'Evolution' Kata

There is a new kata around. It existed as a draft on my hard drive for over a month and now it's finally out!

This also marks the beginning of a new kind of kata: Optimization Katas. They have no "right" answer, but multiple ways of solving. Therefore the result of each one is a numeric score - which should either be as low or as high as possible, depending on the task at hand. This is a great way to compare solutions against each other.

Oh, and it's also the first one to be categorized as "Professional" - you have been warned :-D

Clojure 1.2.0 Snapshot ...

... is now available for usage as by request. Use at your own risk.

Scala 2.8-RC1 and Groovy 1.7.2 available

I just added the option to select a specific version for each supported programming language. The first new options will be Scala 2.8.0-RC1 and Groovy 1.7.2.

Have fun!

clojure-contrib added

I learned today that 'clojure-contrib' is quite an useful library to have so for every new Clojure-based project it is automatically included. Now I hope every other language lobby doesn't also request extra libraries ;-)

Cheers

Feedback

Today I got an interesting feedback (unfortunately without an e-mail address):

This is a brilliant idea, but your implementation seems rediculously complex. Creating a workspace folder (on Windows, no less!), installing Maven, etc is way too complicated and detracts from the simplicity of the Kata.
I think a better solution would be an online approach - see the problem, type some text into an (auto-syntax-highlighting) box, press the button. No install, no workspace, just clicking on a link :-)

That's my thoughts exactly! It just seemed to be a better idea to just start at first and go from there. At the beginning I was thinking about how to provide an online solution - but I couldn't answer all the questions I had:

• How to do online, real-time syntax-highlighting? 
• How to provide auto complete? 
• Should it be client- or server-based? 
• If server-based, what kind of server would I need to handle the requests?
• If client, how could I embed maven within a JavaFX app?
• And maybe the most important: How would I be able to still keep working on my commercial project after I pull this stunt ;-)

I thought that most Java programmers already have the SDK and Maven installed, so I find my way still way more comfortable than setting up the project and creating the required acceptance tests yourself. But I have to agree with the anonymous author - let's see if I'll get there eventually...

Cheers,
stephanos

New Kata: Teleprompter v2

For those of you who liked the 'Teleprompter Kata' I just created a harder version of it. The slang words are not neatly enclosed by '$' signs, so you have to find them yourself. This also means you have to be aware of quotes...have a try: http://codingkata.org/katas/unit/teleprompter-v2


Have fun!

A new language is supported...

Javascript can now be used to solve a kata!
I finally figured out how to use the Rhino implementation to compile javascript code to bytecode and integrate it with my kata design. I only tried very simple katas so it has to prove itself yet in more complicated scenarios - I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader :-)

Happy kataing!