Electric Josh

Tuesday, May 07, 2002

This morning I was about 45 minutes early for my 8:30 meeting, so I sat outside and did some work on the laptop. Outdoor-usable laptops should have the following features:

• the screen should be lit by the sun instead of the battery-sucking backlight that was almost too dim to use outdoors anyway;
• the battery should last a lot longer
• the keyboard should feel less fragile (although I do dig the Vaio's full size keyboard in all other respects)

...

I've been playing with Jython, which is Python implemented in Java. Among a whole bunch of other niceties, it allows me to write Python code that uses all the Java libraries that are floating around out there, including servlets, EJB's, and JDBC drivers for connecting to databases. (Note that I've only bothered to try this with servlets; I'm assuming the others are just as easy.) It even compiles Python code to Java .class files, which means that we can drop the damn things into web containers and the like without thinking about the fact that they were written in a different, nicer language.

All I need to do now is to figure out some way of rolling this into what I do at work. My employer used to be big on Python, but has since grown, which necessarily means more corporate-feeling, which seems to mean using Java and C++ in Python's place. Alas, having fun and getting paid don't always dovetail quite as nicely as one would like. Nor do writing code and having it be legible to (and hence reusable by) others. #