Slashdot Mirror
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."
Last time I clicked on a *zoo* link on Slashdot... well, let's just say I won't be clicking those links anymore! Freaked my wife out.
Otherwise it would be Jcan or something similarly J sounding. JcodeZoo maybe? Jarchive?
Codehaus is a similar site with a lot of cool stuff.
Yes there are some warts, not all of the code in CPAN is perfect, some of it might very well be broken...but on the whole the repository has high quality code.
I would suspect every language/toolkit would want something like this.
CodeZoo is launching with a directory of Java components, and from there, we hope to move into other languages. Let us know where you think we should go next! (We've already gotten one request for Lisp...)
Also:
On every page, you'll find links to O'Reilly and Safari content to help you learn more about the components you want to use.
Browsing around I don't see this, but it sounds like a pretty cool idea.
Attempts to find genuineuley free re-targetable components has, only because of SUN, been much harder in Java than, say Perl.
Good luck.
I wonder how much documentation/community support CodeZoo is going to get. The reason things like the CPAN and CTAN work as well as they do is because of the enormous contributions from places like comp.text.tex, the TUG, and comp.lang.perl.*
There's enough code on the C?AN to make finding anything impossible without help.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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.
it'd be even better if they were able to distributed the files in RPM and DPKG formats. Once you've committed to a package based system it hurts to install non-packaged stuff. That's one of the reasons why JPackage is so nice.
It only has 'J'!
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.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
> Codehaus is a similar site with a lot of cool stuff.
There's also boost for C++ developers. It is not a large repository but it contains important building blocks.
I wonder if there is any decent code repository for
Java's big attraction was that it came with 'CPAN', that is, the Java API. Java API has equivlants of Net::Socket, Net::SMTP, LWP and File::IO. These were big plusses back when it arrive circa 1995.
What i don't see in this OReilly yet are Date::Calc, Text::Autoformat or such.
See also: http://www.manageability.org/blog/opensource/view and0 0975 (can't seem to get the darn '#' working in /.)
http://www.johnmunsch.com/archives/2004_07.html#0
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It's the "Hand Picked" part of the description that's the problem.
Who needs a library which is censored by the librarians. 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?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Well usually there are publishers, editors and other to review what goes in a library.
Under your ideology you will never find what you are looking for because everyone is offering the same damned thing with their own creative touches, your better off writing the code from scratch then!
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 :-)
So let me get this right. Your 'corporate firewall' makes it difficult for you to access CPAN and this means "CPAN SUCKS" ?
The first step in using CPAN from behind a firewall is to install the latest version of CPAN.pm. This might involve manually downloading the tarball and running 'make install', but it will be well worth that small effort.
The next step depends on your preference. I'd recommend installing wget. It works nicely with 'corporate firewalls' and CPAN.pm works nicely with wget.
Then you can use
and sit back and watch the dependecies resolve themselves - works for meAs 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.