Sun hires the JRuby developers

InfoQ has an article on Sun hiring the JRuby developers and the implications of this step for Groovy/Grails. They quote Graeme Rocher, a lead developer of Grails, who (not too surprisingly) says that it will not have much impact. I beg to differ and here's why.

When I became interested in latest enchilada of RAD tools like Rails, Grails, Trails and so on the two I had a real hard look at where Rails and Grails. What drew me to Grails was the fact that it was close to Java so that I could use the myriads of existing libraries out there and that I could deploy it in Tomcat. But the more feasible it becomes to deploy a Rails application on JRuby the less valid these two arguments will be. So why would anyone go for Grails these days? In Graeme Rocher's Blog he quotes the tight integration with Spring, Hibernate, etc. and that they lokk at integrating EJBs. This might be of interest to some developers, but for me this misses the point of why I became interested in Rails in the first place: a very efficient and maintainable way to build db-driven web sites. If it is built on Spring or not does not really matter to me (at least for the use cases I am looking at right now).

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Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan...

What is Multi-Tenancy? A closer look

Lately, I had a lot of conversations about multi-tenancy (MT). So I finally wrote up my thoughts on that term. In this post I will argue that MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable. Therefore, any statement about a system being “MT” can only be made in the context of the given requirements. It is not a property of the system itself . I will also show that perfect multi-tenancy is indistinguishable from single-tenancy (ST). MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable Imagine a step-function "ST-MT" (values are either 0 or 1) that determines if a given system is MT (1) or ST (0). That function will look like this: ST-MT = function (system, business requirements) Look at the function’s arguments: the first one is obvious – the result will depend on the system itself. The second one is more interesting: it is the cumulative set of business requirements . Typically, these requirements will include: Resource sharing: systems typically declare...

Second FISE Hackathon

At this week's IKS meeting at Paderborn the second FISE Hackathon took place. FISE is an open source semantic engine that provides semantic annotation algorithms like semantic lifting. The actual annotation algorithms are pluggable through OSGi. Existing CMSs can integrate the engine through an HTTP interface (inspired from Solr ). Last week, Bertrand gave an introductory talk about FISE that is available online . There was no explicitly set goal for the second Hackathon. Rather, the existing code base was extended in various different directions. Some examples: a language detection enhancement engine (I am particularly glad to see this - automatic language detection in CMSs is a pet passion of mine) a UI for FISE users that allows humans to resolve ambiguities myself, I coded a JCR-based storage engine for the content and annotations There was also a good amount of work done on the annotation structure used by FISE and documented on the IKS wiki . A complete report of the Hack...

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