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Data, Context and Interaction (DCI) is a paradigm used in computer software to program systems of communicating objects. Its goals are: To improve the readability of object-oriented code by giving system behavior first-class status; To cleanly separate code for rapidly changing system behavior (what the system does) from code for slowly changing domain knowledge (what the system is), instead of combining both in one class interface; To help software developers reason about system-level state and behavior instead of only object state and behavior; To support an object style of thinking that is close to peoples' mental models, rather than the class style of thinking that overshadowed object thinking early in the history of object-oriented programming languages. The paradigm separates the domain model (Data) from Use cases (Context) and Roles that objects play (Interaction). DCI is complementary to Model-view-controller (MVC). MVC as a pattern language is still used to separate the data and its processing from presentation. DCI was invented by Trygve Reenskaug, also the inventor of MVC. The current formulation of DCI is mostly the work of Reenskaug and James O. Coplien.

There was a recent outburst in blogs on the topic of Groovy and how it compares to Java. Although I respect the youthfull entusiasim of Groovy and Co. working on this little exercise I'm just perplexed by the "WHY?" in this whole discussion. Let me just say again: W H Y ?!?! 1. Practically no one cares about Groovy (let alone Groovy++ strap-on) beyond Grails community. So this language just as "widely accepted" as Ruby (at least for enterprise software development) 2. If you know Java it's equally "challenging" to pick up either Groovy or Scala. Don't let anyone insult your intelligence by claiming that Scala syntax is somehow more complex than Groovy. In both languages you will need to adapt to functional thinking - and that's where you will have to spend a couple of weekends… 3. If you know Groovy - you already know 90% of Scala (different syntax and few extra features can be picked up in the evening) 4. Scala is designed by people who have proper academic background, experience and talent in the area of language design - Groovy has never been that way (and anyone who dares to look inside of Groovy runtime or history of changes in it will attest to that). NOTE: it did come out rather strong - but that's how I feel about it and after some thinking I'll leave as is. Nothing personal to anyone reading it… 5. Scala as a post-functional language is years ahead of Groovy (static typing with best-in-business type inference, highly tuned mix of imperative and functional styles, powerful and done-right generics, etc.) 6. Groovy will ALWAYS be slower than Scala or Java (latest benchmarks put even Groovy++ about 50 times slower than Java) just by its nature unless someone changes the language and rebuilds the runtime from the ground up. 7. Once we get decent integration with Eclipse, NetBeans and IDEA for Scala, the Groovy will lose its only serious advantage

" In general when people think about running a Java based application server with Apache as front-end they almost always think about using mod_jk to proxy to Glassfish, but you can also use mod_proxy quite effectively. If you are wanting to proxy from a HTTPS Apache to a HTTP Glassfish then this article describes how you can do that. "

"THINK IN MODELS Models & Modeling, Enterprise Applications & Engineering"

"A better way to build. Project automation is essential to the success of software projects. It should be straight-forward, easy and fun to implement. There is no one-size-fits-all process for builds. Therefore Gradle does not impose a rigid process over people. Yet we think finding and describing YOUR process is very important. And so, Gradle has the very best support for describing it. We don't believe in tools that save people from themselves. Gradle gives you all the freedom you need. Using Gradle you can create declarative, maintainable, concise and highly-performing builds. "

A few weeks back, I wrote a blog entry lamenting the attitude toward IDEs in the Scala community. A few people told me that the tooling situation was better than I'd implied, so I thought I'd spend a bit of time looking at using Scala (and Lift specifically) in Eclipse. I think the situation is still a ways away from the tooling situation for Java, but it is actually quite good, and I wanted to post a quick tutorial for those interested in developing Lift in Eclipse. Prerequisites This post assumes that you already have Scala 2.8 final and Eclipse 3.6 on your system. For Eclipse, I recommend upping the Xmx setting if you haven't already - I had issues when I had multiple Lift projects imported with Xmx set to 386. Also, this tutorial is going to use Maven, not SBT. SBT may be a better build tool for Scala projects, but I'm not sure how well it works with m2eclipse - I'm going to play with that more later. I also assume you know how to install plugins into Eclipse - I will create a more in-depth screencast for doing all of this if there is enough interest.

Last week I decided to challenge Scala's downscalability by trying to replace a Groovy script with a Scala pendant. In this article you will read about this little experiment and a comparision of the Scala result with the Groovy predecessor. But first some background about the script: Some time ago my company introduced a new spam notification system.  When it thinks that a mail contains spam, it keeps it in quarantine and once or twice a day sends an email to the recipient (me) reporting all the kept mails, together with an intranet web link for each  to release it. Here you see an example of such a mail (note: I have my mails displayed in plain text format):

"Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools BIRT is an open source Eclipse-based reporting system that integrates with your Java/J2EE application to produce compelling reports. Get started with the newest major release, BIRT 2.6.1. Get started with the latest in the BIRT 2.5 series. Need help with BIRT? BIRT provides core reporting features such as report layout, data access and scripting. Please try BIRT and tell us what you think by filling bugs reports & enhancement requests through Bugzilla as explained on the community page. "

If you have web hosting account, you need to think about its security. There are many viruses, which will harm your web hosting. So that you need Security for your web hosting account. Here you can get all information about security tips for web hosting.

"If you didn't know already, Eclipse allows you to define custom templates for commonly used code snippets. Its a very neat feature for those of us who are memory challenged or don't like typing things twice! I think that Apache Camel users could really benefit from having predefined templates for doing Camel routing. I also hear a lot of requests like "I have this Java DSL route, how do I do this in the Spring XML DSL?" so having both Java and XML templates for the same thing is essential."

When you write Eclipse plug-ins sooner or later you will start thinking about testing your work. The very first steps will lead you to the Internet. But to my (and maybe your ;) ) surprise this information is not very easy to find. I know two ways to accomplish this task and I want to describe the first one - testing Eclipse plug-ins using build-in JUnit support.

"A better way to build. Project automation is essential to the success of software projects. It should be straight-forward, easy and fun to implement. There is no one-size-fits-all process for builds. Therefore Gradle does not impose a rigid process over people. Yet we think finding and describing YOUR process is very important. And so, Gradle has the very best support for describing it. We don't believe in tools that save people from themselves. Gradle gives you all the freedom you need. Using Gradle you can create declarative, maintainable, concise and high-performance builds. "

""Coming from desktop application development, I have found the IT Mill Toolkit [Vaadin] to be a lot of help in the transition to web application development. With the toolkit, writing AJAX enabled web applications is as easy as writing Swing based GUI code. It hides so many frustrating details, and handles browser independence so I don't have to worry about it. Using the toolkit makes it quite easy for me to write sophisticated web applications." Bo Thorsen, Monty Program AB"

"Code Generation is better than Model Interpretation in Model-Driven Development? In my latest blog post I add my point of view to the topic "Code Generation vs Model Interpretation"."