Good tools.

October 27th, 2007

Had a chance to play around with some interesting software tools recently. Some that have caught my attention have been:

• Ubuntu - very nice Linux distribution, rapidly becoming the one to beat. We use it at the company I’m contracting for, and it’s been my first exposure to a Debian based system. apt-get is very nice, I’ve had very little software installation problems. But as ever I feel that Linux is lagging in the display driver department.
• lighttpd. I have a new favourite webserver. Thanks to apt-get, I went from having no webserver to having a fully functional installation of lighttpd serving up cgi pages in, oh, about three minutes. Hooray for Linuxy goodness!
• Haskell. Rapidly becoming one of my favourite languages, and I’m convinced that any decade now I’ll be able to do something useful with it, as opposed to merely alternating between being in awe of it’s elegance and banging my head against trying to understand category theory just so I can do some simple I/O. But that said, I took one step closer to this goal with the discovery of.
• Haxr. Getting it installed involved jumping through a few Cabal hoops, as it seemed to need some older packages, but once I had it running, I very quickly had a Haskell CGI program served up via Lighttpd (see above!) and talking xml-rpc over the network! Being convinced, as I am, of the importance of low coupling/high cohesion, I have a feeling that xml-rpc or json-rpc could be very nice ways of tying together complex and disparate systems. I’ve seen enough companies spend many many-years trying to put together distributed serialisation mechanisms, and I suspect that often the simplest approach is best. Being able to create a service using a language choice that is totally invisible to the client application is very handy.

Now I just need to find a nice persistance layer for Haskell, and I’ll be a happy man.

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