So maybe two years ago, our good friend (noted security researcher and computing maven in general) Tim J had been kicking around an idea for developing web applications: he wanted to use a more general interface mechanism, say Swing or GTK, for laying things out, with some other layer figuring out how to express what you put together in terms of web languages. At the time, I didn't see the need...
But Google did, apparently! GWT lets you design webapps in terms of Java, running on your local machine for testing purposes. GWT then compiles them down to Javascript when you're ready to deploy for the rest of the world. I'm probably the last to find out. It's open source; you can go play with it if you want. Pretty crazy.
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Also; after rather a while of hearing my friends work with and develop the music-programming language ChucK, I finally took the time to go play with it. At first I tried to use the Audicle -- which is a really pretty IDE, all done up in OpenGL -- but it crashed on my Mac, so I tried miniAudicle instead. That worked just fine, with a nicely intuitive, minimal interface. After just a few minutes, I was making some interesting bleeping-and-booping noises. It was very satisfying! I think I like the square-wave generator best.
ChucK definitely warrants checking out, if you have any sort of urge to make cool noises, or even cheesy music. Graham Coleman, who wrote said cheesy music tutorial and has in recent months been performing live with ChucK in Atlanta, was just now on the radio, and he proceeded to rock the airwaves pretty hard. Hooray!
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