At this stage, if you've heard of Rails and you haven't converted, it's entirely possible that you never will. It's also entirely possible that anybody who still isn't even taking Rails seriously by this point might just be some kind of idiot.
...
Every programmer should also read Chad Fowler's "My Job Went To India" book, where he explains that as larger and larger numbers of programmers adopt a particular skill, that skill becomes more and more a commodity. Rails development becoming a commodity is really not in the economic interest of any Rails developer. This is especially the case because programming skill is very difficult to measure, which - according to the same economics which govern lemons and used-car markets - means that the average price of programmers in any given market is more a reflection of the worst programmers in that market than the best. An influx of programmers drives your rates down, and an influx of incompetent programmers drives your rates way the fuck down.

Instead, I want to talk about my first attempt at solving the puzzle, which was an utter failure. A glorious, spectacular failure. Perhaps the single most impressive failure of my career. Failures are often much more interesting than successes, but for some unfathomable reason, people are often reluctant to discuss them.

And this is just the beginning of the ceremony:

Me: read file blah.txt and display it on system output
Java: How should I name the class?
Me: Test
Java: How should I handle errors?
Me: I don't care right now, I just need to display that data to system output
Java: But I need to know this, what if something unexpected happens?!
Me: I just want to make a prototype damn it!
Java: Sorry, can't do it.
Me: Ok, do nothing on error.
Java: And which implementation of Stream class should I use for reading?

Everyone knows that diversification is the key to managing financial risk, but few people seem to apply this principal to their professional careers. Most developer shops are relatively limited when it comes to the number of technologies and problem domains they deal with. If you want to diversify your resume without job hopping every year, then it makes sense to actively seek out technology experiences that are different from the ones you use in your day job.

Neal Ford and others have been talking about the distinction between dynamic and static typing as being incorrect. The real question is between essence and ceremony. Java is a ceremonious language because it needs you to do several dances to the rain gods to declare even the simplest form of method. In an essential language you will say what you need to say, but nothing else. This is one of the reasons dynamic languages and type inferenced static languages sometimes look quite alike - it's the absence of ceremony that people react to.

Exceptions should be thrown when something exceptional happens. Maybe encountering a null value was at some time, exceptional. But in today's world of databases, form fields, and integrated disparate systems, you don't know where your data is at or where it's coming from - and encountering null is the rule, not the exception.

Expecting me to write paranoid code and add a check for null to avoid every branch of code where it might occur is ludicrous. There's no reason some sensible default behavior can't be chosen for null, and if I really need something exceptional to happen, I can check for it.

Really, aren't you sick of writing code like this:


when you could be writing code like this:


I think this is especially horrid for conditional checks. When I write if(someCase) it's really just shorthand for if(someCase eq true). So why, when someCase is null or not a boolean should it cause an error? It's not true, so move on - don't throw an error.

Someone tell me I'm wrong. It feels like I should be wrong. But it feels worse to have the default path always be the one of most resistance.

What do you think?

Tim broke his watch, and ...

Imagine my joy as I realized that I could make it 11:30 again, and go enjoy another lunch. Meeting at 3:30? No problem, just turn the hour hand up to 6:00 and go home! I can sleep as long as I want as long as I turn it back to 8:00 when I get to the office. All my work estimates are now "five minutes", and I complete them every time.

...

But people still try to mandate velocity.

My ultimate beef though is not a practical one. It's an idealogical one. We should encourage those who succeed to lead as examples for others so that they can see that success is something that's worth pursuing. The more successful people and companies we have in this country (or any country,) the more successful the economy at large will be, and the higher the standard of living we'll have. And individually, it's rewarding to see your ideas through to production, and moreso on a mega-scale.

Bill Gates has earned the right not to comb his hair on TV, and I'll bet that even Brooke Shields would like the same right. The cowering masses of admirers aren't what the real winners seek. They're a side effect of doing something that nobody else has done, and doing it exceedingly and emphatically well. Everyone admires Bill Gates, whether or not they'll admit it. He's a man of action, a man of success, and for some, the picture of what they can not aspire to be. They think that because they can never become like him that they should instead try to seize some of that which he has created (as in with lobbyists or legislation.) To slice off a chunk for those who will never do the things he has done, and will not lift a finger to that end.

That's where they're wrong. You can aspire to be as great as you like. You can pursue your path to the end of your days. Nobody is going to give it to you, and they shouldn't. It's the 'hard' part that makes it so great. If you don't make it to be as successful as you had aimed by the time you die, you won't be walking around cursing the fact.

.NET and Java are both prime examples of object-oriented programming gone stupid. Their class libraries have become so utterly huge that it becomes damn near impossible for an individual developer to suitably grasp anything more than a small portion of them.

Although they supposedly give more flexibility, something as essential as reading from and writing to a file becomes a hassle with .NET or Java. It's easy to get lost in whether we need a FileInputStream, or whether we should wrap a FileInputReader in a TextInputBuffer, and so forth. Give me fopen() any day.

Thoughts and discussion are always encouraged.

In any case, there is an "enterprise" license that costs a couple of thousand dollars to get you around most of those limitations. The only exception is the limitation to three build agents - you can buy extra licenses for that at $299 a pop. I can't foresee the need for even two, but that might be because I have yet to see all the functions they serve.

Anyway, if you've been paying attention at least partially, you'll know I'm a huge fan of the DRY principle, especially as it relates to source code. In that case, you wouldn't be surprised to learn that one of my favorite features is this:



I haven't yet found a way to make the build fail for duplication, but seeing the reports is nice. I was also a bit disappointed it didn't catch code like this:


But, it's nice to know it will at least catch copy-and-paste reuse.

I was set up and running my duplication checks in a few minutes, but finding everything you need is not as painless (setup is mostly painless, finding reasons for build failure and editing is not as easy). It's not hard, by any stretch of the imagination, but they set such a high standard on the "add" part that even the minor annoyances I encountered on the rest seemed large. A lot of that is being new not just to the technology, but some of the terminology they used as well.

Anyway, I've not dived in deep enough to see how or if it might work for other languages or platforms, but if you're using Java or .NET, I'd recommend you give it a try.

Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make (pg. 39)

What these [reconstructive] presidents did, and what their predecessors could not do, was to reformulate the nation's political agenda altogether, ... and to move the nation past the old problems, eyeing a different set of possibilities... (Skowronek, pg. 38)

When the new regime starts gaining momentum, in the old regime there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. We can see some of this in the dogma repeated by Ruby's detractors alluded to (but not sourced) by Daniel Spiewak. We hear it in the fear in people's comments when they fail to criticize the ideas, relying instead on ad hominem attacks that have little to nothing to do with the issues at hand.

(Unlike Obie, I don't have any reason to call attention to anyone by name. If you honestly haven't seen this, let's try i don't like ruby, ruby sucks, and ruby is slow and see if we can weed through the sarcasm, apologists who parrot the line so as not to offend people, or just those exact words with no other substance. )

There will also fail to be unity. Java is considering closures, and some want multiline string literals. There's talk that Java is done and that there should be a return to the good ol' days.

Neal Gafter quotes himself and Joshua Bloch in Is Java Dying? (where he concludes that it isn't):

Neal Gafter: "If you don't want to change the meaning of anything ever, you have no choice but to not do anything. The trick is to minimize the effect of the changes while enabling as much as possible. I think there's still a lot of room for adding functionality without breaking existing stuff..."

Josh Bloch: "My view of what really happens is a little bit morbid. I think that languages and platforms age by getting larger and clunkier until they fall over of their own weight and die very very slowly, like over ... well, they're all still alive (though not many are programming Cobol anymore). I think it's a great thing, I really love it. I think it's marvelous. It's the cycle of birth, and growth, and death. I remember James saying to me [...] eight years ago 'It's really great when you get to hit the reset button every once and a while.'"

To me, the debate is starting to look a lot like the regime change Skowronek's work predicts when going from a vulnerable establishment regime where an outsider reconstructs a new one.

I'm not saying Ruby itself will supplant Java. But it certainly could be a piece of the polyglot programming puzzle that will do it. It's more of an overall paradigm shift than a language one, so although I say one part is represented by Java and another by Ruby, I hope you won't take me literally.

Franklin Roosevelt was the candidate with "clean hands" at a moment when failed policies, broken promises, and embarrassed clients were indicting a long-established political order. Agitating for a rout in 1932, he inveighed against the entire "Republican leadership." He denounced them as false prophets of prosperity, charged them with incompetence in dealing with economic calamity, and convicted them of intransigence in the face of social desperation. Declaring their regime morally bankrupt, he campaigned to cut the knot, to raise a new standard, to restore to American government the ancient truths that had first inspired it.

Hoover's inability to take the final step in innovation and repudiate the system he was transforming served his critic's well... Hoover would later lament the people's failure to appreciate the significance of his policies, and yet he was the first to deny it. The crosscurrents of change in the politics of leadership left him with an impressive string of policy successes, all of which added up to one colossal political failure... Hoover sought to defend a system that he had already dispensed with...

Which one sounds like which paradigm?

The experiences discussed herein were valuable in their own right, but the challenge itself is rewarding as well. How often do we pause to reflect on what we've learned, and more importantly, how it has changed us? Because of that, I recommend you perform the exercise as well.

I freely admit that some of this isn't necessarily caused by my experiences with the language alone - but instead shaped by the languages and my experiences surrounding the times.

One last bit of administrata: Some of these memories are over a decade old, and therefore may bleed together and/or be unfactual. Please forgive the minor errors due to memory loss.


How QBASIC Made Me A Programmer

As I've said before, from the time I was very young, I had an interest in making games. I was enamored with my Atari 2600, and then later the NES. I also enjoyed a playground game with Donald Duck and Spelunker.

Before I was 10, I had a notepad with designs for my as-yet-unreleased blockbuster of a side-scrolling game that would run on my very own Super Sanola game console (I had the shell designed, not the electronics).

It was that intense interest in how to make a game that led me to inspect some of the source code Microsoft provided with QBASIC. After learning PRINT, INPUT, IF..THEN, and GOTO (and of course SomeLabel: to go to) I was ready to take a shot at my first text-based adventure game.

The game wasn't all that big - consisting of a few rooms, the NEWS directions, swinging of a sword against a few monsters, and keeping track of treasure and stats for everything - but it was a complete mess.

The experience with QBASIC taught me that, for any given program of sufficient complexity, you really only need three to four language constructs:

1. Input
2. Output
3. Conditional statements
4. Control structures

Even the control structures may not be necessary there. Why? Suppose you know a set of operations will be performed an unknown but arbitrary amount of times. Suppose also that it will be performed less than X number of times, where X is a known quantity smaller than infinity. Then you can simply write out X number of conditionals to cover all the cases. Not efficient, but not a requirement either.

Unfortunately, that experience and its lesson stuck with me for a while. (Hence, the title of this weblog.)

Side Note: The number of language constructs I mentioned that are necessary is not from a scientific source - just from the top of my head at the time I wrote it. If I'm wrong on the amount (be it too high or too low), I always appreciate corrections in the comments.


What ANSI Art taught me about programming

When I started making ANSI art, I was unaware of TheDraw. Instead, I opened up those .ans files I enjoyed looking at so much in MS-DOS Editor to see how it was done. A bunch of escape codes and blocks came together to produce a thing of visual beauty.



Since all I knew about were the escape codes and the blocks (alt-177, 178, 219-223 mostly), naturally I used the MS-DOS Editor to create my own art. The limitations of the medium were strangling, but that was what made it fun.

And I'm sure you can imagine the pain - worse than programming in an assembly language (at least for relatively small programs). Nevertheless, the experience taught me some valuable lessons:

• Even though we value people over tools, don't underestimate the value of a good tool. In fact, when attempting anything new to you, see if there's a tool that can help you. Back then, I was on local BBSs, and not the 1337 ones when I first started out. Now, the Internet is ubiquitous. We don't have an excuse anymore.
  
  
• I can now navigate through really bad code (and code that is limited by the language) a bit easier than I might otherwise have been able to do. I might have to do some experimenting to see what the symbols mean, but I imagine everyone would. And to be fair, I'm sure years of personally producing such crapcode also has something to do with my navigation abilities.
  
  
• Perhaps most importantly, it taught me the value of working in small chunks and taking baby steps. When you can't see the result of what you're doing, you've got to constantly check the results of the latest change, and most software systems are like that. Moreover, when you encounter something unexpected, an effective approach is to isolate the problem by isolating the code. In doing so, you can reproduce the problem and problem area, making the fix much easier.

The Middle Years (included for completeness' sake)

The middle years included exposure to Turbo Pascal, MASM, C, and C++, and some small experiences in other places as well. Although I learned many lessons, there are far too many to list here, and most are so small as to not be significant on their own. Therefore, they are uninteresting for the purposes of this post.

However, there were two lessons I learned from this time (but not during) that are significant:

1. Learn to compile your own $&*@%# programs (or, learn to fish instead of asking for them).
2. Stop being an arrogant know-it-all prick and admit you know nothing.

As you can tell, I was quite the cowboy coding young buck. I've tried to change that in recent years.


How ColdFusion made me a better programmer when I use Java

Although I've written a ton of bad code in ColdFusion, I've also written a couple of good lines here and there. I came into ColdFusion with the experiences I've related above this, and my early times with it definitely illustrate that fact. I cared nothing for small files, knew nothing of abstraction, and horrendous god-files were created as a result.

If you're a fan of Italian food, looking through my code would make your mouth water.

DRY principle? Forget about it. I still thought code reuse meant copy and paste.

Still, ColdFusion taught me one important aspect that got me started on the path to Object Oriented Enlightenment: Database access shouldn't require several lines of boilerplate code to execute one line of SQL.

Because of my experience with ColdFusion, I wrote my first reusable class in Java that took the boilerplating away, let me instantiate a single object, and use it for queries.


How Java taught me to write better programs in Ruby, C#, CF and others

It was around the time I started using Java quite a bit that I discovered Uncle Bob's Principles of OOD, so much of the improvement here is only indirectly related to Java.

Sure, I had heard about object oriented programming, but either I shrugged it off ("who needs that?") or didn't "get" it (or more likely, a combination of both).

Whatever it was, it took a couple of years of revisiting my own crapcode in ColdFusion and Java as a "professional" to tip me over the edge. I had to find a better way: Grad school here I come!

The better way was to find a new career. I was going to enter as a Political Scientist and drop programming altogether. I had seemingly lost all passion for the subject.

Fortunately for me now, the political science department wasn't accepting Spring entrance, so I decide to at least get started in computer science. Even more luckily, that first semester Venkat introduced me to the solution to many my problems, and got me excited about programming again.

I was using Java fairly heavily during all this time, so learning the principles behind OO in depth and in Java allowed me to extrapolate that for use in other languages. I focused on principles, not recipes.

On top of it all, Java taught me about unit testing with JUnit. Now, the first thing I look for when evaluating a language is a unit testing framework.


What Ruby taught me that the others didn't

My experience with Ruby over the last year or so has been invaluable. In particular, there are four lessons I've taken (or am in the process of taking):

• The importance of code as data, or higher-order functions, or first-order functions, or blocks or closures: After learning how to appropriately use yield, I really miss it when I'm using a language where it's lacking.
  
  
• There is value in viewing programming as the construction of lanugages, and DSLs are useful tools to have in your toolbox.
  
  
• Metaprogramming is OK. Before Ruby, I used metaprogramming very sparingly. Part of that is because I didn't understand it, and the other part is I didn't take the time to understand it because I had heard how slow it can make your programs.
  
  Needless to say, after seeing it in action in Ruby, I started using those features more extensively everywhere else. After seeing Rails, I very rarely write queries in ColdFusion - instead, I've got a component that takes care of it for me.
  
  
• Because of my interests in Java and Ruby, I've recently started browsing JRuby's source code and issue tracker. I'm not yet able to put into words what I'm learning, but that time will come with some more experience. In any case, I can't imagine that I'll learn nothing from the likes of Charlie Nutter, Ola Bini, Thomas Enebo, and others. Can you?

What's next?

Missing from my experience has been a functional language. Sure, I had a tiny bit of Lisp in college, but not enough to say I got anything out of it. So this year, I'm going to do something useful and not useful in Erlang. Perhaps next I'll go for Lisp. We'll see where time takes me after that.

That's been my journey. What's yours been like?

Now that I've written that post, I have a request for a post I'd like to see:

What have you learned from a non-programming-related discipline that's made you a better programmer?

1. JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA: An awesome IDE for Java. So great, I don't mind spending the $249 (US) and using it over the free Eclipse. The Ruby plugin is not too shabby either, the license for your copy is good for your OSX and Windows installations, and you can try it free for 30 days. Martin Fowler thinks IntelliJ changed the IDE landscape. If you work in .NET, they also have ReSharper, which I plan to purchase very soon. Now if only we could get a ColdFusion plugin for IntelliJ, I'd love it even more.
   
   
2. Programming Ruby, Second Edition: What many in the Ruby community consider to be Ruby's Bible. You can lower the barrier of entry for your favorite programmer to using Ruby, certainly one of the funner languages a lot of people are loving to program in lately. Sometimes, I sit and think about things to program just so I can do it in Ruby.
   
   If they've already got that, I always like books as gifts. Some of my favorites from this year have been: Code Complete 2, Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices which has a great section on object oriented design principles, and of course, My Job Went to India. I have a slew of books I've yet to read this year that I got from last Christmas (and birthday), so I'll have to list those next year.
   
   
3. Xbox 360 and a subscription to XNA Creator's Club (through Xbox Live Marketplace - $99 anually) so they can deploy their games to their new Xbox. This is without a doubt the thing I'd want most, since I got into this whole programming thing because I was interested in making games. You can point them to the getting started page, and they could make games for the PC for free, using XNA (they'll need that page to get started anyway, even if you get them the 360 and Creator's Club membership to deploy to the Xbox).
   
   
4. MacBook Pro and pay for the extra pixels. I love mine - so much so, that I intend to marry it. (Ok, not that much, but I have been enjoying it.) The extra pixels make the screen almost as wide as two, and if you can get them an extra monitor I'd do that too. I've moved over to using this as my sole computer for development, and don't bother with the desktops at work or home anymore, except on rare occasions. You can run Windows on it, and the virtual machines are getting really good so that you ought not have to even reboot to use either operating system.
   
   Even if you don't want to get them the MacBook, a second or third monitor should be met with enthusiasm.
   
   
5. A Vacation: Programmers are notoriously working long hours and suffering burnout, so we often need to take a little break from the computer screen. I like SkyAuction because all the vacations are package deals, there's often a good variety to choose from (many different countries), most of the time you can find a very good price, and usually the dates are flexible within a certain time frame, so you don't have to commit right away to a certain date.

Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating it, and thanks to all you who read and comment and set me straight when I'm wrong - not just here but in the community at large. I do appreciate it.

Do you have any ideas you'd like to share (or ones you'd like to strike from this list)?

What we really need here is a way to filter the collection while looping over it. Move that extra complexity and indentation out of our code, and have the collection handle it.

In Ruby we have each as a way to loop over collections. In C# we have foreach, Java's got for(ElemType elem : theCollection), and Coldfusion has <cfloop collection="#theCollection#"> and the equivalent over arrays. But wouldn't it be nice to have an each_where(condition) { block; } or foreach(ElemType elem in Collection.where(condition))?

I thought for sure someone would have implemented it in Ruby, so I was surprised at first to see this in my search results:


However, after a little thought, I realized it's not all that surprising: it is already incredibily easy to filter a collection in Ruby using the select method.

But what about the other languages? I must confess - I didn't think long and hard about it for Java or C#. We could implement our own collections such that they have a where method that returns the subset we are looking for, but to be truly useful we'd need the languages' collections to implement where as well.

Of these four languages, ColdFusion provides both the need and opportunity, so I gave it a shot. First, I set up a collection we can use to exercise the code:


Then, I exercised it:


Obviously, that breaks because don't have a cf_loop tag. So, let's create one:


It works fine for me, but you might want to implement it differently. The particular area of improvement I see right away would be to utilize the item name in the where attribute. That way, you can use this on simple arrays and not just assume arrays of structs.

Thoughts anybody?

Chad mentions a measure he used to assess a job candidate's depth of knowledge in Java: a question of how to make the JVM crash.

I'm definitely lacking in this regard. I've got a pretty good handle on Java, Ruby, and ColdFusion. I've done a small amount of work in .NET and have been adding to that recently. I can certainly write a program that will crash - but can I write one to crash the virtual machine (or CLR)?

I can relunctantly write small programs in C/C++, but I'm unlikely to have the patience to trace through a large program for fun. I might even still be able to figure out some assembly language if you gave me enough time. Certainly in these lower level items it's not hard to find a way to crash. It's probably harder to avoid it, in fact.

In ColdFusion, I've crashed the CF Server by simply writing recursive templates (those that cfinclude themselves). (However, I don't know if that still works.) In Java and .NET, I wouldn't know where to start. What about crashing a browser with JavaScript?

So Chad mentions that you should know the internals of JVM and CLR. I should know how JavaScript works in the browser and not just how to getElementById(). With that in mind, these things are going on the to-learn list - the goal being to find a way to crash each of them.

Ideas?

As a side note, let me say that this is not necessarily a zero-sum game. In one aspect you may be declaratively programming while in another you are doing so imperatively. Example:


You are telling it how to construct a record, but you are not telling it how to read the file. Instead, you are just telling it to read the file.

Anyway, enough of that diversion. I hope I've convinced you.

When I finished writing the (half-working) partial order planner in Ruby, I mentioned I might like "to take actions as functions, which receive preconditions as their parameters, and whose output are effects" (let me give a special thanks to Hugh Sasse for his help and ideas in trying to use TSort for it while I'm on the subject).

Doing so may have worked well when generalizing the solution to a rules engine instead of just a planner (they are conceptually quite similar). That's often intrigued me from both a business application and game programming standpoint.

The good news is (as you probably already know), this has already been done for us. That was the subject of Venkat's talk that I attended at No Fluff Just Stuff at the end of June 2007.

Why use rules-based programming?
After a quick introduction, Venkat jumped right into why you might want to use a rules engine. The most prominent reasons all revolve around the benefits provided by separating concerns: When business rules change almost daily, changes to source code can be costly. Separation of knowledge from implementation reduces this cost by having no requirement to change the source code.

Additionally, instead of providing long chains of if...else statements, using a rule engine allows you the benefits of declarative programming.

A bit of theory
The three most important aspects for specifying the system are facts, patterns, and the rules themselves. It's hard to describe in a couple of sentences, but your intuition should serve you well - I don't think you need to know all of the theory to understand a rule-based system.


Facts are just bits of information that can be used to make decisions. Patterns are similar, but can contain variables that allow them to be expanded into other patterns or facts. Finally, rules have predicates/premises that if met by the facts will fire the rule which allows the action to be performed (or conclusion to be made).

(Another side note: See JSR 94 for a Java spec for Rules Engines or this google query for some theory. Norvig's and Russell's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach also has good explanations, and is a good introduction to AI in general (though being a textbook, it's pricey at > $90 US)).

(Yet another side note: the computational complexity of this pattern matching can be enormous, but the Rete Algorithm will help, so don't prematurely optimize your rules.)

Drools
Now that we know a bit of the theory behind rules-based systems, let's get into the practical to show how easy it can be (and aid in removing fear of new technology to become a generalist).

First, you can get Drools 2.5 at Codehaus or version 3, 4 or better from JBoss. At the time of writing, the original Drools lets you use XML with Java or Groovy, Python, or Drools' own DSL to implement rules, while the JBoss version (I believe) is (still) limited to Java or the DSL.

Since I avoid XML like the plague (well, not that bad), I'll go the DSL route.

First, you'll need to download Drools and unzip it to a place you keep external Java libraries. I'm working with Drools 4.0.1. After that, I created a new Java project in Eclipse and added a new user library for Drools, then added that to my build path (I used all of the Drools JARs in the library). (And don't forget JUnit if you don't have it come up automatically!)

Errors you might need to fix
For reference for anyone who might run across the problems I did, I'm going to include a few of the errors I came into contact with and how I resolved them. I was starting with a pre-done example, but I will show the process used to create it after trudging through the errors. Feel free to skip this section if you're not having problems.

After trying the minimal additions to the build path I mentioned above, I was seeing an error that javax.rules was not being recognized. I added jsr94-1.1.jar to my Drools library (this is included under /lib in the Drools download) and it was finally able to compile.

When running the unit tests, however, I still got this error:


At that point I just decided to add all the dependencies in /lib to my Drools library and the error went away. Obviously you don't need Ant, but I wasn't quite in the mood to go hunting for the minimum of what I needed. You might feel differently, however.

Now that the dialect was able to be loaded, I got another error:


As you might expect, this was happening simply because the rule was receiving an int and was trying to call a method from Integer on it.

After all that, my pre-made example ran correctly, and being comfortable that I had Drools working, I was ready to try my own.

An Example: Getting a Home Loan
From where I sit, the process of determining how and when to give a home loan is complex and can change quite often. You need to consider an applicant's credit score, income, and down payment, among other things. Therefore, I think it is a good candidate for use with Drools.

To keep the tutorial simple (and short), our loan determinizer will only consider credit score and down payment in regards to the cost of the house.

First we'll define the HomeBuyer class. I don't feel the need for tests, because as you'll see, it does next to nothing.


Next, we'll need a class that sets up and runs the rules. I'm not feeling the need to test this directly either, because it is 99% boilerplate and all of the code gets tested when we test the rules anyway. Here is our LoanDeterminizer:


I told you there was a lot of boilerplate code there. I won't explain it all because:

1. It doesn't interest me
2. I don't yet know as much as I should about it

I fully grant that reason number one may be partially or completely dependent on the second one.

In any case, now we can finally write our rules. I'll be starting with a test:


And our test fails, which is what we wanted. We didn't yet create our rule file, LoanRules.drl, so let's do that now.


The string following "rule" is the rule's name. Salience is one of the ways Drools performs conflict resolution. Finally, the first two lines tell it that buyer is a variable of type HomeBuyer with a credit score of less than 400 and loan_determinizer is the LoanDeterminizer passed in with the object list where the homeBuyer is what we've called buyer in our rule. If either of those conditions fails to match, this rule is skipped.

Hopefully that makes some sense to you. If not, let me know in the comments and I'll try again.

And now back to our regularly scheduled test: running it again still results in a red bar. This time, the problem is:


The key part here is "the method setOkToGiveLoan(boolean) is undefined for the type LoanDeterminizer." Oops, we forgot that one. So let's add it to LoanDeterminizer:


Now running the test results in yet another red bar! It turns out I forgot something pretty big (and basic) in LoanDeterminizer.giveLoan(): I didn't tell it to execute the rules. Therefore, the default case of "true" was the result since the rules were not executed.

Asking it to execute the rules is as easy as this one-liner, which passes it some working data: _statelessRuleSession.executeRules(objectList);

For reference, the entire working giveLoan method is below:


Now our test bar is green and we can add more tests and rules. Thankfully, we're done with programming in Java (except for our unit tests, which I don't mind all that much).

To wrap-up the tutorial I want to focus on two more cases: Good credit score always gets the loan and medium credit score with small down payment does not get the loan. I wrote the tests and rules iteratively, but I'm going to combine them here for organization's sake seeing as I already demonstrated the iterative approach.


And the associated rules added to LoanRules.drl:


As you can see, there is a little bit of magic going on behind the scenes (as you'll also find in Groovy) where here in the DSL, you can call loan_determinizer.percentDown and it will call getPercentDown for you.

All three of our tests are running green and the console outputs what we expected:



As always, questions, comments, and criticism are welcome. Leave your thoughts below. (I know it was the length of a book, so I don't expect many.)

For more on using Drools, see the Drools 4 docs.

Finally, as with my write-ups on Scott Davis's Groovy presentation, his keynote, Stuart Halloway's JavaScript for Ajax Programmers, and Neal Ford's 10 ways to improve your code, I have to give Venkat most of the credit for the good stuff here. I'm just reporting from my notes, his slides, and my memory, so any mistakes you find are probably mine. If they aren't, they likely should have been.

Scott first introduces us to the death of Java, or more precisely, that rumors "of [its] death have been greatly exaggerated." Instead, Java is the COBOL of the 21st century. Although it is over 10 years old now, it was designed with C and C++ in mind so you might consider it even older than that.

Scott notes that after ten years many technologies are dead (or rotten and decaying!). Does anyone still use DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, or WordPerfect? (Do you still want to?) I might be partial to DOS because that's where I cut my teeth (and the thought of using it still has me licking my chops), but other than that, I think the answer is a loud "hell, no!"

On the other hand, some technologies "age like a fine wine." Scott includes HTTP and TCP/IP in this category.

Finally, the third class of applications adapt and evolve to stay alive. FTP moved to SFTP and now we're using BitTorrent. Telnet moved to SSH and POP to IMAP. It is in this vein that Java finds itself, struggling to adapt.

It's not that Java (the language) isn't capable - it's that it gets in your way. Scott points out that in essence, the main complaint about Java is "that it is one level of abstraction too low." The soup du jour is simplicity - we want things to be "better, faster, [and] lighter." In fact, anyone who has written a line of code in Java knows he's got around 29 more to write before he's done anything useful. Scott then shows a 35 line example of reading a file and printing it out line by line to illustrate his point.

In Java, we often "develop 'util' classes to overcome this abstraction layer mismatch," Scott says, noting that being forced into having com.mycompany.StringUtil due to Sun's declaration of String as final is a code smell. Surely there is a better way!

Enter Groovy, the "first scripting language to be officially sanctioned by Sun to run on the JVM." It can run in compiled or interpreted mode and it is easy to install (though it took me some time because of less than helpful error messages about me pointing to the bin directory under Java, rather than the base Java directory). Most importantly, it fills the void of that "abstraction layer mismatch." Reading and writing lines in a file with Groovy is reduced to:


Look familiar? It's definitely Ruby-esque, but based on my cursory inspection, also keeps some Java idioms where appropriate (for example, import over require). I can definitely see how it would be easy for a Ruby developer to pick up, but on the other hand, I think it would be easier for a Java developer to transition to this than to Ruby. I'm looking forward to playing with it some more.

Finally, Scott goes through some "Groovy hacks" related to File I/O, XML and HTML, SQL, Groovlets (surprisingly, Groovy's servlets), and Grails. In particular, you should have a look at the Groovy Markup way of writing markup, because its quite a bit more elegant than ><ML (that my 13375p34|< for an X). I won't go into detail about the code samples, as you can find those elsewhere (.PDF) if you wanted (perhaps in GINA, the canonical Groovy book), but I do plan to cover an introduction to Grails in a future post related to another presentation from NFJS. When I start playing more with Groovy I'll put up some real code samples then.

Thoughts about Groovy?

For this post, I just wanted to give an overview of the symposium in general. As soon as I walked in and found my name badge, I knew these guys were a seriously professional conference, and they would pay attention to the small details to make our experience great.

Why? The badge was inside a nice, hard plastic (think something you might store a baseball card in, but bigger) and worn around a neck clip - the kind you used to see people wearing to hold their keys around their necks. But that wasn't the impressive part - the most impressive was that they put the schedule inside too, upside down on the back side, so all you had to do was flip over the badge and you could read the schedule and room assignments easily.

We also got a nice laptop backpack, a leather notebook where we could store pre-printed slides and code samples from the sessions we attended, as well as a CD with all the presentation material from every session.

Now, that's all useful for going back and having something to reference, but it's also great to have so you can flip through and see a good overview of sessions before you attend, so you know if it will be valuable for you.

The rooms were outstanding. We stayed in the Marriott Austin Airport South. I got the feeling the hotel staff greatly appreciated us being there - I got even better service from them than I normally expect from Marriott. Now, I'm not sure of the weekend rates there, but Thursday they wanted 200 dollars (US), and Sunday they wanted $189 (if I recall correctly). But NFJS was able to negotiate $99 rooms for us for Friday and Saturday. It was certainly nice to get such great service at such a bargain. Of course, it would have been even nicer if the hotel provided free wireless Internet access. NFJS provided it in the conference rooms, but that didn't reach all the way up to our rooms. I'm getting free wireless next door in another Marriott-owned hotel for over 100 dollars less than I would be paying at Marriott proper tonight!

The food was amazing as well. Just good all-around, and even included options for vegetarians that didn't include side-dishes only. I was fairly impressed by that. Also, I think the hotel bar is the cheapest bar in Austin. =)

Everything went extremely smooth from what I could tell. Jay Zimmerman and any other staff (including the hotel) did an excellent job of ensuring that. Oh yeah (read: "most importantly"), the speakers were awesome. They really knew how to entertain and be informative. But, for being a Java-based conference, it was interesting (exciting?) to see how many bashes Java got - and not just from the speakers. I'll probably blog some funny quotes later.

The first night most of the speakers made themselves available (aside from in-between sessions) at the hotel bar. I had dinner with a friend of mine (who I didn't know was going to be there) and Scott Davis, who is an amazingly charismatic guy. The second night a lot of people went to Bruce Tate's house. Someone later told me the group I was hanging out with in the dynamic languages BOF had been invited, but by that time we didn't feel like going to crash the party (not to mention a second-hand invite of "I heard" isn't that strong a thing to go on in the first place).

Also, one of the presenters had Sean Corfield's blog on his bookmarks toolbar, so that was exciting to see (I'll have to go through my notes to remember who).

In any case, I've got tons of sessions to blog about, some of which may contain useful information for you. I'm staying another night in Austin so I won't start tonight (other than this one), but keep a look out for more detailed posts about the actual content of the conference in the coming days.

PS: I'm also looking forward to catching up with all the other blogs and seeing how CFUnited went. But if I see one more post about the iPhone I'm going to have to duct-tape my head like a mummy gets wrapped to avoid exploding.