As is my custom, I want to thank all of my readers, especially those who have joined the discussion, and wish you all a merry Christmas. In all the hustle of the season, it is my hope and prayer that the joy and peace brought to us in the person of Jesus Christ will be an ever-present blessing in your lives.

Jason Lee 2013-11-22

In trying to come up to speed on Ceylon, I've run into some issues with module import dependencies. I'm pretty sure they're all pilot error, but it was suggested that I import the jars into the Ceylon repository and specify the dependencies between the modules. This would, effectively, be functionally the same as the <dependencies> element in the Maven POM. In classic geek, over-engineer-the-solution fashion, I cobbled together this shell script. It could be more elegant, but it seems to work, and it was much simpler than a Java implementation using the Maven APIs. :)

Last week at Devoxx, Red Hat announced the release of Ceylon 1.0, "a modern, modular, statically typed programming language for the Java and JavaScript virtual machines." A fan of learning languages, I started taking the tour . In no particular order, and without any lengthy rumination, here are my initial thoughts on the language.

I recently acquired a copy of Instant Vert.x (Kindle version here ) by Simone Scarduzio. It's a short book (54 pages), so here's my short-ish review. :)

Jason lee 2013-09-30

Several weeks ago, I posted blurb about a JavaFX project I had cobbled together, DoctorFX . It is an effort to build a semi-graphical editor for Asciidoc , but it is, currently, very basic. I had some spare time last week, so I decided to add some features to it. As I thought about what needed to be added and what that would require, I thought that, perhaps, an architectural change was warranted. With some time and an itch, I pulled out the sledge hammer and out came a NetBeans plugin. This plugin though, does more than Asciidoc: it offers full(-ish) support for the Awestruct framework.

There are a lot of features I'd like to add still, but, currently it supports only basic project loading and editing. It technically has code to preview Asciidoc files, though I'm having issues getting the rendered page from displaying. (In case you want to take a crack at it, that code is here .) I'd also like to add preview support for Slim and Haml, but that may have to wait a bit.

If you'd like to lend a hand to the effort, you can find the current source on Bitbucket .

This is, of course, a bit heavier than DoctorFX, but most of my work with Asciidoc is, currently, in the context of Awestruct, so this fits my needs better, and it was fun dipping my toes into the NetBeans Platform API. :)