TriNetre - Archive for March 30, 2004

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March 30, 2004

Javahut vs. Perl Cafe

[Technology] @ 12:29 PM

James Turner, senior editor of LinuxWorld Magazine laments "that Java developers seem to be in love with unneeded and confusing layers of complexity".

Imagine if the Perl cafe and Javahut were across the street from each other. You walk into Javahut, and ask to sit down. "I'm sorry," says the person at the door. I'm not actually the hostess, I'm a Factory class that can give you a hostess if you tell me what type of seat you want." You say you want a non-smoking seat, and the person calls over a NonSmokingSeatHostess. The hostess takes you to your seat, and asks if you'll want breakfast, lunch, or dinner. You say lunch, and she beckons a LunchWaitress. The LunchWaitress takes your order, brings over your food, but there's no plates to put it on because you forgot to get a CutleryFactory and invoke getPlates, so the Waitress throws a null pointer exception and you get thrown out of the place.

Dusting yourself off, you walk across the street to the Perl cafe. The person at the door asks what kind of seat you want, what you want to eat, and how you want to pay. They sit you at your seat, bring over your food, collect the money, and leave you to eat in peace. Sure, it's not the most elegant dining experience you ever had, but you got your food with a minimum of pain.

Interesting article though I wonder how he was able to install Crypt::OpenPGP module in 10 minutes :)

One CPAN install got me the entire suite of packages I needed to make the Crypto::OpenPGP package work (and BOY could the Java community take a lesson from the success and good design of CPAN) The package was straightforward to use, maybe not the most elegant, infinitely extensable design possible, but easy to get up and working in 10 minutes.

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OpenPGPComment V1.5

[Software] @ 10:35 AM

Version 1.5 of OpenPGPComment for Movable Type has been released. The changes include:

A new tag 'MTIfPGPSigned' that provides the blog owner the ability to place the link to the page displaying the raw PGP comment and the verification result (if enabled), within the blog template. As a result of this new tag, if you are upgrading, please note that unlike previous versions, the 'OpenPGP Signature' link and its text is not produced by the plugin itself. Rather the blog owner has to define it within his/her template. Look at the 'tags usage' section to see how the tag 'MTIfPGPSigned' can be used for this. Thanks to Jacques Distler for the idea and sample code.
Fixed a bug that caused problems when the comment filters like MT-Textile were used along with OpenPGPComment. Thanks to Brad Choate for the fix.

This release fixes all the problems that have so far been identified. Hopefully the next release will add some admin functionality to the verification section, allowing the blog owner to control the public keyring as well as the key-URL database. However, the chances are that there will be some major changes in my life in the next two months or so. So, I have no way to set a time-line for the next release. To stay tuned, please subscribe to the mailing list.

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