Scripting News: Brent Simmons is leaving Userland, for parts unknown. Thanks Brent for years of awesome software, and for being a great guy! (that part's not going to change. ;-)) Look forward to seeing you around the 'net!

Ugh. Jim wanted to report a bug in Userland's Radio Userland, and ask a question. The reward for his trouble?

For some reason Dave, from this link on down on todays' Scripting News, there are no permalinks on the entries. I'm not logged on as "me" right now so I can't email you. What happened?

Jim is "urgently in need of work". If you need an awesome coder, a great mentor, or all-around great guy in your company, check him out.

Be aware - Jim needs to work remotely, and he's by far the one I would bet one if I could hire a teleworker. He's motivated, creative, and productive.

Dave is making a point on Scripting News regarding IDL (or in this case WSDL) for Frontier, and other non-typed scripting languages. His point is that he cannot generate at runtime the WSDL directly from the code, as can C# or Java developers - b/c their runtimes have information about the types and numbers of parameters to a call.

This means having to handcode the WSDL for a web service in these environments, which can be a PITA if your service is at all large.

I have an idea though. One way to get around this would be to implement a meta-data header for these environments similar to javadoc. I'll use Frontier as an example.

In Frontier, scripts are outlines. Frontier already has a rich set of functionality dealing with rendering outlines into other formats, esp. HTML. You can use[#directives](http://monkinetic.blog/tag/directives) in your outlines, which get translated into information in the symbol table when rendering the outline (or any other datatype for that matter).

So, I would propose a simple set of[#directives](http://monkinetic.blog/tag/directives) that can be inserted into a script outline above the actual script code, as a commented block. That block can be grabbed and processed to generate whatever idl format is desired.

This is just an idea, someone with more Frontier experience could come up with a better design. I also know that Perl has Perldoc and POD (inline support for manpages), so including this information in perl scripts in a long tradition in that community.

Also, at least someone is working on WSDL support in Python (which has an easily introspected runtime). "Therefore I am planning to write a WSDL generator that will examine our exposed methods and write out a valid WSDL file."

So, I think that lack of explicitly typed data should not be the final reason not to support some sort of IDL for web services. There may be other, better reasons, but I have not seen them yet.

Since Jim is taking the awesome Cocoa class at Big Nerd Ranch SF, and I can't (Waaahhh), I want Aaron's book instead.

I've started reading Andrew Sullivan's website pretty much daily. He's a fairly prolific blogger, now we just need to get him to make his posts linkable. Doc agrees.

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Jim has a little accident involving 'rm -fr'. Oouuch.

Cool! Both Jim and Greg have tried out Sid... Muahahahahaha!

"Jim" Roepcke, my current WebObjects mentor and all-around great guy, is bragging about the blog he built in an hour with WebObjects. We won't mention who put him up to it...

At Macworld SF, Steve Jobs layed out Apple's vision for itself and the future of the Macintosh. In a 15 minute section of his keynote, he described the digital lifestyle, where our Macs become "Digital Hubs" that route information and media between the new generation of digital devices that are becoming more and more commonplace.

#item1413"='href"http://jim.roepcke.com/2000/12/03None#item1413"' 12="" 2000="" href"http:="" jim.roepcke.com="">Jim points out that Radio Userland, once promised to be a free distribution, will actually have a moderate price once officially released.

Dave has put the Userland Discussion Group on pause, and is re-instituting the "Mail Pages", which ran '96..'98. To help ease the time burden is Radio Userland, Dave's &uumlautber-content-tool.

Pike

I am once again editing this site in "Pike". Yay! Now I have to review how to write rules, so I can get my rules set up right on this machine. (My iBook.) Rules are now working. Now that I'm in Pike again, it's like being in Frontier (actually, those in the know will make the case that I am in Frontier...) ";->". I have my HTML menu, and my outliner, and because I know how, I can customize Pike to do whatever I want it to.

Outlining your ear off

No doubt about it, outlining makes me a much more prolific writer. I find it so much easier to express myself in a structured editor.

Speaking of structured editors, I was describing "Frontier" to another developer this evening, and he just nodded the whole time, until I got to Frontier's outliner. Describing the process of editing code in an outline to him, I watched his face light up. I love that! I expressed to him, as I do to every developer I expound to, that if only I could get a scriptable outline code editor that would do syntax highlighting, I could stop IDE shopping.

Just to prove I could do it, I got Frontier talking via Applescript to Sun's javac the other day, and was writing Java code in the outliner, and compiling it in javac. Yum!

Resumes and Headhunters

I've had my resume up on my site for a long time. I'm not looking for a job, but I think of my resume as a publicly available doument, a reference of sorts.

Lately I've started getting emails from people I can only assume are headhunters saying they saw my resume online, I have skills they're looking for, and have a great opportunity for me if I'll contact them. Java is big (though if they looked closely they would see that my resume says JavaScript), as is eCommerce. The couple I actually talked to (they called me at work, no less) wanted to know all about what kind of work I'm doing, what tools I use, but were very slow to offer details about the opportunities they have to offer. Oh- I also blew off someone I thought was an annoying headhunter, but on reflection was probably just a desperate corporate recruiter.

I don't know what brings them out of the woodwork. Nothing has really changed for me in the last few months, that I can think of. Somehow I got on some recruiter's list, and they're all pitching me, hoping someone will get me to swing.

I've changed my resume, so it expicitly states that I'm not currently seeking a change of employment. My boss will be happy to hear it. Maybe it'll get them to leave me alone. But I doubt it.

Microsoft ".Net"

Chatting with Josh Lucas the other day, I wondered aloud (well, in print, er, IM) about "Microsoft"'s new ".Net" ("dot-net") strategy. I think this is a big chance for Microsoft to do some great, open, things for both developers and consumers.

The technology is there, to be open, and amazingly powerful. But it's also published, and visible. Lock-in will be harder - not impossible - but harder, no matter what Bill says. (Look about half-way down, for Bill's comment's about second-class citizens. He burns me up sometimes.)

But in typical MS style, the strategy may be too Microsoft-centered. Even the name breathes arrogance, presuming to usurp the ".net" top-level domain moniker for the name of the platform. Come on, guys.