The good: Wil Wheaton's most recent sermon on The Real Revenge of the Nerds. Well worth a read.

The bad: Karl Rove's "October Surprise" will be sentancing Saddam Hussein Monday, November 5th. Unfortunately, they probably won't get much backlash from people that consider a hangin' to be grotesquely inappropriatte.

You know that feeling of energy when you are nearing a toxic overdose of sugar? The buzz where you know you have to do SOMETHING, preferable something COMPLICATED, or your head will collapse into a massive headache, as if some unnamed gods are punishing you for not using this gift? That special state of mind where you start to imagine in a thousand horrid directions if you don't keep busy with a problem?

One of the larger projects I use at Healthprolink is a Java web application where much of the logic is in an embedded Jython interpreter. In many ways, this is beautiful. The edit-compile-debug loop is much smaller, allowing me to test and implement new features and bugfixes with remarkable speed. In practice, I tend to think in

Goal: spent less time fixing old code, more time writing new code.

Why monitor? J2EE is ridiculously complex. Over-engineered solutions can be very slow.

JSR 223 implemented in Mustang.

Javax.script in mustang.
Javax.script.http depends on servlet so not in Mustang.
PHP extension. Wrappers for Java objects. Embed PHP in servlet container. Availabilty TBD.

JavaScript included, based on Rhino, with Third-party implementations, BeanShell demonstrated. Snapshot build 40 and later.

Use cases
stand-alone script interpreter
script uses Java objects
java calls script engine.
Scripting framework.

The Google lesson: advanced UI concepts work best with clear, minimal applications. Combining the level of hackery that goes into Google maps with a substantially larger application would result in a steaming, unmanageable, mess.

Autogenerated UIs become ugly messes of code you never want to touch, that get in the way of cool algorithms. If you want to do somethign the code-generator didn't intend, you often have little recourse.