I'd like to announce the initial release of Eddie, a feed parser library written in Java. It's taken me over 100 hours, but it now correctly parses 90% of the FeedParser unit tests, including all the rss and atom tests. It's GPLed, with an exception allowing you to use it in any open sourced program. Get it at my website. Need to add documentation and character set and encoding support. Also need to separate the testing infrastructure from the rest of the code.

This is the first time I've done any java programming in anger, and I have to say I'm surprised to discover I quite like it. In many ways it seems a very quick language to program in. It seems almost like programming in a scripting language, but stronger typed. This is probably due to not having to worry about memory management. Certainly I don't think I could have written this quite so quickly in C++.

Having said that, there are a couple things that I don't like about Java. Everything is a pointer. This is useful at times, but it means that every time you want to call a method on an object you have to test whether it is null or you run the risk of getting the dreaded NullPointerException. Java also doesn't have keywords for and, or and not. I know not everyone likes these, but I keep finding myself trying to use them.

I'm sure there are other things I hated, but I can't remember them now. I think I'll end up doing more java programming in the future.