Link Love Galore
Cool beans! My SimpleWeb wiki and my thoughts on Groove really caught some attention! I've been getting a lot of links from a variety of cool places. Wow!
First Mike the Rebelutionary commented that SimpleWeb was "wicked" and thought he might be able to use it on his extranet instead of a Perl app he has running now. That would be great!
Also Dave from Roller gave SimpleWeb a mixed review, but in general thought the code was pretty clean. Hey, I'll take the compliment. I'll agree that a bunch of code mixed up with HTML can get ugly, but nothing beats it for Rapid Application Development. I try to keep my JSP code from getting too spaghettied and I'm starting to play with Velocity right now (and learning a lot from Roller's implementation) to see if that might let me do RAD without the mixing of code.
And Victor added me to his BarraPunto technical weblog (the Spanish Slashdot). Cool! I love bilingual link love. I really should post a Spanish version of the SimpleWeb. Anyone want to volunteer to check my spelling before I publish it?
My analysis of Groove got some response both from people who normally read my blog and some of the people on Groove.net's blog list. Neato.
After exchanging a few emails about the subject after my original post on Ray Ozzie, Scott from the Fuzzy Blog posted his thoughts about Rebol in response to my comparison of Groove and Rebol. Scott's take is that Rebol has other problems too, the least of which is they're a new platform from neither a big nor free-software company. I have to agree with him on that.
Jeroen Bekkers posted a link both to me and Matt Mower in his post about how it's nice to see more bloggers discovering Groove. Matt actually, responded to my question about why there isn't a Groove-like app in Java. There is one! It's called PeerMetrics and Matt says "It's nowhere near as slick as Groove and, when I tried it out, the toolset wasn't as good (even as basic as Groove's toolset is now) but it is Java, SOAP and XML based." I'll definitely have to check it out (who needs sleep?)
Hugh Pyle, another guy listed on Groove.net's blog list who actually works for Groove, saw Jeroen's link to me and responded with his thoughts on developing for Groove. "It's hard to disagree that building Groove tools is too difficult. I've had a lot of practice, and it still takes me a couple of days to build anything interesting." But he says, VB.Net is going to change all that. Oof... I've heard that sort of talk before. Microsoft ALWAYS makes it look so easy. Believe me, you're setting yourself up for disappointment! The cool thing about Hugh is it seems that he's just relocated to the U.S. from the U.K. so he qualifies as an expat-blogger now! Welcome to the club Hugh! And having spent a decent part of my young-adult life in New Hampshire (my parents still live there), I can just tell you that I don't get it either.
Finally, I got some responses to my request to play with Groove (Victor and Ron Lusk who also mentioned my MiniBlog on his web the other day!). I haven't been online with Groove all day (being at work) but I'm going to leave it on tonight and see who says hello!
-Russ