually something done. And that’s where agility fits in: If I get the whole idea of agility right, it’s all about getting things done (unless you use it as an excuse to shutdown your brain).