I realised today that I actually have a fairly large number of open source projects published online (all on google code. Another thing I realised is that I should fix that).
I also realised that some of these are totally defunct.
I thought this would be a good time to do a quick breakdown of them, explaining what’s there, what they do and what their current status is.
JTypebuilder
Code generator for creating immutable data structures in Java. The idea was to define simple datatypes with a record notation and get an immutable class from them with correct equality, hash code and toString implementations, getters for the properties and a builder class for generating instances.
Status: Very very dead. It was at best a weak idea, and I have no interest in pursuing it. Use Scala’s case classes instead.
Generators4j
A brief foray into functional programming in Java. Lazy generators with functions like map, filter, etc.
Status: So dead. I didn’t get very far before concluding that trying to do this in Java was unusably awful.
Lazy Strings
Experiments in efficient representation of String types, with the aim being to provide a drop in replacement for java.lang.String with a different set of performance characteristics. Started in Java, moved to Scala.
Status: Just resting its eyes. I’m not doing much with this at the moment, but I occasionally peek at it and will probably factor out some of the ideas and turn it into a more tightly focused library.
Ranged Types
Very small Scala library for statically checked numeric ranges.
Status: Awaiting a use case. I occasionally think about picking it up again, but then I wonder why. It’s a fun idea, but I don’t actually have anything I need to use it for and as far as I can tell neither does anyone else.
SBinary
A small library for binary serialization and deserialization of Scala data types, based on Haskell’s Data.Binary.
Status: Very much alive. I’ve just released version 0.1 RC1, am using it as a dependency in other things and am continuing to tinker with it to improve its usability.
Prefer Scala
A wrapper around the Java preferences API designed to be nicer to use from within Scala and support a wider variety of preferences in a typesafe way. Uses SBinary to serialize Scala types to and from the preference backing store. It’s been factored out of the code for Hector’s Reminder Service.
Status: Fledgling. I’ve only just released it. It’s very small, and I intend it to remain so, so I expect to push it towards a 1.0 fairly quickly and then have it enter maintenance mode where future updates are just to fix bugs and bring it into line with the latest versions of its dependencies.
Hector’s Reminder Service
Unlike the other ones, this one is an application. It’s a small cross platform status bar application based on QT which gives you reminder messages on a semi-regular basis. Designed to be unobtrusive and simple and intended for the occasional casual reminder rather than of specific events. Uses “Prefer Scala” for persisting of state between application runs.
Status: Again, quite recent. I have a semi-official version released which works and more or less does what I want. I’m intending to polish that, add a very small number of new features (currently planned are a more expressive way of specifying message intervals, the ability to temporarily suppress a message group and possibly a simple API for other programs to interact with him) and then declare it to be feature complete. Once it’s reached that point it will enter a similar state of “Updates are only to fix bugs and match new dependency versions”.