Man, there's a reason that software release and sexual release both use the word 'release'. There's something exhilirating about making your first release of a piece of software you've been working on for a while.
Anyways, I uploaded the first (0.01) version of <a href="http://joap-perl.jabberstudio.org">joap-perl</a> today. Beaujolais for me!
Did I mention JOAP? I mentioned JOAP. Anyways, after I got the JOAP spec working, I realized that nobody was going to use it unless there was some accompanying software. And I also realized that nobody was going to build that software except for me.
So I started working on a <a href="http://joap-perl.jabberstudio.org">Perl package</a> for JOAP. Specifically, it lets you expose Perl classes on the Jabber network through JOAP, without a lot of hassle -- just a bit of metadata specification. And it lets you use JOAP objects someone else exposed in your Perl code in a completely transparent way. You just do some set up, and then you've got JOAP objects as Perl objects.
This is the most Perl coding I've done in like 7-8 years. It's frustrating, of course, but it does remind me of all the fun parts of Perl. It _is_ a modifiable language, like Scheme or Forth, but the modification is so secret and strange as to be totally abstruse. That kind of makes it fun, though.
Of course, after joap-perl goes 0.1, I'll be starting on joap-python. Then joap-java. It's like I did something really wrong and now I have to pay for it in programming hell forever.
So, I've been interested in <a href="http://www.jabber.org/">Jabber</a> for a while. My interest flagged for a bit, but when we needed to have on-line meetings for the Pigdog <a href="http://www.burningman.com">Burning Man</a> trip, I figured Jabber was a natural fit.
Since then, I've been dicking around with various Jabber coding, and it's kind of become a madness. I now maintain a <a href="http://jabberx.jabberstudio.org">console-mode Jabber client</a> as well as its accompanying <a href="http://iksemel.jabberstudio.org">C library</a>.
After delving into Jabber so much, I got fixated on the idea of using Jabber as distributed object framework. After a while, I wrote a spec for the protocol I thought up, called <a href="http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0075.html">JOAP</a>. It's been about all I've been doing for the last 4 months, and it's been fun. Check it out.