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Programming Java IT Technology

Developer Site CodeZoo Launches 78

Posted by Zonk from the cup-of-coffee-for-you dept.
acomj writes "Developer resource site CodeZoo launched today. An archive of Java code pieces, which plans to do for Java what cpan did for Perl, according to an announcement from O'Reilly." From the announcement: "We're not focused on hosting developer projects, like SourceForge, nor on comprehensively listing all open source Java code. Instead, we've hand-selected a list of the components we think will be the easiest and best to use in your development projects -- whether you are an open source or commercial developer."
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Developer Site CodeZoo Launches More

Developer Site CodeZoo Launches

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  • Fool me once (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @06:47PM (#12148798)
    Last time I clicked on a *zoo* link on Slashdot... well, let's just say I won't be clicking those links anymore! Freaked my wife out.
  • Otherwise it would be Jcan or something similarly J sounding. JcodeZoo maybe? Jarchive?

  • Codehaus (Score:5, Informative)

    by kevin_conaway ( 585204 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @06:52PM (#12148837) Homepage
    Codehaus [codehaus.org] is a similar site with a lot of cool stuff.

  • Could be an amazing time saver (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @06:52PM (#12148843)
    CPAN is one reason why many people stick with Perl...an amazing breadth of code that has great support for installation, etc.

    Yes there are some warts, not all of the code in CPAN is perfect, some of it might very well be broken...but on the whole the repository has high quality code.

    I would suspect every language/toolkit would want something like this.

    • One of the most useful things I have ever learned:

      #perl -MCPAN -e shell
  • whether you are an open source or commercial developer
    Since when is that mutually exclusive?

  • Not Just Java... (Score:5, Informative)

    by th1ckasabr1ck ( 752151 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @06:53PM (#12148855)
    From the article:

    CodeZoo is launching with a directory of Java components, and from there, we hope to move into other languages. Let us know where you think we should go next! (We've already gotten one request for Lisp...)

    Also:

    On every page, you'll find links to O'Reilly and Safari content to help you learn more about the components you want to use.

    Browsing around I don't see this, but it sounds like a pretty cool idea.

  • A change for the Better (Score:3, Insightful)

    by omb ( 759389 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @06:53PM (#12148857)
    This makes a huge ammount of sense; re-usable components cannot be too big.

    Attempts to find genuineuley free re-targetable components has, only because of SUN, been much harder in Java than, say Perl.

    Good luck.

  • Documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by poopdeville ( 841677 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @06:54PM (#12148858)
    I wonder how much documentation/community support CodeZoo is going to get. The reason things like the CPAN and CTAN work as well as they do is because of the enormous contributions from places like comp.text.tex, the TUG [tug.org], and comp.lang.perl.*

    There's enough code on the C?AN to make finding anything impossible without help.

    • Re:Documentation? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Skudd ( 770222 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @09:14PM (#12149844) Homepage Journal
      I agree. I just downloaded one of the packages, CroftSoft, and it had absolutely NO documentation. The most I know is that it...

      An Open Source portable pure Java game library with example games, Swing-based sprite animation engine, deployment framework, and firewall tunneling networking. The code is documented in the book Advanced Java Game Programming by David Wallace Croft.

      Yes, nice... A book. Offer a package, but don't document it.

      I don't mean to sound like a wet blanket and all, but I think this is something that is being hyped up too much before it's given a shot at reality. I do commend them for their efforts on getting it started though.

  • Here is my contribution ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by thej1nx ( 763573 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @06:54PM (#12148870)
    System.out.println("Hello World");

    ....easiest and best to use in your development projects.

  • Where's the meat? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @06:56PM (#12148887)
    How is this an improvement on what SourceForge
    already does? A brief look at CodeZoo shows that
    most of the projects are hosted on SourceForge already.

  • This is great....but..... (Score:4, Informative)

    by crush ( 19364 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @06:59PM (#12148915)
    it'd be even better if they were able to distributed the files in RPM and DPKG formats. Once you've committed to a package based system it hurts to install non-packaged stuff. That's one of the reasons why JPackage [jpackage.org] is so nice.
    • Once you've committed to a package based system it hurts to install non-packaged stuff

      That also neatly explains why those of us who have _not_ committed to a package based system do not want this...

  • Damn table of contents (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @07:00PM (#12148927)
    It only has 'J'!

  • Why CPAN works (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Matts ( 1628 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @07:10PM (#12148999) Homepage
    You know, this sounds like it won't ever make it to the level that CPAN has reached. The reason CPAN works is simple: it's entirely open to anyone to put stuff in there.

    In other words, the barrier to entry is incredibly low, and you get free worldwide distribution off the back of it.

    Now in spite of this, there are some incredibly high quality pieces of software uploaded to CPAN every week (there's a lot of junk there too). A lot of people complain about the junk and cry for a way to filter it out, but honestly I think it's actually a bonus - the people who write junk today may produce master works tomorrow and we don't want to discourage them (I went through that same process myself with my earlier CPAN efforts).

    There's been some pretty good stuff written about the success of CPAN elsewhere. I would urge those working on this project to find those articles and read them.

    • Re:Why CPAN works (Score:3, Informative)

      by boneclipse ( 873739 )
      Take a look at maven (http://maven.apache.org [apache.org]) and its repository on ibiblio.org....its CPAN for Java! Automatic download of dependencies is a very cool thing indeed.

    • Re:Why CPAN works (Score:3, Informative)

      by Marc Hedlund ( 229164 )
      Matts,

      I think you're right that CPAN got going because of its open access and wide distribution. But I also think it's a different world now than it was when CPAN started. Sourceforge, CodeHaus, and others have made it easy for developers to get that kind of distribution -- and much more, such as bug tracking and announcement lists -- for free and for any language. Many of the needs CPAN fulfilled no longer are as pressing.

      CPAN's utility for developers, though, continues, and that's what I hope CodeZoo

  • Hmm, I use both CPAN and Java (Score:5, Informative)

    by tezza ( 539307 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @07:16PM (#12149055)
    And this looks more like java-source.net [java-source.net]. Java-source is a site I highly recommend. It helped me find JRat an excellent Java Profiler.

    Java's big attraction was that it came with 'CPAN', that is, the Java API. Java API has equivlants of Net::Socket, Net::SMTP, LWP and File::IO. These were big plusses back when it arrive circa 1995.

    What i don't see in this OReilly yet are Date::Calc, Text::Autoformat or such.

    See also: http://www.manageability.org/blog/opensource/view [manageability.org] and
    http://www.johnmunsch.com/archives/2004_07.html#00 0975 [johnmunsch.com] (can't seem to get the darn '#' working in /.)

  • A library censored by the librarians (Score:3, Insightful)

    by popo ( 107611 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @07:22PM (#12149083) Homepage

    It's the "Hand Picked" part of the description that's the problem.

    Who needs a library which is censored by the librarians. Isn't it better to have a library consisting of *all* available applets/applications and have the user community rate them for quality and ease of use? .... and doesn't that already exist?

    • "Hand Picked" & problem? Your not serious. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well usually there are publishers, editors and other to review what goes in a library.

      Under your ideology you will never find what you are looking for because everyone is offering the same damned thing with their own creative touches, your better off writing the code from scratch then!

    • Re:A library censored by the librarians (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Who needs a library which is censored by the librarians.

      Obviously you're not familiar with one of the major functions of a librarian.

      Isn't it better to have a library consisting of *all* available applets/applications and have the user community rate them for quality and ease of use?

      Better? No. Different and equally valid, yes.

      .... and doesn't that already exist?

      No.

    • Who needs a library which is censored by the librarians.

      There may be some editorial bias, but this is more of an act of compiling and presenting as opposed to supressing.

      Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they have commercial interests -- say selling their own books. But O'Reilly at least has an honest reuptation in that field (unless they've become evil and I missed a memo or something =)

      Isn't it better to have a library consisting of *all* available ...

      Because having someone distill it for you is very nice,

    • Re:A library censored by the librarians (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bit01 ( 644603 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @11:31PM (#12150828)

      Censorship can occur because of too much noise as well as too little information. A good librarian can improve the ratio.

      For example 90% of modern mass marketing is the suppression of free, useful speech. Just look at the typical informative (ha!) car or shampoo ad.

      ---

      Are you a creator or a consumer?

      • Not sure why I bother, but I call BS on you. Look at the Merriam-Webster definition of "censor," and tell me how your statements fit that definition.
        tr.v.: To examine and expurgate.
        You seem to think that "censor" means "drowns out" or "distracts from". By your definition, when I play my guitar badly, I'm censoring and surpressing good music...

    • I worry more about the book references (Score:4, Interesting)

      by steve_l ( 109732 ) on Wednesday April 06, 2005 @04:58AM (#12152054) Homepage
      As the author of a non-ORA book, I worry that if thing becomes the "one stop shop" for Java content, then it will refer the viewers only to the ORA books. Which, as an O'Reilly site, they are free to do. But this is exactly why independent sites -CPAN, CTEX are better -no half-hidden agenda, other than the technology itself.

  • Language Independent Libraries? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by buckhead_buddy ( 186384 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2005 @08:26PM (#12149559)
    Back when I learned to program in the 1970's there were a variety of magazines that would publish programs and tutorials. If Byte ran a game or productivity program for the TRS-80, you can bet that Nibble would an Apple ][ game that was similar in concept down the road. Even though the programs and explanations were nothing alike, even a 4th grader like me could see shared ideas floating around. And often times, being able to compare the ideas, programs, and platforms was even more beneficial than just one library of programs from one provider.

    These days much has changed in terms of cross-platform software. People write code for libraries and api's rather than particular processors. Compliance standards like Posix and runtime layers like Apache's APR take out some of the low-level drudgery. Libraries like Mono and GnuStep are trying to bring the API's themselves into open source utility.

    While this Java library sounds like a great thing, why write it specific to Java? Like those magazine articles of old, it seems like there'd be a demand for a variety of program ideas, tutorials demonstrating the construction, and a language specialist who'd take the program and customize for a particular language, platform, and or api set.

    I know that cpan thrives because of the strong perl advocacy, but the idea here is for computer science advocacy with specialization to illustrate how the idea could be done implemented in Visual Basic versus Java versus Objective-C versus Python and on and on. Some of the best knowledge I learned about Object Oriented Programming didn't sink in until I specifically took a look at a program trying to do the same task in C, Java, and Smalltalk. While the Haskell advocates may not ever have the manpower to write comparative tutorials with procedural languages, they might be able to implement a few of the programs to give a Haskell newbie a leap on the big changes in mindset rather than just the syntax of a procedural langauge.

    Would such an archive be profitable? Who knows. In no way am I trying to knock the new Java zoo, but just idlely speculating about ways that some of these great language specific libraries and tutorials might be made a bit more independent :-)

    • Rarely have I seen a post that misses so _MANY_ points at once; CPAN, CTAN & PEAR are truely useful because they make a searchable archive readily accessible, and I generally have a clear Idea of which language code I want to find

      Where well indexed searchable archives exist they are a real boon

      where they do not exist it says a lot about the vitality, community and opennes of the language set

    • Re:Language Independent Libraries? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The problem with examples from 'Functional Language Weenies' is that they start out written for newbs... but very quickly go off the deep end of complexity, because the ultimate target is not the newbs, but its the other FL Weenies, this is particularly true of any of the ones in academia. The problem is that they want to show off to each other more than they want to help others to join the club.

      This, more than any other reason* is why there are only pockets of FLWs in the vast sea of imperative programme
    • As someone who is versed in about a dozen program languages, but who only tackled Java last year, I can tell you that knowing how to program something in concept and how to do it in Java are two different things. For instance, there were many occassions in my recent past, where I thought: "I know how to do this, I am pretty confident that Java has a standard way of doing this, but how the hell do I find out what that standard way is?"

      (Frankly, I also think that Java is overburdened with many standard ways

  • Is there anything similar for Python? There's PyPIhttp://www.python.org/pypi [python.org] of course, but anything else?
  • Did they really mean to have this name sound like "Kudzu"? You know - that vine that grows on the outside of many buildings, quietly destroying the walls. Seems like a reference I would have stayed away from in naming my developer site.

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