I mentioned in the last post that my interests are taking me away from the details of XML, in particular, the nitty gritty, language lawyering aspects of XML. Part of this is that I'm tired of language lawyering over angle brackets. On the positive side, I'm very engaged with what's happening in Chandler (which is good since that's my day job).

In the Java space, one of the things that I'm most excited about is James Strachan's Groovy which has just gone beta. As I mentioned in my ApacheCon notes, I managed to convince James to give me the skinny on Groovy while we were both in Las Vegas. Since then, he's been hard at work, and recently, I've set my IRC client to autologin to #groovy -- so that I can at least log what's happening. I hope to be able to actually participate soon (I need to do the same for #joiito, which Mark Pilgrim and Joe Gregorio were advocating to me - one thing at a time). What James has done with Groovy was already impressive at ApacheCon, and my personal feeling is that if you want a Python or Ruby like language for Java, you want Groovy. Sam asked James if he could do a .NET/C# version of Groovy, which I think is an interesting idea. The only problem is that Groovy uses the Java libraries as its libraries, so a .NET Groovy would be incompatible. Oh, did I mention that there's an Eclipse plugin for Groovy too?

I hope that I'll be able to report more about Groovy in the weeks ahead -- I've downloaded my copy. Go get yours.

Tim Bray has another one of those experiences where meeting people in real life is a surprise. Fortunately, it turned out pleasantly -- Tim pronounced Dare to be "a friendly, cheerful, and interesting guy".

I've been reading the XML 2003 posts with interest -- I've never made it to one of these conferences (being an exhibitor for IBM doesn't count), and since my interests are taking me away from the details of XML, it doesn't look like I'll be making it to future ones. Too bad you can't spend your life going to conferences. Even if I could do that, I'd hate the travelling.

Morgen tracked down the problem that was keeping all of Chandler from buliding on Panther. The problem was with wxWindows -- so it hasn't been keeping me from working - the repository unit tests don't need wxWindows to run. However, I did have to get a completely fresh checkout from CVS. This shouldn't work this way -- somewhere in hardhat we're not blowing away all of the stuff that's getting built. I already had this problem when I copied my Chandler tree from Debian to the the Powerbook. hardhat didn't blow away the SWIG binaries, and so it didn't build. When the build says clean, it should really clean up. That's a tall order when your build contains private copies of Python, wxWindows, Berkeley DB, DBXML, Xerces-C, Pathan, 4Suite, and more.