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lang:groovy - extend your Spring app with scripting
The Spring Framework offers many ways to ease application development and maintenance, but one that gets my interest really going is its dynamic language support.
codehaus: Dynamic language beans in Spring
codehaus: Groovy and JMX
raible designs: Using Dynamic Languages with Spring with Rod Johnson and Guillaume LaForge
organic thoughts: Spring Meets Groovy!
Karl at Monday, May 26, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Been Nutso Busy
Sorry for the sudden lack of conversing and blogging as of late. My day job has been keeping me really busy. That, along with physical therapy (which has stalled btw - I'm going to try epidural steroid injections next), has really been kicking my ass.
In addition to all this, the past month or so, Philly Future started to crash uncontrollably. Drupal's aggregator isn't built to scale, in terms of size, as I have painfully found out. It took some major indexing, cache tuning, and aggregator module tweaking, to stabilize things. Along the way I learned quite a bit about MySQL and Drupal. Enough to know that I need look for a replacement for the aggregator or majorly refactor its database usage. Even so, I plan to submit the improvements I made to the community. They're going to give us a few more months I think.
Some days I still can relate to Chris Gardner's character in "The Pursuit of Happyness", where instead of traveling a myriad of buses, perfectly timed, each day to negotiate making it to my place, the job, or school, six hours on public transportation, now it is balancing work, home, health, and passions like Philly Future. A far better situation. But still not enough time to do it all.
Karl at Sunday, July 1, 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
atom2rss: a poorly written Atom to RSS converter
Not to vent, but Blogspot's default of outputting Atom and no RSS for its users gave me all sorts of headaches. A huge expense in time that that drove me away from more important matters at Philly Future. CivicSpace/Drupal's aggregator does not handle Atom. That means if you are on Blogspot, a site like Philly Future could not include you. An upcoming version of Drupal's aggregator will have this capability. Bryght's hosted Drupal solution does right now. However, I couldn't wait for Drupal to release an aggregator with Atom functionality, and I'm self-managing Philly Future - so I needed my own solution.
A simple service that would, upon passing it a URL of an Atom feed, produce RSS, be best. That way I could avoid hacking Drupal code. A few folks suggested I use Feedburner, and for a while I did, until I read the terms of service. I was, inadvertently, claming I owned those feeds! Once I discovered this, I removed those feeds from my Feedburner account and found another way. After an exhaustive search on Google, I found a few Python implementations of what I was looking for, but no PHP. The hosted web services that I did find wanted to charge money, or warned they were to stop service at any moment. I had to do it myself.
Not that anyone needs converters like this anymore as most services and aggregators handle both Atom and RSS, but I figured it would be a good thing to release for others reuse, so here it is. Using the required Magpie RSS, the PHP RSS Parser library, it retrieves, caches, and parses the passed in Atom feed, iterates over its items, and outputs RSS. A brute force approach, certainly not perfect, nor complete in terms of the metadata it attempts to convert, but one that has worked for the great many Atom feeds Philly Future encounters.
Karl at Monday, November 28, 2005