09.27.08
A quick update on Batteries
Just a quick word for people who may be curious about the development of OCaml Batteries Included. Work is proceeding nicely and we’re getting close to a first official release. We’ve moved things around quite a lot recently, worked on the documentation and added a few nice features (read-only strings and arrays, uniform numeric modules with type-class-style dictionaries). We’re about to add Unicode support for inputs and outputs (based on Camomile) and an improved Scanf module and that should be it for a first release.
A new preview tarball has just been uploaded on the Forge, as well as a new preview documentation.
As a side-note, the Haskell community seems to be involved much in the same process as Batteries Included, with the Haskell Platform, aka Haskell Batteries Included. Both their schedule and their list of packages seem a little more precise than ours but the overall objective remains the same: take a great programming language used mostly by academics and turn it into a complete development platform able to compete with the best the industrial world is able to offer. The main difference, it seems, is that the Haskell Platform doesn’t have a glue layer designed to uniformize APIs. The other main difference, I’m afraid, is that the Haskell community seems much larger these days than the OCaml community — or perhaps just more active or more verbal. It is my hope that a larger and more convenient standard library will help draw (back?) both academics and developers to the OCaml world. A little more academic support wouldn’t hurt, of course.
Back to OCaml Batteries Included, I hope we’ll be able release by October 10th. At that point, we’ll need beta-testing and it will be time to decide of what should get into Batteries Included 0.2. I’m sure everyone has ideas and suggestions — it will soon be time to share them.
09.22.08
Firefox, les extensions et la sécurité
Il y a environ un an, un de mes collègues travaillait sur un dispositif de communication pour les services d’urgence. Ce dispositif, prévu pour être utilisé lors de catastrophes naturelles ou d’attentats terroristes majeurs, devait permettre une meilleure synchronisation entre la police, les pompiers et les équipes de secouristes. Ah, et au cas où il se serait effectivement agi d’un attentat, le dispositif se devait d’être sûr. Conclusion du collègue en question : “comme Firefox est sûr, je vais faire cela sous la forme d’une extension Firefox, et ça sera sûr.”
À ce stade, j’espère que vous êtes déjà en train de vous moquer intérieurement de mon collègue. Cela dit, savez-vous effectivement quel risque vous courez en écrivant une extension ? Savez-vous quel risque vous faites courir à l’utilisateur ? Et savez-vous à quel point vous pouvez compter sur la plateforme Mozilla pour vous aider à écrire des extensions ou des applications sûres ?
À l’occasion, je tâcherai d’écrire un article détaillé sur le sujet. En attendant, pour ceux qui se posent des questions, voici les transparents (en français) de l’exposé que j’ai donné samedi dernier au Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop de Paris.
Ah, un indice : ayez peur.
