Dropbox Documentation Server

What does this even mean? Well, it means I'm really cheap, and lazy. It probably means I'm silly, too, when I tell you what I'm doing.

First, a back story is in order. I was reading some internet articles the other day, when completely irrelevantly, I thought of making my Public Dropbox folder a static web site. Dropbox has a really neat desktop tool that syncs a folder on your machine to their cloud storage, automagically. Being that the site would be static, I started to wonder what I could even do with it. Then I realized: this is perfect for a documentation server! (Maybe not!)

Monido, What?

I've been working on a little project called Monido, which is simply a monitoring service for Scala. It can monitor anything from a file, a directory, a DB table, or web page. I think you get the picture.

The project, however, only ships with a single reference implementation to monitor the file system for changes. I'm using it for this very post at this moment. More on that later.

Scalendar v 1.0

Update

It is now hosted on both scalendar's github page, and on scala-tools. It was approved a couple of days ago, and hopefully, other people might find it useful.

As I worked on my wife's ipad app, I kept refining my Scala Calendar wrapper (which I coined Scalendar thanks to brad). It began to evolve into a really nice api, in which you work with immutable objects that wrap the Java Calendar api. While it completely interoperates with Java time, it works well enough as a stand-alone library.

The main functionality like date traversal and property getters haven't changed from the last post. If you're interested, read more about the changes after the jump.

Manipulating time

Handling time using the standard Java libraries can be a real pain. I am writing a webapp that uses pretty complicated date arithmetic, and while Java's Calendar object works, clients of the library are forced to work with a mutable object, thus being rather verbose to accomplish a simple task.

Three Programming Languages

I ran across this post a few months ago, that I recently given some more thought to while making supper. (Funny how the brain works isn't it?) I've come up with my "three" programming languages as of this writing, and I'd like to share them with you.

Who needs a Template Engine?

My wife commissioned me for another web app this weekend, and we spec'd it out using an app on her iPad (We both had a lot of fun). I wanted to prototype this sucker as quick as possible, and to be frank, my template engine I wrote for Scalatra wasn't cutting it. It dawned on me rather suddenly, something my former co-woker mentioned to me in passing.

"Scala supports in-line XML literals... Why not just go with that?"

And here I am almost a year later, saying to myself: Huh... you have an excellent point....

Remote Control v0.1 Alpha

The remote control package has finally reached an alpha stage today. The library includes ways for a server program to give client programs a way to change its behavior on the fly, or to run arbitrary code on command, and receive values from those arbitrary commands.