Blogging Pubbitch

Since I got here, the weather has been shocking. The people in the office are starting to become convinced that I drag along a good dose of English weather with me. I deny it. Totally.

Still, I've not been letting the weather slow me down. It's been a busy week! I've had a chance to meet up with a few friends, met new ones that I never knew I had, avoided dropping a baby (which can only be a Good Thing), attended a talk given by Dave Thomas at Atlassian about Cloud computing (very interesting), done some surfing (I'm worse that I've ever been before), and had some lovely meals out.

I've also been working hard, and managed to demo something that I've been working on for a while on Friday. I also gave a Tech Talk on how to write unmaintainable, hard to read code (the idea being that if you know what's bad, you can avoid doing it) At some point, I'll turn the talk into a series of posts --- they'll be fun to write, if nothing else.

The other thing that's been occupying a small amount of time is playing with JNA. WebDriver has been built with a layered architecture, which should make it easier to support languages other than Java. We've seen this already with the Firefox Python-bindings, and the remote bindings written in Ruby (and the ColdFusion port, too :) The thing is, Firefox and the remote drivers are the "easy" case: you just spool data over a TCP/IP connection. Internet Explorer is a lot harder because it has a native C component too. Fortunately, we've followed the layering here too, and the JNI code we have calls down into a series of wrappers.

The thing I was trying to do was to expose these layers through a simple C library, which will make it far easier to add support for Ruby, Python and .Net. Turns out, I don't think it'll be that hard. The first step will be to rip out the JNI code and replace it with JNA.

How hard can it be? :)