University stress
As you have noticed it's already the time of the semester where all the homework, projects and preparations for exams accumulate towards the same date.
The upcoming weekend is again the most pressing date of this semester as this is one of the last presence lectures for some of our lectures. And the last presence lecture is often used for end-term exams.
Furthermore there are some presentations and handins to be finished by Saturday.
What's currently taking most of my time is my project work for this semester. I don't know if I've already hinted somewhere in a post on that but let me give you a short intro.
I'm creating a framework for Java which allows developers to define the structure of any file in some sort of description language, hand this and a file containing data in this format to a parser which is created out of the description language and get out a data structure which contains the contents of the file in an easy accessible way for the developer.
Initially the project was about researching such frameworks, comparing them to each other and create a prototype implementation for an application within our company. After I have handed in the description and plan for my project work I found out that there is no framework existing for the Java language which comes even near the functionality I've been looking for. Nothing. Nada. I just found something similar to that implemented for Python, it's called Construct and resembles quite exactly what I've been looking for. So I decided to resurrect my old lexer and parser know-how and create a framework on my own. Since I've already worked on a thesis in the past which involved creation of a C++ parser I knew that finding the right tools to use and creating a language from scratch is not something one can pull off without a great deal of theoretical background in that area. I already knew which problems I probably will be facing and how to avoid several caveats and until now it turns out that I'm not very far off of my expectations.
Just that I need some more time to get it finished :P
Nevertheless, what I've also been thinking of is that maybe I'll open source this framework if there aren't obstacles for that like copyright or usage issues with the university or my employer for which I'm implementing this.
Maybe there will be updates on this in the future... maybe.