The Groovy lessons reflect my first steps into Groovy territory. Groovy is a programming language that builds on Java and is quite seamlessly integrated with Java.

After learning to run simple stuff in the GroovyShell you naturally want to proceed to something resembling an application. Run it conveniently using the GroovyScriptEngine. Enter the following lines in a GroovyShell:
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Ubiquitous computing. If English isn’t your first language you probably scramble for a dictionary. The ubiquitous entry would say something like this:

found or seeming to be found everywhere; ever-present

So, ubiquitous computing literally means computing everywhere. The concept could have been buried in the sediment of time and forgotten, had there not been some startling development in East Asia.

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Today’s kudos go to the profusely productive Elliotte Rusty Harold and the XML model called XOM. To quote the XOM web site, XOM is

an open source (LGPL), tree-based API for processing XML with Java that strives for correctness, simplicity, and performance, in that order

Among the design principles, there is one I particularly like: An API is written by experts for non-experts. Great, I simply don’t want to learn all the intricacies of namespaces etc. I just want the API to tell me if I’m heading the wrong way.

My confidence in this package has grown over time. I have used XOM primarily to juggle Docbook documents, using XSLT and XPath. The application has been in production for a while and has performed without a hitch.

It’s a pity that DOM didn’t reach this level of excellence. There is a Swedish saying, “Many cooks, little taste.”

The newcomer to Korean or Japanese information and telecom technology will immediately notice the u-words. They are sprinkled all over presentations, descriptions, and reports. There is u-Korea, u-Japan to begin with. Other than that almost every aspect of life seems to have its u-version: u-city, u-home, u-tourism, u-business, u-government, to name a few.

Here is our report, a kind of linguistic introduction to this hot topic: U-Korea, U-Japan, U-Fever

You may think you know about ubiquitous computing. Find out how Korea and Japan have added a visionary touch and lots of energy to the concept. These countries are now re-exporting their u-vocabulary to baffled Westerners.

In everyday language “levels of abstraction” sounds like daydreaming or going off somewhere in a trance. In computing abstraction is our daily bread. A higher level of abstraction means doing more with less effort. Programming languages inevitably gravitate towards higher levels of abstraction. Let us see how.
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