Announcing Nuki 0.1 (VoodooPad, watch out!)

Dear interwebs,

Today I finished the first release of a simple, database-backed and web-accessible Wiki software written entirely in Nu and making use of the NuHTTP and NuMarkdown libraries. I call it Nuki (pronounced ‘nookie’), and I wrote it to teach myself how to integrate Core Data and NuHTTP in a simple application.You can check it out from Subversion here. Read on to see what I learned whilst writing this application. 

At first I encountered some difficulty getting the Core Data store and NuHTTP server up and running – but then I had a brainwave: why not copy Tim’s application skeleton from Nudge? I did so, and all was good.

My Core Data model is very simple – no relationships at all, just a single model class – so there was very little interesting to talk about there. By placing the (attr-accessors) macro inside the NSManagedObject subclass, though, I got all the Core Data accessor methods for free – delicious! And to those who say I’m tainting the MVC paradigm by including code inside the model on how to render HTML links for a given page, I say that you’re probably right.

 Having a proper macro system is a breath of fresh air. I realized just now that the degree to which I like a language is a function of its extensibility, its standard library and its power for syntactic abstraction – Nu, as far as I know, is the only one that satisfies all three of those criteria.