If you're looking for a definition of software development goodness, you can't do better than Larry Wall's dictum: easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible. The Groove Developer's Kit (GDK) met the second requirement, but not the first. To create a tool that can be injected into a Groove shared space, and that displays in the transceiver, you had to master some pretty esoteric skills. There are brilliant practioners of that art, but I'll never become one of them. More importantly, neither will a great many scripters who would otherwise love to reach into Groove's basket of services. Why couldn't we just write a few lines of Perl, or Python, or Ruby, or C#, in order to do easy things easily? In the next version of Groove, due out in early 2003, we can, thanks to Groove Web Services (GWS). [Full story at O'Reilly Network.]
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/12/10.html#a534