Happy birthday, Grace

Happy birthday, Grace

Yesterday, Grace Hopper would have turn 107 years old. She was one of the first computer scientists. She worked on compilers but she is probably best known for her development of COBOL. COBOL is one of the first high-level programming languages (FORTRAN is the other one). Back in the 1950s, computers were used as calculators, but COBOL and Grace Hopper shown us that computers can be used for much more that simple calculations. Today, COBOL is still wildly used.

As a tribute to Grace Hopper, I have played a bit with the OpenCOBOL compiler. OpenCOBOL can translate COBOL source code to C and use a C compiler to generate a real executable program. The compiler is licensed under GNU General Public License (version 3), and the runtime is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (version 3). That is, OpenCOBOL is free software!

Ubuntu Linux and Linux Mint have packages for OpenCOBOL. Probably other Linux distributions and FreeBSD have packages as well but I haven't checked. The installation (using Linux Mint) is simple:

sudo apt-get install open-cobol

I haven't tried to write software in COBOL. The closest I ever came is that I worked on converting between 4th generation languages (4GL) a few years ago. 4GL programs are often converted to COBOL. But I have written a short program in COBOL:

      * Greeting to Grace Hopper

       IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.

       PROGRAM-ID.    greeting.

       DATA DIVISION.

       WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.

       01 WS-TODAY PIC X(21).

       01 WS-YEAR  PIC 9(4).

       PROCEDURE DIVISION.

       010-Greet.

           MOVE FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE TO WS-TODAY.

           MOVE WS-TODAY (1:4) TO WS-YEAR.

           

           SUBTRACT 1906 FROM WS-YEAR.

           DISPLAY "Happy birthday"

           DISPLAY WS-YEAR

           EXIT PROGRAM

           .

       STOP RUN.

Compiling the program using OpenCOBOL is easy:

cobc -x greeting.cob

and running is easy:

./greeting

I am not going to do a lot of COBOL programming in the future, but it seems to possible to replace old legacy operating systems with a modern platform like Linux.

Review: Storm - real-time processing cookbook

Review: Storm - real-time processing cookbook

Quinton Anderson has written a book on the analysis platform Storm and published it at Packt. I have worked a little with Hadoop in the last couple of years, and it is only natural to take a look at the other big data processing platform. Hadoop is a batch processing platform, and Storm is for real-time processing and analysis of data. That means the two projects are not direct competitors, and they might complement each other.

When reviewing a technical book for the general public, it is important not to review the technology but the book. You can easily write a crappy book on excellent technologies while the opposite is very difficult. This review should be read in this context.

The author starts out by explaining how to set up Storm. Storm seems to be quite a complex beast, but Mr. Anderson gets nicely through it. I would have preferred to get an introduction to some of the concept before jumping into the many tasks. But it is my personal preference, and this is a cookbook and not a text book for a university course.

The first couple of chapters is about processing real-time data. Twitter and log files are the canonical examples in this area, and the book utilizes these as well. 

One chapter are on how to use C++ and Qt in your real-time data processing. If you think that Qt is about graphical user interfaces, the book will show you that Qt is a lot more. The author is using Qt's non-GUI parts in his processing.

Another chapter is about machine learning. As part of the big data revolution, machine learning has become popular again. Machine learning is a topic that Mr. Anderson is passionate about, and he analyzes in great detail the problem before showing the recipe. 

One of the major disadvantages of the book is that the assumptions about the reader are pretty hard. The reader is assumed to know at least about:

• Java development using and Maven and Eclipse
• Some functional programming
• Ubuntu or Debian (or any UNIX) command-line
• Web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON)
• Data modelling experience
• A little about NoSQL

This problem does not really from the author but from Storm. But the author might have chosen other examples. The book is not a university text book, and therefore I would like many more references to text book and papers.

There is a lot of source code in the cook. You should really download the examples as some of them are longer than a page. It would be great if Packt would do some kind of syntax highlighting. Most programmers find it easier to read syntax highlighted code. In particular, electronic books (I have read the book as PDF) can easily be colorized!

One of the things I really like about the book is that the author has taken time to craft understandable diagrams. A well-composed diagram is worth many words, and he often sums up the key points in a diagram. In general the author writes in a rather dry or fact based language. But on page 111, you find that the author cannot suppress his humor: "... for  automating Clojure projects without setting your hair on fire."

I'm not going to say that Storm is a crappy technology but Quinton Anderson has done the job well by writing a good cook book.

If you are serious in getting into data science and data processing, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the book. You can find the book at http://www.packtpub.com/storm-realtime-processing-cookbook/book.

Review: Instant ExtJS Starter

Recently, Packt Publishing published a book by N. Bhava on ExtJS. It's a fairly short book, about 60 pages long. The idea is to get you started with ExtJS. If you don't know what ExtJS, it is a framework to develop the front-end of web applications. Today, users except web applications to behave must like desktop applications, and a typical web developer is much more like a GUI programmer just a few years ago. In order to get started with ExtJS, the book is an excellent introduction. By reading the book, it quickly becomes obvious that today's web developers just have a great deal of knowledge of JavaScript, object-oriented programming, HTML and CSS. JavaScript is a class-less object-oriented programming language. But ExtJS is based on the notion of classes, and they are somehow emulated by plain JavaScript. The author does not go into details - probably due to the limited length of the book. A book of less than 60 pages cannot scratch the surface no matter how great the author is. Indeed, the book is quite well written, and the flow of the book is fine. But I must be honest, I have tried ExtJS ever before, and the book is too short for my taste. I do like the cook-book like steps in how to install ExtJS. And I like the usage of the browsers' debugger to inspect code and DOM. The proof-reading of the book could be better. On page 9, the different edition of ExtJS is mentioned twice, and the example of page 35 has an extra </tpl> tag. If you have another web framework (jQuery UI, YUI, etc.), you will find the book useful. It will give you a clear idea of what ExtJS is all about in a short time. The author emphases early that the strength of ExtJS is it's components. The major components (layout, containers, data, templates, and forms) are discussed. In particular, the layout and data components are nicely explained. You can find the book here.

Review: Learning JavaScriptMVC

I haven't been developing front-end code in JavaScript for some time. Well, to be more precise: years. Most of my JavaScript code these days is unit tests for a node.js extension, I'm maintaining at work. Recently, a book on JavaScriptMVC by Wojceich Bednanski was published by Packt. I was curious to see how contemporary web applications are written so I picked up the book. It is a short book - only 124 pages. In the preface, the author sets the requirement of the reader but I think he underestimate what it takes to read the book. In my opinion, the reader is an experience software developer with a sound knowledge of JavaScript, jQuery, and HTML. If the reader hasn't read "the good parts", I would recommend her to do so before reading this book. Furthermore, the reader should not be afraid of the Linux command line. Today, most software developers are trained in object-oriented modeling and design, and the author does assume so. Through-out most of the book, the reader sees how to develop a simple TODO manager. As TODO managers generally work with dates, the book has a number of assuming dates. On page 21, one sees a task due 1st December 1012. The approach of the book is to begin by the basic elements and gradually move to more advanced components. If the book has been much longer, I believe that many readers will be lost by this approach. To be fair, a complete example is introduced in the beginning of the book but explanations are coming in later chapters, the reader is left a bit frustrated. Chapter 2 and 3 are about topics which are invisible to the user of an application: documentation and testing. I agree with the author that these topics are important but I would have preferred them later in the book. Chapter 4 is about how to organize an application. It seems strange that large portion of the example code is commented out on page 51. Moreover, some of the plugins are discussed so briefly that the reader has no clue if there are useful or when to use them. One of the toughest part of a JavaScript application is to load the required libraries - and in the right order. In my dark past as front-end developer, I wrote a small library for loading libraries. Actually, it is just an excuse to write a graph class in JavaScript. Chapter 5 shows how to do load depending library using JavaScriptMVC. Unfortunately, the author does not explain in details how it works, and the examples are so simple that they have limited value. I like that the author introduces a complex framework like JavaScriptMVC is a very short book. But I was at times a little confused: does the author only show me the simple solution or best practises? If the publisher has asked for more pages, the author might have had a chance to get deeper into the subject. You can find the book here.