(In-Hold-Out) Release Day

DDMSence (pronounced "dee-dee-em-Essence") is the result of three months' worth of unpaid work, and the prime reason why I don't hang out with you anymore (besides the foul odor you call a deodorant). It is an open source Java library (released under the LGPL license) which supports the . A complete technical write-up of the library can be found at the DDMSence website.

For the uninitiated, DDMS is not what girl gamers experience once a month during their tabletop games -- it is a specification which defines a consistent set of "card catalog" details for any resource you might want to make available or discoverable. If everything has a common set of metadata, ordered in a common format, search engines can support this discovery, even if it has no idea how to handle the resource itself. So, you could add a seven pound leg of lamb to a collection of non-fiction books, and as long as they are described in the same way in the card catalog, people will still be able to find your leg of lamb and eat it.

DDMS is written in XML (which is like an anally pedantic set of HTML tags), and my new library converts this XML format into Java objects, essentially allowing DDMS to be easily used in any Java-based environment.

If you have no intention of working for the Department of Defense at any point in your life because of your meth habit, or that hitchhiker you ran over last summer, just know that this is going to be bigger than Booty's homepage, and will probably make me a household name in my house.