Developer Site CodeZoo Launches

acomj writes "Developer resource site CodeZoo launched today. An archive of Java code pieces, which plans to do for Java what cpan did for Perl, according to an announcement from O'Reilly." From the announcement: "We're not focused on hosting developer projects, like SourceForge, nor on comprehensively listing all open source Java code. Instead, we've hand-selected a list of the components we think will be the easiest and best to use in your development projects -- whether you are an open source or commercial developer."

Comments

Where's the meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this an improvement on what SourceForge
already does? A brief look at CodeZoo shows that
most of the projects are hosted on SourceForge already.

Why CPAN works

[Matts]

You know, this sounds like it won't ever make it to the level that CPAN has reached. The reason CPAN works is simple: it's entirely open to anyone to put stuff in there.

In other words, the barrier to entry is incredibly low, and you get free worldwide distribution off the back of it.

Now in spite of this, there are some incredibly high quality pieces of software uploaded to CPAN every week (there's a lot of junk there too). A lot of people complain about the junk and cry for a way to filter it out, but honestly I think it's actually a bonus - the people who write junk today may produce master works tomorrow and we don't want to discourage them (I went through that same process myself with my earlier CPAN efforts).

There's been some pretty good stuff written about the success of CPAN elsewhere. I would urge those working on this project to find those articles and read them.

Re:A library censored by the librarians

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs a library which is censored by the librarians.

Obviously you're not familiar with one of the major functions of a librarian.

Isn't it better to have a library consisting of *all* available applets/applications and have the user community rate them for quality and ease of use?

Better? No. Different and equally valid, yes.

.... and doesn't that already exist?

No.

Language Independent Libraries?

[buckhead_buddy]

Back when I learned to program in the 1970's there were a variety of magazines that would publish programs and tutorials. If Byte ran a game or productivity program for the TRS-80, you can bet that Nibble would an Apple ][ game that was similar in concept down the road. Even though the programs and explanations were nothing alike, even a 4th grader like me could see shared ideas floating around. And often times, being able to compare the ideas, programs, and platforms was even more beneficial than just one library of programs from one provider.

These days much has changed in terms of cross-platform software. People write code for libraries and api's rather than particular processors. Compliance standards like Posix and runtime layers like Apache's APR take out some of the low-level drudgery. Libraries like Mono and GnuStep are trying to bring the API's themselves into open source utility.

While this Java library sounds like a great thing, why write it specific to Java? Like those magazine articles of old, it seems like there'd be a demand for a variety of program ideas, tutorials demonstrating the construction, and a language specialist who'd take the program and customize for a particular language, platform, and or api set.

I know that cpan thrives because of the strong perl advocacy, but the idea here is for computer science advocacy with specialization to illustrate how the idea could be done implemented in Visual Basic versus Java versus Objective-C versus Python and on and on. Some of the best knowledge I learned about Object Oriented Programming didn't sink in until I specifically took a look at a program trying to do the same task in C, Java, and Smalltalk. While the Haskell advocates may not ever have the manpower to write comparative tutorials with procedural languages, they might be able to implement a few of the programs to give a Haskell newbie a leap on the big changes in mindset rather than just the syntax of a procedural langauge.

Would such an archive be profitable? Who knows. In no way am I trying to knock the new Java zoo, but just idlely speculating about ways that some of these great language specific libraries and tutorials might be made a bit more independent :-)

Re:Language Independent Libraries?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with examples from 'Functional Language Weenies' is that they start out written for newbs... but very quickly go off the deep end of complexity, because the ultimate target is not the newbs, but its the other FL Weenies, this is particularly true of any of the ones in academia. The problem is that they want to show off to each other more than they want to help others to join the club.

This, more than any other reason* is why there are only pockets of FLWs in the vast sea of imperative programmers.

You can see it happen in the tutorials... the first one starts out simple and easy to understand... then by the second or third we are shown a better way, then an even better way, and an even better better way. It gets very confusing, and the reader is left thinking... "okay, thats nice, but why would I care about closures?"... or ... "cool, now I never need think of a function name ever again... how the $#%^& do they ever debug this mess???". The reader is given no reason for wanting closures or lambdas... is it performance? Often the code may even get longer. And the reader is left wondering how the heck is longer equivalent to more elegant??

The trick to understanding these is to realise that for the FLWs more recusion = elegance. And the way to tell how much recusrion there is is to count the number of )s on the last line. Five is passe... seven is good... more than ten is very good. The ideal is to have more than 8 )s and also to have more )s than there are lines in the program!

*Some people suggest that performance used to be an issue and that is what held Functional Languages back... as counter evidence I submit Visual Basic... a language for which performance was never the prime selling feature, and yet which achieved acceptance by millions.

Of course I'm not saying that the number of users of a language indicates its goodness (cf: esperanto vs english) - what I'm saying is that if the Haskell guys did turn up it would be wasted on the rest of us because they'd invariably use the most complicated form they could come up with, and so it would only be of use to the people who don't need it!

And thats a shame. And its also why we'll keep having to 'reinventing Lisp' all the time, until the FLWs come down from the ivory towers and get serious about hanging out with the great unwashed.

Re:Documentation?

[Skudd]

I agree. I just downloaded one of the packages, CroftSoft, and it had absolutely NO documentation. The most I know is that it...

An Open Source portable pure Java game library with example games, Swing-based sprite animation engine, deployment framework, and firewall tunneling networking. The code is documented in the book Advanced Java Game Programming by David Wallace Croft.

Yes, nice... A book. Offer a package, but don't document it.

I don't mean to sound like a wet blanket and all, but I think this is something that is being hyped up too much before it's given a shot at reality. I do commend them for their efforts on getting it started though.

I worry more about the book references

[steve_l]

As the author of a non-ORA book, I worry that if thing becomes the "one stop shop" for Java content, then it will refer the viewers only to the ORA books. Which, as an O'Reilly site, they are free to do. But this is exactly why independent sites -CPAN, CTEX are better -no half-hidden agenda, other than the technology itself.