Also honest. Someone snatches the stage victory from him at the finish line. Sorry, but sometimes cycling is really unfair. Too bad - I would have given today's stage victory to Jörg Jaksche, he really kept attacking. Twice less looking back and maybe he would have won after all.
Funny title, isn't it? Well, I just noticed something while dealing with web frameworks and other applications, specifically in the Ruby and Python environments. Namely, the way mini-data is stored and how configuration data is handled, for example.
In the Java environment, there is an inflation of XML mini-languages - mountains of dead data. Dead because this data only exists in XML format and can only be processed and modified using XML tools. For example, if I have constantly repeating or algorithmically describable configuration blocks (e.g., a mountain of quite similar-looking URL patterns for a web framework), I can only generate these using XML tools - e.g., generate them from simpler formats using XSLT. Or I write small tools for this.
In Ruby, the situation is similar - only that instead of XML, YAML is used here. Ultimately, however, this is not better - the configuration is still a dead file.
But both in the Python environment and in various other dynamic languages, there is a good alternative to this: just use a module in your programming language. For example, Python modules live - if the structure is complex but partially repetitive - simply write a small Python function that helps with the dynamic creation of the config. If the config should partially come from database contents - simply write a Python function that reads this data from the DB at runtime and mixes it into the config. Living configuration data, after all.
Of course, security issues come into play here - we don't want to repeat the PHP mistake with the eternal eval. What is urgently necessary for this would be a clean sandbox for such modules. Unfortunately, there is a massive hole in the implementation right there in Python. There were bytecode hacks in the past, which were also revived - but these are just hacks. The method of building a pseudo-sandbox using restricted imports and proxy objects, as Zope does, is also not the be-all and end-all.
Perl offers a very clean method here - as is usual for all security features in Perl, this is of course used by almost no project - to regulate down to the smallest detail what the code in such a sandbox is allowed to do - and thus a configuration via Perl module is definitely better secured than in languages without such a concept.
Java itself, of course, has a pretty sophisticated security management system - necessarily, as it is also supposed to run in browsers with very restricted rights. This security model is also usable for applications and could be used, for example, for servlets or Java configs - especially since you can also easily translate files at runtime and load them dynamically with Java. Now explain to me why the Java people are so fixated on XML when they have the best foundations for secure living data ...
We will ignore the safe model of PHP here, because it is a soda-or-seltzer model - either every code runs under safemode, or none at all. What we would need is a selective activation of different security classes for a single code block or module import (ok, PHP also doesn't have module imports, only includes - I say, we just ignore it).
So far, you can only work with living configurations in Python if you are sure that the configurations are only edited by users without malicious intent. Django, for example, only uses living configurations - it would therefore be a pretty stupid idea to make the configuration files editable via the web for centrally hosted applications.
We urgently need a clean sandbox for Python. I even believe that this would be a more important subproject than the various syntactic extensions that are repeatedly addressed.
wxCL provides Common Lisp libraries for using the brilliant wxWindows GUI library. Very nice - I have already appreciated wxWindows in its Python incarnation, and in Scheme (via DrScheme) it is also very helpful. Now Common Lispers can use it too. I know that in Common Lisp, of course, CLIM (today often in the form of McCLIM) is the toolkit of choice, especially since it is much more powerful than wxWindows. But still, it's nice to have a cross-platform GUI library, especially because it is available for more than one programming language.
