Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Hybrid Language Applications

I've recently been working on a small side project for my own personal use and have been considering using a mix of languages for the implementation -- specifically Java and Python but also possibly some Ruby. The reason I'm considering this is that there are unique advantages to each language that I'd like to leverage and I feel like I could implement things faster and more easily they were all available to me.

Specifically for the project I'm working on there's a component which needs to be able to parse RSS feeds. There happens to be an amazing python library called feedparser which seems to be by far the best RSS parsing library out there. So I plan to implement a simple program which knows how to retrieve a set of RSS feeds in python in order to take advantage of this library.

What I'm mostly unsure about is how to glue together my little programs. Right now I'm envisioning the python program producing output to standard output in a line based record format (probably CSV). We all know that a line based format is the "right thing to do" because ESR told us so. My big concern is whether or not there is a better way? It seems like with the addition of a Javascript interpreter in Java 6 (not necessarily required, but might make it even easier), JSON might be on the table.

What do others thing? How do you solve this problem?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

What kind of volume are we talking here?

Brandon said...

Anything really. Obviously this isn't the best approach if something is performance critical, but I'm more interested right now in optimizing developer time and allowing problems to be solved by the right tools without introducing too much overhead gluing things together.