Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

J2EE's PetStore with Cocoon's control flow

Christopher Oliver came up with a really nice implementation of J2EE's PetStore application using Cocoon's control flow!

The application controller is written using a modified version of the Rhino JavaScript implementation, that has first-class continuations and tail-call function calls elimination. The application is located here; check out the petstore.js application controller that drives the application, and the PetStoreImp.js that implements the data objects.

The entry points in the application are either top level JavaScript functions, or simply restart a continuation saved previously using the sendPageAndWait function call. Simple, yet very powerful!

War blogging

Check out this weblogger in Baghdad. Amazing stuff!

Update: evhead points to Paul Botin's story about a possible hoax.

Galen Rowell's last trek

National Geographic published in the April issue an article by Rick Ridgeway about a trip to the Tibetan Chang Tang plateau, to find the calving grounds of chiru, the Tibetan antelope. The article is illustrated with beautiful pictures made by Galen Rowell, who unfortunately died in a plane crash few weeks after he returned from this trip.

A truly great story about altruistic people trying to save an endangered specie.

War

The war in Iraq has started few hours ago with a strike apparently targeted at a gathering of Iraqi officials.

Ready for the Peace is an interesting commentary about the post-war Iraq reconstruction and the huge interests in the area.

I cannot stop comparing the situation of Iraqi people with those of the Eastern European communist countries, particularly Romania, before 1989. The people that controlled the economy and got rich after 1989 were those in the second-line of the communist party and those in the secret police, who were able to manipulate dossiers of informers, in order to blackmail both the people in power and those in the opposition. National and racial minorities were used to deflect public's attention from the real problems. Corruption spread like wild fire and it was impossible to control, since it appears that everybody's life is touched by it in one way or another. The same confuse situation is there even today, more than 12 years after the regime change.

A similar situation will most likely happen in Iraq. US will have to rely, at least initially, on the former corrupt officials to conduct business. Iraq doesn't have any opposition party, and with no middle-class to influence the economic and political decisions is going to be really tough. Will US do what it did with Germany after WWII to create a strong economy and civic society? Will US find the money and justification to its taxpayers of why it should do this? I think this is the only way for US to keep its promise of liberating the Iraqi people.