Russell Beattie

A couple days ago, I just dusted off some of my UPP code and started working on it again. Little did I know that Les was doing the same thing! Awesome!

BeanShell rocks - and, oh yeah, a personal proxy in Java

Have I mentioned lately that I ♥ BeanShell for Java?

I haven't said much about it lately, but I'm still working on my PersonalWebProxy - only this time I'm playing with Java and all the goodies I was wishing for while in Python. I've got Jena and Lucene and HSQL and BSF and Quartz and Muffin and... well, a lot of stuff that feels pretty nice to me.

But, with respect to BeanShell in particular, I've got a lot of the nifty live hackability that I had with the things I was playing with in Python. With no more than 5 lines of code, I've tossed a live interactive shell into my running proxy, into which I can telnet or access via Java console in a browser. With this, I can get into the machinery before I take the time composing a UI, inserting/removing plugins at will, tossing together new proxy filters on the fly, composing RDQL queries adhoc, tweaking Lucene searches.

Fun stuff, and so easy. But, sorry, no further code from me yet. It's very ugly, and barely works, but it's just a sketchpad at the moment. I hope to have a little something before the end of the month to pass around, should anyone still be interested.

Wow! Cool news! I thought Les had gone off and was playing with Python, but he's now switched to Java and is using basically the same tech I am. That's some great news.

Now, the reason I'm taking time away from Symbian dev and working on the UPP again is that I want to host a local Web Server with SynchML capabilities so I can communicate to it via Bluetooth from my Nokia 7650. Basically the phone is meant to synch and to upload photos to a website and has all that functionality built in. But if you're at home, you can just do that to your PC, but only if your PC has a little http server running on it. Since I first downloaded Userland Radio over a year ago, I've been sold on the idea of a personal web server, and though I've been talking about doing something similar in Java ever since, I've never gotten around to it.

The reason I've never done it? Feature creep. I keep thinking of neat things to do with a local server that I can never seem to get started. But now I have a specific goal, so I'm going to do the Simplest Thing that could Possibly Work and get it out there. I think this is great that Les is working on the UPP too because I think at some point they'll be easy to combine since all the tech we're using is basically the same. Cool beans.

This is going to get cool quickly.

-Russ