I was mentioned as a founder of Genetic Programming

Ha, I got mentioned in an article as a pioneer in Genetic Programming! cool! "While John Holland and his students were perfecting genetic algorithms, his colleagues (such as Nichael L. Cramer, John R. Koza and Gianna Giavelli) were founding the even more mind-boggling field of “genetic programming,” a similar evolutionary machine learning technique that can evolve and optimize a population consisting of entire computer programs designated to perform a task such as designing an electronic device, playing a game, predicting the movement of the stock market, etc." A Software That Evolves Itself Computers are becoming immensely powerful and the field of evolutionary computation is taken quite seriously. NEWSMAX.COM http://www.newsmax.com/RichardGrigonis/Education/2015/09/01/id/673072/

ActiveWeb (ActiveJDBC) and the Uber Lean Framework counter-revolution in Java

For years development frameworks have been constructed like a kitchen sink multi tool growing bigger and more bloated. PHP being barely object oriented is nothing but a list of 8000 functions. ICK! Even Java now has so many libraries and features that its a life effort to keep up.

Luckily, there is a answer. It's called JavaLite

JavaLite goes the other route. It doesn't even have sessions. It just barely got application scope. It doesn't manage HTTP get params.  It doesn't do much of anything really.

Or so it seems at first.

The main project is ActiveWeb. When I started using it a year ago its user guide was 20 pages.

It has a parallel project called Active JDBC. This is the bringer of magic.

Having suffered FIVE projects with endless pain updating and typing entities, and being horrified at database changes, ActiveJDBC is fully automatically generated behind the scenes and built into your compilation process. Hail JDBC.

The speed at which you can cobble together a ActiveWeb project is staggering.

LET me repeat that. STAGGERING

www.crossmypath.com is built entirely in activeweb. No JSF. No entity beans. No ugly php. Real code, readable, maintainable and a Model-View-Controller seperation that is much more clear than JavaJSF or Angular. (okok these aren't quite the same beasts I know)

I do think that this one man shop brilliance, by Igor Polevoy, does need a bit of a community process for next features, it does have support groups on google and elsewhere. It really would be a boon to have a built in user mgmt system with authentication and session scope storage. But other than that, its one heck of a ride to use this. It feels... like a summer breeze on a hot day.  Like a giant load of complexity we all thought was normal and needed is just... absent.

Kudos to JavaLite for doing the amazing. Like most great things, it was done by a single coder fed up with the crap. great job.

Suffering Spring - A patch that should have died wreaks havoc on software project

Spring came out when J2EE was in a bit of a mess. How it got into said mess is clear. Old CORBA shops wanting to have leverage in Java's direction pushed the design of J2EE into a world that it didn't need.

Soon you had local AND remote inferfaces, six files to configure just to get a simple entity out the door.

And the fact that Java was slow to support dependency injection. Which, is still a questionable technique that adds un-needed complexity and confusion to projects. Unless you really have dynamic type extensions over the life of the project or insane testing requirements, DI is a rats nest.

Take for example Springs wonderful implementation of @Service and @Repository and @Entity. Wow they finally support annotations. When you declare with @repository you get automatically exception translation back out to the invoker of the transaction. Sounds like a good idea. Until it gets confusing how the heck did this exception happen. No worries, you can control the translation via endless configuration files. Like the scene in brazil where deniro installs the patch to the air conditioning, its a maze of wires and pumping organs. ick.

Ah wait, it gets worse. Even with exception translation the calling method should receive what they translate to. Err no. Using a repository model the caller of the caller of the caller of the invocation is needed to trap exceptions. Aka yes, we had to set up THREE FASCADE calling layers to solve this. ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!! And this is required if you really want to protect your code and log exceptions.

Anyways, J2EE was a mess. Spring stepped in. And for a while, it got customers. All hail spring.

But then, Java got its act in order. Cleaned up the interfaces. Cleaner simpler better. And Spring was trounced.

So after a year of trying to cobble Spring into a project, there were at least 5 times I had to stay until midnight and fix a mess that no one else could figure out. Security and password encryption are big messy areas in Spring. You would go down a path that SHOULD work, and it just wouldnt.

After losing about 5 years off my lifespan dealing with this non-sense, Lets officially announce - Spring is dead - except for loony psychos who like to play with fire. The community process and vetting is there for a reason in Java. It moderates out the chaos and eventually dumps bad design. In Spring, there is nothing.

Oh yah, and now java has simple clean dependency injection. There is simply no reason to lock into a single vendor anymore.  With java we have the different app server platforms, even different JDK versions.  And Oracle is ensuring quality. This is not just bias.

Will I ever do another Spring project? Uh, there aint enough gold in the Universe.

Book number TEN - The Rains

The rains is a teen story but suitable for adults who want a light read, on an adventure of a chubby boy who faces discrimination and ends up saving a town and uniting all the animal kingdoms. Its a bit wisdom-y and filled with some buddhist lessons for all of us on honor, friendship, and trust.

The Sumerian Planisphere - ticking away the 26,000 cycle of catyclysm and end times

THE SUMERIAN PLANISPHERE NINEVEH of SUMER (Ancient Nineveh lay opposite modern Mosul) The Planisphere of Nineveh, acc. to L.W. King, British Museum, 1912. Shown below, first without explanation, and then with the decipherment. The 26,000 year cycle is a time when the earth goes into catyclysm. We don't know for sure what happens. But it is tightly linked to the Shamash, the 3rd sun (sun, moon, shamash) and the interferance pattern seen when two suns near each other. This is the cycle where every 13,000 years we dip from above to below the plane of our galaxy. It is believed that at that time, a loose binary companion of the sun juts inward to our sun, and the gravitational pulls on our planet causes floods and earthquakes - the end of the world. The fragmetns of how to track this phenomena (which I wrote about in the Kingdom of Mei series) are found all over the sumerian and akkadian tablets. Most principly the sumerian planisphere tracks it against the orbits of the plane and orion. The Decipherment - by Andis Kaulins - is in the graphic below. It is based on a heavens which existed originally in ca. 3300 BC.    Since this decipherment was first made it has become clear that En.LIL is essentially the MILKY WAY, for the stars of MUL.APIN on the path of EN.LIL, as deciphered elsewhere on this site, are those on the ELLIPSE of the MILKY WAY. Note the central position played by Orion - as in other ancient Planispheres as well. Compare the Sumerian planisphere with the  modern Precessional Planisphere of Milton D. Heifetz from Learning Technologies, set here to 3300 BC.