Everyone has an email account. Whether you use it for its intended purpose or not, it's all but required to use the internet today.  Most people I talk to primarily just use email to sign-up for sites, reset passwords, or get specific emails.  Their mailboxes are out of control, and for OCD people like myself, it can even be stressful.  Over a decade ago I outlined what I thought was a "better email", and shockingly, only about 30% of what I came up with has been implemented in one form or another today.

I knew that this undertaking was both massive and complex and that I would have to wait until I had the resources, knowledge, and capacity to write it.  That time has finally come!

We've submitted an application to YCombinator and should know April 16th if we've been accepted.  Fortunately, even if we don't get into YC we're going to pursue this anyway.  We have a private prototype strictly for YC's use only, but if you're interested in seeing a video demonstrating the very primitive functionality we've built out so far, take a look:

Again, it's a very minimalistic demonstration of what we are building, but it represents a replacement and integration for both email and Facebook.  The latter was one of our biggest concerns for integration, so we decided to undertake it as a proof of concept.

Remember Google Wave? When it came out, I thought perhaps Google had finally built what I had in mind.  However, they had two colossal mistakes that led to failure:

1. No mobile integration. While it was still the early days of mobile applications, no mobile application significantly hindered adoption for those of us with smartphones.
2. The switch mentality.  I set up my account immediately when Google Wave first opened it to the public.  However, none of my friends or family were there.  I convinced a few other people to give it a try, but convincing people to start using it in addition to email and other messaging platforms just wasn't going to happen.

The first public release of Courio will have complete mobile support (a no-brainer today).  The second issue though is to avoid forcing anyone to feel like they have to "switch".  We want to "add" and never limit anyone's options.  To do that, we are heavily focused on the unification of all of your current messaging platforms into Courio.  This means that you can talk to everyone you talk to today, but you can do it in one place instead of many places.

I just wanted to take a few minutes and outline my new endeavor.  Feel free to sign-up at https://courio.com to get updates as we move forward.

While we have some early funding, we are considering outside investment for early-stage development.  If this is something you'd be interested in learning more about, please contact me at matt@courio.com.

To my relatively small number of followers, it should come as no surprise that my biggest failing is actually getting much visibility for my vast number of open-source projects I write.  To that end I've been doing some research and asking other developers to give me some suggestions on how to get more visibility for me projects.  I've made it a goal for this year to get more visibility for my open-source projects so they will hopefully reach a larger audience.

I decided that I would post the results of my research in a blog post so hopefully others can benefit from this research as well, or at least I can have an easy place to reference back to it for myself.

Speaking / Conferences

The most common suggestion for visibility for a project was speaking about it both in local groups and at conferences.  Several developers said that's how they learned about a useful framework they are using.  This is a good idea and something I'm planning on doing more of this year, even though I really prefer to write code than talk about it, but this is a bit of a longer-term objective than immediate visibility.

Awesome

There are lots of "awesome" lists. Often more than one for each language. This is a no-brainer presuming you can get someone to merge your pull request: https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness

Reddit

Apparently there are people that use that site and a common source of information for developers.  I must admit, I haven't been a big user, and this is something I think is going to have to change.  I'll have to get involved in the Scala group and reference my projects there.

Twitter

Yet another thing I am terrible about not keeping up with.  For a very long time I simply had all of my GitHub commits logging to Twitter, but I'm thinking that personalized messages on Twitter with relevant hashtags might be a very good way to get my projects noticed.  Many developers I talked to get most of their news and information from Twitter.

Mailing Lists

Though a bit old-school, this is something a lot of developers still follow and perhaps a good way to get visibility directly into people's inbox of a new framework that should be using.

Based on this research it's clear that my aversion to social media has a direct correlation to my difficulty in getting visibility for my projects.  Shocking right?  I suppose the moral of the story is, if you don't like people, don't expect them to like you either.

I've been pretty busy the past few weeks with clients and haven't had much time to blog. Last week, however, I gave a presentation to the OKC JUG (Java Users Group) about Scala. As anyone that actually reads my blog must know, Scala is my primary language and I absolutely love it. This week since I don't have a lot of time to delve into anything complex I'll simply share my presentation slides comparing Scala and Java code:

Case class scala from Matt Hicks

It is amazing how much more simplistic tasks can be accomplished in Scala versus Java.

I was pretty exclusively a Java developer for twelve years before making the switch to Scala. Yes, it was difficult to learn some of the syntactical differences, but now that I have I don't want to turn back. No, this is not a baited question to get a flame-war going, but an honest attempt to get some real feedback by those that believe Scala is more difficult than Java.

Let me lay some ground-rules before we get this discussion going though. First, complex topics in Scala are complex, there's no debate there, but that doesn't make Scala more difficult than Java, there are just more possibilities to what you can accomplish. I say that the argument cannot be made that Scala is more complex if there is not a side-by-side comparison to Java code that is much simpler to understand. This means we have to leave the advanced concepts of implicit conversions, multiple inheritance, and so much more that Scala can do, but are features that bring it beyond the capabilities of Java. Yes, of course you can make an argument that in switching to a language like Scala you will eventually run into these scenarios, but I am speaking purely of the introductory programmer and the "difficulties" between Scala's syntax versus Java's.

Now, can someone give me a scenario of code in Java that would be more complicated to understand in Scala?

Well, this is a great title for this post not only as it's the first blog post I've made here in seven months, but I've also had the song from Portal stuck in my head lately. :)

Looking at my blog it would be easy to classify me as MIA but I've actually been quite busy in the open-source and have even been blogging quite a bit lately, just not here, but I'll get to that in a minute.

First of all, my very basic last post talking about the entry-level learning I was doing with Scala was quite fitting as my last post as very shortly after that post I made a complete shift from Java to Scala programming. With this came the abandoning of lots of open-source projects I've either created (like jSeamless) or been a developer on (like jMonkeyEngine). I believe so strongly in Scala that I've shifted everything I possibly can to Scala.

Second, with the shift I've made to Scala and all the projects I've abandoned as a result, one new project has come to being that, in many ways, embodies much of the vision I've had for several projects I've left behind. That project is called "sgine" (Scala Engine). I've been developing on it for a while now and have made some major strides recently and finally wanted to make a re-appearance on my blog to hopefully start posting here again.

Now, at the beginning of this post I said that I've been blogging elsewhere. If you go to http://www.sgine.org you'll see that it's a blog filled up with posts regarding updates to the engine I've been developing. I'm really excited about this project and though many people have accused me of abandoning Java...and realistically that's pretty much what I've done...I haven't a regret for switching to Scala, it's such an incredibly powerful language and has renewed my vigor in programming. For anyone considering looking into a new language I cannot recommend it enough.

If you're searching the internet for the title of this post you'll see a lot of people ranting about how Java doesn't have Delegate support. Though I have been one of these people, and continue to be frustrated that there is no native solution, that is not the purpose of this post.

I write this to say I've created what I would consider to be a pretty clean alternative to native delegates in Java using reflection. I created this as a feature in jSeamless and have been using it heavily for a while, but after a few people asking about support in non-jSeamless applications for my friendly Delegate support I decided I would remove it from jSeamless and make it a stand-alone API that anyone can use.

The Delegate implementation I find myself using more than anything else is MethodDelegate. It provides the ability to reference a specific method on a specific object that can be invoked. For example:

Though I actually wrote this a couple years ago I finally decided to contribute this utility back to the community. This tool allows a graphical remote connection to a MythTV database and can copy and delete recordings over a Samba share. It is a graphical utility written in Java to search recordings, see details of recordings, copy single and batches of recordings, and other features for remote access to recorded programs. This should work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Hopefully other people can get as much use out of this tool as I have. Feel free to post a comment if you found this useful.



MythAssistant.jar

MythAssistant.exe

MythAssistant-source.jar

In Java, Beans are an important part of good programming practices and good Object-Oriented coding. There has been a lot of discussion recently about monitoring changes on beans other such functionality that is not inherently built into Java. With my Magic Beans project I've already done a lot of things along these lines, but recently I've been thinking more and more about how powerful beans could be if they were to extend outside the boundaries of the norm. What if you could deal with Beans like you do with Connections in SQL? What if you could create a transaction that would give you a new copy of a Bean and when you are done with it you can "commit" that bean back to the original? What if you had transactional monitoring of beans that goes beyond the normal Observer/Observable concepts?

I keep coming back to beans as one of my biggest stumbling blocks for writing good and efficient code. Inevitably I'm going to have to revisit Magic Beans and finally create the end-all-be-all for Bean handling.

Okay, so this probably doesn't par up to the JFK assassination, those crop circles, or how in the world John Locke can survive a bullet in the chest, but it's starting to really bother me.

I developed jSeamless with the intent of "seamlessly" bringing technologies together to make life easier on the developer. However, I'm starting to realize that the people that make these technologies would rather not see this happen. I never considered that anyone could understand the concepts of what I'm trying to do and actually put in some extra effort to stop me. I figured at worst people would just not care and let it pass by without another look, but that's not what seems to be happening.

First Point - Java.net

Now that jSeamless has become much more stable and has the majority of features necessary to release I thought java.net would be the place to go to get some good advertising. So I filled out a form requesting that jSeamless be featured along with an article I had written hoping to get some additional developer interest in the framework. After a couple weeks I e-mailed the editor and asked about it. The basic summation was that it would be a conflict of interest to post anything on their site about jSeamless since it directly competes with Swing because it uses Flash as the reference implementation. Now, I can understand if the purpose of jSeamless was to only do Flash development, but jSeamless is about abstraction and it just so happens the only currently completed implementation uses Flash content. I was told to send them another e-mail when there's a completed Swing implementation...we'll see how that goes.

Point Two - FlexCoders

I hang out on the FlexCoders Yahoo! Group to find answers to problems I'm having with Flex integration into jSeamless and to find out new extensions that are being written to Flex that I might be able to integrate or derive ideas from for jSeamless. I decided to post a message to the group asking for feedback from the Java developers that are also developing in Flex to get some ideas of what features they would look for in an API like jSeamless. I actually got some really good responses, I messaged back with additional information and then suddenly all the posts disappeared without a trace.

There was no e-mail letting me know I had violated some rule of the group or anything. I know the group is run primarily by people that work at Adobe, so I can only assume it had to do with marketing a framework that could take away revenue from their commercial products.

There actually several other scenarios that have had similar results, but I'm really starting to feel a lot of resistance for this system. I never imagined that I was developing something controversial or even something that would get anything worse than indifference about. This causes some problems since I was hoping to get some support from companies like Adobe or Sun in the long-run, but it would seem they don't really want such a project to succeed.

I guess this doesn't really classify as real conspiracy, but it bugs me so I figured I would share my annoyance with the world. :)

I have to present a prototype in a couple hours that is really important to my job and the company I work for. I think I'm pretty well prepared, but have been trying to go through any last minute details and bug fixes to make sure nothing breaks horribly well I'm demonstrating it.

It's at a time like this that my brain decides to recall a poem I wrote in the third grade. Now, I'm not really sure how I got there, but now that I have I decided I'd write it down because I still like it. :)

Tomorrow is Today, if Yesterday had never been,
Today is a day that will never come again,
Now is the the time that always will be,
Time is the variable, only the mind can see.

Not bad for a third grader, huh? ;) Well, back on track I'm really excited about this demo as it is the largest application I've developed yet utilizing jSeamless and this demonstration is about getting more buy-in for the product, the framework I've written, and jSeamless from the company I work for. Next week I'll be able to start adding massive new features to jSeamless (I couldn't until this demo was completed for fear I'd screw something up).

Anyway, this will hopefully be a short day for me so I think I'm going to go home and spend the rest of the day with my wife...I love Friday. :)

I know that seems like a strange question to ask, but it's one I often ask myself. In many ways I've been extremely successful throughout my life, and it occurs to me that many of those successes were good successes, and many of them were bad successes. Most of the time it's easy to tell the difference. Sometimes, however, it's very difficult to discern.

I've been feeling this way recently regarding jSeamless. I believe it's one of the greatest development endeavors of my life thus far and have no intention of abandoning it, but it is now beginning to develop a following of users, which is great, but the majority of these users simply use the API and then post when something is missing or broken. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with this, but I'm getting extremely bogged down with providing functionality for these users instead of them helping and committing to the project themselves. I believe in the long-run it will get better and eventually I'll have some strong developers that are willing to help. For now though, it's draining to spend all day at work writing code to support them, and then coming home and writing code to support the jSeamless community.

I guess a project has to catch on at its own pace, I just wish there were more people interested in helping. jSeamless is becoming a large project and I'm just one person. I often brag about how much this one person can do, but I realize as well as anyone that my limitations are definitely there.