Understanding context-free grammar using Scala

At some point of the project, there will probably a need to have some prototype
of a scripting language.

I am looking at combinator library included with Scala which allows to code grammar almost in EBNF notation.

I am currently following examples from

Formal Language Processing in Scala

to understand it better and maybe use it in future iterations of my project.

LIFT Web Framework

I've started to look at LIFT WebFramework, as way to get hands on experience with Scala.

Lift is the only new framework in the last four years to offer fresh and innovative approaches to web development. It's not just some incremental improvements over the status quo, it redefines the state of the art. If you are a web developer, you should learn Lift. Even if you don't wind up using it everyday, it will change the way you approach web applications

Michael Galpin, Developer, eBay

Scala looks very promising, I've now been able to convert my initial code of Publish/Subscribe prototype (based on openChord)

GreaseMonkey is very handy!

I knew about Greasemonkey Firefox addon but have never really dig deep to see how to write a script.

"Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to HTML web page content on the DOMContentLoaded event, which happens immediately after it is loaded in the browser (also known as augmented browsing). As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script." -- Wikipedia

I found a nice  website that helped me to get into Greasemonkey spirit of things.

To better understand it,  I wrote a small script to import new citation from Google's scholar to CiteUlike. I got tired of Copy&Pasting. Ther script is very easy and handy.

The discovery of Scala

Yesterday, I have discovered Scala programming language , through a random Slashdot post on Swarm project :

a novel approach to programming distributed systems using Scala's serializable delimited continuations. Ian, CEO of Uprizer Labs and developer of SenseArray, is possibly best known for designing and coordinating Freenet, a popular P2P distributed network storage application.
He presented Swarm at the IEEE Ninth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing in Seattle,USA that took place September 9-11. You can watch a video where he describes Swarm

-- from scala website

Scala and Swarm both sound very interesting and promising!

openCHORD + Jena

I've started to experiment with openCHORD. This is a Java open source implementation of CHORD DHT.

First, I have converted it to Netbeans project and wrote a small main method to see it work. It allows me to create several local nodes ( different ports).

My next step is to integrate Jena model. I want to create a Jena model wrapper to act as a container for RDF statement. It will allow me to have greater flexibility in my future work. However, I will start my integrating a Statement object into openCHORD implementation and see where it will take me.