December 14, 2008

uri-template 0.3 released

This release includes support for Parenscript, as well as a uri-template-bind facility for using URI templates for destructuring.

Info here: http://www.cl-user.net/asp/libs/uri-template

December 4, 2008

Yay CSS

http://www.cliki.net/css-lite

If you've been following the Parenscript repository, now you too can have an s-exp CSS generator back. This one works even better than the original.

December 1, 2008

But the market won't let me

That's always a problem with taking pictures of buildings - damn automobiles make even the most luscious modern block look crap and banal.


Owen Hatherly takes readers of his blog through another delightful adventure through Britain's bleakly fascinating landscape of today.

[Spoiler alert: readers of his previous photo-excursions will be relieved to find that Britain still consists entirely of railway stations, consumerist (anti) spaces, and the occasional abandoned factory.]



Meanwhile, there is a new Smalltalk being developed for Flash, which is notable for using some newfangled technologies like OMeta (which I have neglected to study for too long now) for implementation (spotted via Patrick Logan).

November 22, 2008

Code

I put up some new code on the aptly titled section of my website:


http://vsedach.googlepages.com/code.html

Included are Jaro-Winkler and Levenshtein string similarity distance algorithms. Levenshtein is a general algorithm based on insertions/deletions/substitutions, while Jaro-Winkler is a more tweaked implementation specifically suited to short strings such as names. One area where the latter comes in handy is denormalizing manually entered records where for example salespersons' names may not be consistently entered. I found that Jaro-Winkler works best if you add the distance of the last name and the first name separately while giving the last name greater weight.



Also included are implementations of sparse vectors, and radix trees (which I blogged about before).

November 19, 2008

Hardware support for garbage collection.

A fascinating email exchange between David Moon and Cliff Click Jr. currently at Azul Systems about the Azul Java servers' architecture. Things that caught my attention:

One of the biggest impact changes we made was a hardware read-barrier for GC - a simple instruction that tests invariants of freshly loaded pointers and takes a fast-trap if the test fails.


GC read-barrier enables a fully parallel & concurrent GC; we can sustain 40G/sec allocation on a 400G heap indefinitely, with max-pause times on the order of 10-20msec. This uber-GC is partially made possible because of the read barrier (and partially possible because we 'own' the OS and can play major page-mapping tricks).


Yes, wide tag per pointer. No problem (yet) with running out of classes. Big Java Apps these days seem to have about 2^15 classes.


The new insight I took from this is that effective hardware support for garbage collection does not have to be complicated. The other two quotes provide further evidence for opinions I espouse: cons all you need (10% of the heap per second!!), and object orientation is an inadequate paradigm for writing software that is now being stretched to absurdity (30,000 classes!!).

November 9, 2008

Compile-time intra-application URI link checking

Here is a neat hack I came up with to do compile-time intra-application link checking for a web application that I wrote. As you might expect the mechanism is based on eval-when facility of CL, but also uses the *compile-file-pathname* and *load-pathname* variables to provide the names of the files where the offending links reside.



The ASDF definition of the application looks like:




(asdf:defsystem :cct
:serial t
:components ((:file "resource-definition")

;; other files

;; link checker (goes last)
(:file "uri-reference-checker"))


Where resource-definition.lisp defines the page-definition and link-reference macros:




(in-package :cct)

(eval-when (:compile-toplevel :load-toplevel)
(defparameter *defined-uri-list* ())
(defparameter *referenced-uri-list* ()))

(defmacro/ps resolve-resource (resource-identifier)
(pushnew (cons resource-identifier (or *compile-file-pathname* *load-pathname*)) *referenced-uri-list*)
(symbol-to-uri resource-identifier))

(set-dispatch-macro-character #\# #\/
(lambda (stream subchar arg)
(declare (ignore subchar arg))
(let* ((base-uri
(with-output-to-string (collector)
(loop until (member (peek-char nil stream nil #\Space t) '(#\Space #\Newline #\Tab #\? #\) #\{)) do
(princ (read-char stream) collector))))
(page (read-from-string base-uri)))
`(concat-url (resolve-resource ,page) ,@(uri-template:read-uri-template stream)))))

(defmacro concat-url (&rest fragments)
`(format nil "~@{~A~}" ,@fragments))

(defpsmacro concat-url (&rest fragments)
`(+ ,@fragments))

(defmacro define-page (page-name (&key parameters (default-request-type :both)) &body body)
(flet ((process-parameter (p) (if (atom p) p (list (first p) :parameter-type (list 'quote (second p))))))
`(progn
(eval-when (:compile-toplevel :load-toplevel :execute)
(pushnew '(,page-name) *defined-uri-list*))
(define-easy-handler (,page-name :uri ,(symbol-to-uri page-name) :default-request-type ,default-request-type)
,(mapcar #'process-parameter parameters)
(if (and ,@(mapcar (lambda (x) (if (atom x) x (car x))) parameters))
(progn ,@body)
(redirect "/cct"))))))


The link-reference mechanism is implemented as a macro character which builds on the uri-template facility. You certainly don't need to do it this way, but I find URI templates to be quite convenient. The only thing I don't like is the special-casing of the termination symbols (whitespace, closing paren). If you know of a better way, please let me know.



Also note the defpsmacro - this is a Parenscript macro definition, which lets the same link-checking mechanism (and uri-template, which is Parenscript-compatible) work with Parenscript code, which is transformed into JavaScript and can then construct (compile-time checked) URIs dynamically in the browser.



uri-reference-checker.lisp runs after all the page definitions have been made and consists of:




(in-package :cct)

(eval-when (:compile-toplevel :load-toplevel)
(dolist (unreferenced-uri (set-difference *referenced-uri-list* *defined-uri-list* :key #'car))
(warn "Reference warning: referencing unknown URI resource ~a in file ~a" (car unreferenced-uri) (cdr unreferenced-uri))))


You could also provide warnings for defined URIs that have no references.



The actual application code then looks something like:




(loop for date in dates do
(htm (:li (:a :href #/bank-rec-report?date={date} (str date)))))


This is a pattern that I think can be applied to most web applications.

May 9, 2008

More arguments for spreadsheet-oriented computing

Jonathan Edwards filtering Gregor Kiczales on building "sloppy systems." Spreadsheets as an example of informally specified, program-as-you-go, always-working, live "persistent object" systems have been pointed out by both Edwards and Alan Kay. Which begs the question, why not investigate the limits of the existing paradigm instead of coming up with new ones (Subtext, EToys, etc.)?

Daniel Gackle has been working on the Skysheet project, which addresses large parts of that question. Imagine replacing databases with persistent, versioned and auditable spreadsheets. Organic, appropriate template systems. Self-describing spreadsheets. Big ideas with very concrete business value.

I was and hope to continue to be a co-conspirator. Ideas I want to investigate: dataflow reified as spreadsheet descriptions (an idea borrowed from SPJ), unifying spreadsheets and array programming, terabyte-sized, massively parallel spreadsheet grids.

Edwards' work on Subtext is a big inspiration. His system for eliminating traditional FOL conditional notation from programming (paper, video) is a big step forward. I'm convinced it can be applied to spreadsheets. First-class copy and paste? Appropriate abstractions for the spreadsheet age.

The revolution will start with a pivot table.