Lisp vs. Java products, ant build process

A few weeks ago, I was talking with one of me consulting customers and we started discussing my commercial KBtextmaster product. I wrote the original 0.x version in Common Lisp and I am almost done with version 2, also written in Common Lisp. My customer stated the opinion that the marketability of compiled Lisp products is small compared to products written in Java. I decided in the last week that he was correct so I dusted off some old Java code (a port of the Lisp code to Java) written a few years go and decided to 'bite the bullet' and starting with the old Java port proceeded with porting over the new Lisp code to Java also.

Anyway, I spent about 5 hours today "coding like crazy" and I was surprised at both how easy it was to port changes over from Lisp to the old Java port code-base and to also update some of the old Java code with newer version 2 algorithms. If my consulting workload is not too much, I expect to get everything done in Java in a few weeks. I also decided to try a different marketing approach: I am going to sell the product for a very low price with a non-commercial (or educational) license and price it quite a bit higher with a commercial use license.

One of the things that I did today was to spend 20 minutes setting up a good ant build process to manage building and deploying the Java code. Ant is so useful to me that I have not bothered looking at alternatives like Maven (which is layered on top of ant).

While I had the flu last week, I made a first cut at a color brochure for the new KBtextmaster product - when it is done, I will post a PDF file :-) I got the idea for doing a color brochure from the people with the semantic web Sesame project: they produced a brochure for Sesame that does a very good job at promoting Sesame (in my opinion).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more