back from Google I/O, got a new laptop!

I can speak for myself, at least, in saying that it felt pretty darn good to be on the GWT team for Google I/O. The Google Wave demo at the keynote got a standing ovation, and they made a pretty big deal about how they used GWT and it was a wonderful tool for their work. Pretty fantastic. A standing ovation at a tech conference. Totally electric.

Anyway! I got back, and my Dell Mini 12 with Ubuntu preinstalled had arrived! It's really pretty. The keyboard is a little more cramped than I'd expected (especially with the punctuation keys) but it's got a nice clicky feel. I'm not super-impressed with the Ubuntu version Dell shipped -- it's a specialized distribution of Hardy (last year's version) with some Dell and Yahoo-specific goodies. But the built-in camera and suspend/resume work beautifully! And no Microsoft tax! Not bad, really!

I'm probably about to install a fresh new (9.04) Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it.

Update! There's a bit of a funky driver issue with running the stock Ubuntu instead of the one Dell provides, but it's very surmountable. Here's how to install Ubuntu "Jaunty" on your Dell Mini 12.

plats is Swedish for "locale".

My first pass for solving the problem from a few days ago is now live on appengine.

Check it out: http://plats.appspot.com

Just include a script in your page and you get a variable or a meta tag (for GWT apps) to tell you which locale you should be in. Details here.

figuring out the user's language preferences, client-side

Your browser sends an HTTP header field called "Accept-Language" (see 14.4) when you make a request to a web server. It tells the server which languages you prefer, and in which ordering, so the server can send you localized content with graceful fallbacks. You can muck with these, for example, in your Firefox settings under Preferences > Content > Languages.

So I'd like to do this on the client side. I had the bright idea that I would just build an XMLHttpRequest object and ask it what headers it was about to send (XHRs do send this field), but GWT's HTTP objects don't let you get at request headers that you haven't explicitly set. The very good reason for this is that XMLHttpRequest objects don't let you query their headers. Oh noes.

It may be that the way to do this is with a bit of server-side cleverness, but that's not the answer I want. Unless somebody happens to have a way to snag these settings from JavaScript...

GWT 1.5 release!

Wooooo, new version of GWT! This is huge. We've been working really hard on this for quite a while.

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit

What's new? Check check check it!

GWT 1.5RC1 -- we're pretty pumped.

Google Web Toolkit 1.5 RC1 is live!
http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-web-toolkit-15-release-candidate.html

Get the bits while they're hot.
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/download.html

GWT 1.5 has a whole lot of wild improvements, detailed here -- but importantly, compiler now supports Java 5 features and produces even tighter code than before, and the UI library has had some pretty serious reworking -- there's a new API for working directly with the DOM in a typesafe way, and GWT apps now come with nice styling by default. We've been working pretty hard.

Oh, and don't miss the new documentation browser :) Much better than browsing the GWT wiki docs by hand.

Share and enjoy!

Design Patterns Ahoy: Violator Pattern

So, at work, every so often somebody brings up the "Violator" Pattern, typically with a slight smirk. Up until recently, I wasn't at all well-versed in design patterns, but this seems like a field that one, as a professional programmer, should be at least familiar with. So I picked up the classic Gang of Four book and started reading through it.

And while, so far, it seems like just good, solid advice about software design -- and at the risk of sounding uncritical, is it really so bad to have common names for commonly-occurring software structures? -- ... no "Violator" pattern is to be found in Gang of Four. Or on the C2 design patterns wiki.

And I wanted to work out for myself what this mysterious Violator Pattern could be. And I figured it out today. In GWT, you can use the JavaScript Native Interface to make calls from code written in JavaScript into methods written in Java. And when you do this, the compiler totally ignores the access modifiers on the methods you're calling. That's the Violator pattern.

A paragon of OO design, verily :)

typing about typing about types

As we make the push to handle Java 1.5 features in GWT (it's about time!) I'm having flashbacks to undergraduate Compilers. Perhaps this is unsurprising, considering what I'm working on. Part of the difficulty in the problem is that whether you're talking about types in the code that constitutes the compiler itself, types in the code that the user is going to put in, or types in the output code... we use the same word. Oh my. (much worse, I suppose, is the code you get with the Appel book, where half of the words on the screen are helpfully "ty" or "typ". Jebus.)

But! All of this means that by the next GWT release, you'll likely have some code that I touched in your hands. Woo.

(ping)

It's been a while since I've last posted: I should make an effort to have exciting technical things to say more often.

But! In the last few months, I've graduated, got a paper accepted to a conference, taught six weeks of summer camps to enthusiastic middle- and highschool kids, and made all the preparations to start up work with the Goog. My first day is Monday.

Topics that I've been looking into and will hopefully post about soon:
- Haskell -- maybe one day I'll have a more consistent opinion about how I feel about static vs. dynamic typing. Writing here on the issue will probably help sort it out. Or just building something big with Haskell.
- Statistics. I went out and bought All of Statistics and I've been thumbing through it a bit.
- CS Education and edutech. Good goodness, education. I've spent most of my summer with the childrens, trying out different ways of convincing them they want to know what I think they should know. It's been going well, for the most part.
- GWT and associated topics in Javascript and Ajax. I'm joining the GWT team in just a few days, so I'm working pretty hard on learning it!