Regular Expressions are one of the most overlooked things in programming. A simple search on Google for form validation returns many cook-book style tutorials that help making things worse by just showing an ugly finished expression (or an even uglier string parsing function). Because it’s so easy to shy away from regular expressions just by seeing them finished, I’ve decided to demonstrate a regular expression construction step-by-step. The expression will validate an hh:mm:ss time pattern.

The results are in: Java has hit the top of mind on Google’s Zeitgeist 2007, scoring the 8th position on the “what …” list. But… “what?” Exactly. If even the average Joe is wondering what is Java, I don’t see how that can be a good thing. What these results tell me is not that there is a burst of new developers willing to learn Java, or that the language is so utterly good that even non-technical people are curious. Google’s Zeitgeist will probably never feature wxWidgets or C++, because they’re just invisible to the end user. You don’t see a wxWidgets logo when a wxWidgets application is loading, nor do you ask a user to update his libc. I would rather hear “I don’t know what is Java” than to hear “Oh, I know. It is that thing that was bugging me!” Java needs better integration with browsers and OSes. Java should be invisible to the end-user.