Regular Expressions

It's easier to program a splash screen than you probably realize. That's our conclusion after recent chats with a couple of successful businesses.

The latest JavaScript--1.7, 1.8 or 1.9, depending on how you think about it--is as fun to program as Python or Ruby. We've argued for years that JavaScript is an essential, respectable, and capable language; now it's even comfortable.

It's easier than ever to learn SQL.

More precisely, it's easier than ever to start to learn SQL. SQL is in its sixth or seventh revision as an official standard, and understanding why there are two different counts, let alone comprehending all the variations of the query language through the years, is a task few undertake. The latest of these standards is almost 4,000 pages long.

Last month's "The Importance of Being Valid" inspired an unusual volume of follow-up directed to us. A critical mass of developers seems ready to leave DTDs (Document Type Definitions) behind, and adopt more modern and capable definitions for their XML work.

In the last installment of Regular Expressions, we stressed the importance of valid XML. In even worse shape than its XML are the world's relational database management systems (RDBMSs).

Is your XML well-formed and valid? It's best if you can answer "Yes!", with confidence. In our experience, anything else is just "asking for trouble." The cost to validate XML documents is pleasantly low.

What's your relation to your desktop environment? Are you basically a consumer, focused on customizing a market leader like KDE or GNOME? A project like Whim makes deeper involvement feasible.

We need to talk about e-mail. E-mail isn't the topic we planned for this month, and its administration isn't what we generally regard as a "Regular Expressions" subject.

Essentially all the applications we develop include an e-mail component, though, and there are vital aspects of e-mail management no one else seems to cover; we finally realized this means it's a conversation we need to start.

D-Bus gives Linux a significant benefit that Windows long claimed as part of its dominance: a component model.

Many of our favorite applications are Web applications, ones where the user interface (UI) resides within a Web browser. Æjaks is a toolkit that expands the advantages of Web apps.

Web applications have well-known and important advantages, including: