June 2006 Archives

The last few months have been interesting. I've started a new job building the web site of Boomer.com. Part of this process has been reacclimating myself to Java. My language of preference is Perl and I'm still working on a few projects at home involving Perl. In the last week, we've made some decisions in which it appears as if we'll be using PHP here for some of our development as well. From these experiences, I've found that Java actually cooperates pretty nicely with these two scripting languages.

In Perl, I've written a library to connect with a Java library I'm using at work, named Java::JCR. Rather than porting an implementation of the JCR to Perl, I've actually hooked the JCR libraries from Perl. Using a tool named Inline::Java, the Perl interpreter spawns a JVM to run the Java code and then communicates with that JVM to run the necessary code. This actually works very well. After getting past the first few hurdles of getting the interface built, date conversions handled, and exception handling worked out, a user of the Java::JCR library can use a JCR implementation without worrying about any of the nuts and bolts of the interface. I'm very happy with the Perl-to-Java interface here.

In PHP, we're looking into using Drupal to make up for some of the deficiencies in our web site design, particularly in the area of community collaboration. However, we're using a JCR-based ECM, Magnolia, to handle a lot of the document and publication management. We need communication between the collaboration side and the publication side of the web site. Much of that communication can be handled through the use of RSS and other syndication protocols or through the use of RPC. However, since both of these involve serialization of data across a network connection, they can slow things down. Some features (particularly search, in our case), don't work very well this way. Therefore, we're looking at the PHP JavaBridge or Caucho Resin and Quercus to perform direct language communication between PHP and Java.

From my experience thus far, Java actually does a pretty decent job of communicating with other languages—either by RPC or even directly with inter-language communications. This involves some overhead of running both an interpreter/VM for the second language in addition to at least one JVM, but it seems to work pretty. I don't know that I can really extrapolate out to other languages in general, but from my experience and research so far, PHP and Perl both seem to work very well with Java. Since each language has it's own pros and cons, this allows me to consume pros from multiple languages while avoiding a few more of the cons.

Anyway, this has been a cool enough experience that I thought I'd share it.

Cheers.

The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday. — Quoted from AP

I'm not quite sure I understand this remark. Especially since the dangers he quotes are, according to the article, all human in origin, "sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of." If humans are so dangerous to ourselves how is getting to another planet really going to help? We'll just risk the same dangers there, it'll just take a little longer. If we add in the natural dangers of the Universe, though, we're doomed. Period.

The problem is a simple matter of time. As the Oracle says in The Matrix Revolutions, "Everything that has a beginning has an end." There's no way around this problem. Sooner or later time is going to catch up with the human race, it's unavoidable. The death rate for humanity is, was, and will always be 100%. The death rate for the species will be no different.

Does this mean I'm ready to roll over now and welcome the end of humanity? Of course not, I'm not even opposed to human expansion into space and colonization. I'm just not willing to engage in false hope that humanity will find the key to immortality sooner or later. This statement is not only myopic but based on blindness.

The fact that time has a beginning and an end should tell us something about the nature of the universe. No, the blessing of having a Christian worldview is that that worldview grants an eternal perspective. Before the universe began, there existed a timeless eternity past. After the universe ends, a timeless eternity future awaits. A materialistic, scientific world-view, however, denies the existance of such a time because it cannot be observed or tested. Belief that a loving God is also planning things provides additional reassurance.

Am I naive about what the human race is capable of, absolutely not. However, niether am I staying up a night fretting over the destruction of the race. It won't happen until it happens and when it happens, it will happen for a reason.