Tom's Blog

Rich Hickey, inventor of the Clojure language, and Stuart Halloway, author of "Programming Clojure," presented introductory and advanced concepts of the young JVM language at Wednesday's Northern Virginia Java Users Group. These are some of my notes from the meeting. The session served to whet interest in learning Clojure, thus these notes do not include a lot of code or explain Clojure's unusual syntax. There are many other sources for that.

Clojure, a Lisp-like language that compiles to Java byte code and runs on the Java virtual machine, was created as a general-purpose programming language that embraces a functional style of software design, rather than the imperative style typical in languages like Java -- and most other general purpose languages in use today. Functional programming languages like Clojure, Scheme and Erlang have been getting a lot of attention at technology conferences over the last few years, which first brought my attention to Clojure. Its functional style and its ability to run alongside and integrate with existing Java code interested me in learning more about Clojure. The fact that its inventor and a technology instructor I highly respect were presenting a free session on Clojure compelled me to attend the JUG meeting.

Rich Hickey released the first version of Clojure in October, 2007, with version 1.0 released May 1, 2009. We are talking about a young language. Still, from what I learned last night, it looks like a powerful language with potential. Clojure is released as open source under the Eclipse Public License 1.0, which makes it easy to use in a non-open source commercial environment.

Stu Halloway, co-founder of the top-notch professional training and agile consulting company Relevance Inc., began with an introduction to Clojure's features and why a Java developer might want to learn it. Rich then took over and introduced three new features of Clojure (Protocols, Reify and Datatypes) that can be downloaded from the latest source tree but are not part of the current 1.1 release of the language.

According to Stu, some of the compelling features of Clojure are its:

• Easy interoperability with Java
• Lisp syntax
• Functional style
• Ability to run in a multi-threaded environment with no coding overhead

To demonstrate the syntax benefit, Stu "refactored" the StringUtils.isBlank method from the Apache Commons lang library. He started by showing the full Java source code and then removing all the ceremonial scaffolding code to expose the core logic, then simplified the Java code into the definition of an equivalent Clojure function:

(defn blank? [s]
     (every? #(Character/isWhitespace %) s))

I'm not a Clojure programmer (yet) but I think I captured the above syntax correctly. Like Ruby, Clojure uses the question mark to replace the traditional "is" prefix in boolean functions. The # symbol introduces an anonymous function. From what Stu described, the functional programming paradigm in Clojure handles most (all?) corner cases for you. There is no need to write special-case "if" statements to deal with a null parameter, for instance.

For Clojure's interoperability with Java, Clojure code can call Java, and Java code can call Clojure functions. (According to Rich, the integration is implemented with little or no need to use Java reflection at runtime, adding less runtime overhead.)

For Clojure's advantage by using Lisp syntax, Stu referred everyone to Paul Graham's 2001 article, "What Made Lisp Different" as the best explanation. Most languages have "special forms" like imports, scopes, protection definitions, metadata, keywords. These special forms are language features you can use, but you cannot create them yourself and add them to the language. These language features are thus unavailable for reuse. Lisp abandoned this restriction. In a Lisp-like language, special forms of the language look like anything else in the language. All forms of the language are created equal. In Lisp (and Clojure), defining scope, the control flow, method calls, operators, functions, import mechanisms -- they are all lists. Stu said a language's "special forms" restrictions cause a programming language to "crap out," and joked that the restrictions bring about magical cut-and-paste reuse workarounds we call "design patterns."

For Clojure's advantage by being a functional language, Clojure encourages you to write small pieces of code that work well together. Good code has the same shape as pseudo code, he said, and Clojure's functional style lets you create more pseudo-code looking real code. According to Stu, functional languages are simpler to understand. They let you write code that eliminates or reduces what he called "incidental complexity" required by non-functional languages:

• Corner cases
• Class definitions
• Internal exit points
• Variables
• Branches

The resulting code is less complex, he said, and simpler to understand by orders of magnitude.

The final benefit he talked about is Clojure's inherent ability to run in a multi-threaded environment with no special concurrency-handling code from the developer. Clojure and other functional programming languages perform this feat by treating data as immutable and producing a new copy of a data structure when data needs to be changed. Two threads never look at the same data at the same time, so there is never any need to synchronize access to code that reads and writes data. Clojure's solution, Stu said, is to separate identify from value. He went on to explain what this means, but maybe the late hour caused me to miss the details.

Rich Hickey

After Stuart set the stage for why learn and use Clojure, Rich Hickey took over to talk about new features he is adding to the language. He said, quite truthfully, that for those in the audience who don't already know Clojure, what he was about to say would not make a lot of sense. These features are Protocols, Reify and Datatypes. As a result of my newness to Clojure, I will pass along what I thought Rich said and hope he and the Clojure crowd forgive my ignorance.

Rich, for an open source programming language inventor, was a refreshingly clear advocate for his new language. Maybe I'm jaded from years of slogging through open-source code, but from my experience, most open source projects release their code with little explanation of how or even why to use it, and then treat users like they are the ones who failed if they misunderstand how to use the code correctly. Rich actually understood where most of us in the audience were coming from. "I know it's a big deal to try to learn a new programming language," he said, but he believes Clojure is worth taking the time to learn and will make our jobs as programmers easier.

Before delving into the new features he is adding, Rich provided a summary of how Clojure is implemented. Part of it is written in Java for performance, and the rest is written in Clojure itself. He said his goal is to eventually write most of Clojure in Clojure once he can get performance boosted to an equivalent level.

Clojure is built using abstractions, with those abstractions written as Java interfaces. The fundamental implementation objectives of Clojure (or at least the ones I picked up on), he said, are to leverage high-performance polymorphism mechanisms of the host environment, to write to abstractions not concrete types, and to enable extension and interoperability with Java.

From what I understood of the new language features, Protocols are named sets of generic functions. Reify allows developers to use the "cool code generation" in the built-in fn function. "I put a lot of work into 'fn' and I wanted to make it reusable," he said. Even though it went over my head, Rich said Reify allows developers to create an instance of an unnamed type that implements protocols, like proxy for protocols. For the new Datatypes feature, if I understood correctly, he said he added a new construct, deftype, to define a name for a type and list of fields in that type.

Additional details that might make sense if you know Clojure:

• Datatypes fields can be primitives
• Datatypes support metadata and value-based equality by default
• In-line method definitions are true methods, no indirection or lookup and calls can be inlined by just-in-time compilers, like Hotspot
• Keyword-style field lookups can be inlined just like (.field x) calls

Rich concluded by offering more reasons to explore and begin using Clojure. "Closure has dramatically less implicit complexity than other languages," he said. You don't need to write a lot of code simply to support the needs of the language. You spend your time with Clojure focusing on domain complexity, not language complexity, he said. "It has a lot of newness, so the unfamiliarity level is high," he said. "But it is very, very simple."

Thursday March 18, 2010 Permalink Comments [0] Let me start this review of Dan Brown's latest novel by saying I read Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code and thoroughly enjoyed the stories and the storytelling. Second, although The Lost Symbol was at times painful to read, I do not join other critics who point out the preachy, moralistic ending. Sometimes we need a reminder to return to the basics of our morality. Finally, I plan to reveal minor details of the book here but I won't disclose any plot twists or surprises.

The Lost Symbol reads as if Dan Brown had been kidnapped and tortured by the Masons, just like one of the characters in the book is kidnapped and tortured by an evildoer, and forced to write this book under duress. Each chapter, while revealing frat-boy antics committed by the Masons during its rituals, also includes what seem to be apologies to the reader for those antics. Brown constantly reminds the reader that Masons have included the geniuses of history, the rich, the politically powerful -- including, he says, most of the high-ranking members of all three branches of the U.S. government. Whenever a character in the book criticizes a Masonic activity, the hero of the book reminds us how warm and cuddly the Masons really are to the point that the subtitle of the book could have been, "Hug a Mason Today."

The constant apologies for the Masons is not why I thought this book was a Brown dud. I actually learned what I hope are facts about Masonic history from this book, which I thought were enlightening and interesting. No, the worst part of this book is the amateurish writing and the forced, silly narrative. Brown wanted to ladle so much history and symbology onto the pages that the hero of the story, Robert Langdon, has to constantly stop and lecture one or more of the other characters in this book on the history of Freemasonry and all the wonderful contributions the world has received unto it by a Mason. We're 30 seconds from the clutches of the bad guys, from whom we are running so we can save someone's life, but wait, let's stop a moment so I can explain in historic detail a particular symbol, or show you this nifty, magical number sequence and spell out in detail why it pertains to our rescue mission. Those stop-and-explain moments clue the reader in early that the tension the author is trying so hard to build must not be really all that tense if the main characters have so much time to marvel over history while being hotly pursued.

To add to the amateurish narrative, the characters, all portrayed as very smart and world-wise, are shocked, shocked! at every predictable turn of events. The characters actually exclaim, quite regularly, "Oh my God!" when something occurs that the readers will have predicted 5 pages ago, pandering to our egos so we can constantly pat ourselves on the back on how smart we are. Langdon, who is surprised the most, has evolved from a savvy, likeable university professor in The Da Vinci Code to a naive, gullible idiot savant. What? You mean this secret package as heavy as a bowling ball, the one my good friend and mentor (and, gasp, a 33rd degree Mason) told me years ago to keep safe and guard with my life because evil people across the entire globe would kill for it, and for which I got a mysterious phone call this morning telling me to bring this vital package to Washington, D.C., this heavy package I have been carrying over my shoulder, which I completely forgot I was carrying even though my shoulder is aching from the weight, might have something to do with why my friend and mentor has been kidnapped? Oh my God! How could this be? I'm shocked! Shocked! And sadly, I'm not exaggerating.

Another example of the irritating writing packed inside The Lost Symbol is that nearly every chapter begins with a retelling of what has occurred up to this point -- just in case the previous section had lulled you into a deep case of neurasthenia and you lost all memory of the previous dozen pages. Why Dan Brown felt he had to constantly summarize previous events is a mystery. If you ignore my suggestion to pass on this book, you will remark to yourself each chapter how you haven't seen such great recapping of events since watching the first three minutes of Batman reruns from the 1960s where they summarize the previous week's cliffhanger.

As the final reader irritation (especially to us in Washington, D.C.), Brown gets some of his D.C. geography, details and landmarks wrong. Here are some of the more obvious factual indiscretions:

• His limo driver takes him from Dulles Airport to the Capitol via an unlikely route: the Dulles toll road to the beltway to the George Washington Parkway, then finally over the Memorial Bridge. Unless I-66 was closed, the limo driver would not have taken the beltway.
• The book says the trip from the airport took a half hour. Not by taking the GW Parkway to the Memorial Bridge it doesn't.
• When Langdon's limo crosses the Potomac, Langdon looks to left of the Lincoln Memorial to see the Jefferson Memorial. Didn't Brown check a map? Or did his researcher mistake the Kennedy Center for the Jefferson? The Jefferson is way over to the right.
• Langdon enters the Capitol Visitor Center on a Sunday and sees tour groups inside the Rotunda. The visitor center is closed on Sundays. There are no public tours.
• Langdon crosses the street from Freedom Plaza and enters the Metro system to get away from the bad guys. The closest Metro station to Freedom Plaza is a couple of blocks away, not across the street.
• When the bad guys try to arrest Langdon as the Metro train pulls into the station, the train conductor is driving from the third car. Metrorail conductors always drive from the first car.
• The metro conductor exits the car without opening the doors. I guess he could have squeezed out the side window, but I think Brown would have included that contortionist trick in the narrative.

Those are a few of the errors a D.C. resident, regular visitor or observant tourist would notice. Since I mentioned a few of the book's D.C.-centric errors, to his credit, Brown does have Langdon notice the hum of the limo's wheels change as he approaches the Memorial Bridge, a sign that Brown knows the road is cobblestone between the Parkway exit and the roundabout approaching the bridge.

Since Brown's previous two books were so much better, I have to ask, What happened? That's why I had to conclude from reading The Lost Symbol that Brown must have been kidnapped by some group intent on rehabilitating the public's view of the Masons after Brown's previous books made these types of secret societies look evil. The real lost symbol of the book is hidden in plain sight. The words on the page, those everyday alphabetic symbols, are Dan Brown's way of crying out to the reader: "Can't you tell from this stilted writing and my obvious mistakes of D.C. geography that any tourist would pick up on that I've been kidnapped and forced to write this? Help me!"

If indeed Dan Brown has been seen in public since the book's publication in September, and he isn't a prisoner of the Masons, the only other reasons I can see for this book being so bad after two previous entertaining novels are:

• The Lost Symbol was a contractual obligation book. Maybe the book was motivated by Doubleday reminding Brown of the $5 million advance and the promise of another $10 million upon delivery of the manuscript.
• This book reflects Dan Brown's actual writing ability, and he got in a major tiff with his editor. The Lost Symbol is the editor's revenge.

Overall, if you still feel compelled to read this book, do like I did and buy the ebook version. At least no tree would have been required to share your suffering. My plea to the Masons: Free Dan Brown before he writes another book.
Saturday December 05, 2009 Permalink Comments [0] For the past few months, tech publisher Manning Publications has impressed me with its marketing push by offering quick-strike discounts on print and ebooks. Until Manning's recent marketing and discounts, I was buying a Manning book maybe once a year, and I almost never bought it directly from the publisher. Instead, I'd usually check sites like BestBookBuys to find who had the title I was looking for at the best price. But with its steep short-term discount offers, and my newfound fondness for ebooks, I have purchased Manning books in recent months on Groovy, Grails, Spring and Ext JS, almost always buying the ebook version for $10 to $15 -- a great price for a tech book.

As part of its marketing push, Manning offers daily and weekly discount codes on its website and Twitter feed. Discounts are often 50% or more from its regular price. Tuesday, for example, the Ext JS In Action ebook for which I paid about $15 a few weeks ago (on discount from $27.50) was on sale for $10. (The book, not yet in print by Jesus Garcia, is a great introduction and explanation on how to use the Ext JS 3.0 component library and the only book I found available at the time covering version 3.0.)

In addition to the book discounts, following Manning's marketing message won me an additional $300. In one of Manning's emails in August, I learned that Manning was holding a monthlong technology quiz in September. Manning posted a question daily on a technology topic related to one of its books, with a $300 grand prize to the contestant who could answer the most questions correctly. The tech quiz was great marketing because it brought me and hundreds of others to the Manning website daily. As a quiz incentive, Manning gave away two ebooks every day to two contestants and offered a daily discount on one or more of its books. After answering 30 technical questions, on topics as diverse as features of ActiveMQ, Clojure and Silverlight, I'm proud to say I walked away as the grand prize winner. The competition was stiff. Manning said it had 1,500 contestants. Toward the end of September, there were still about a dozen people with perfect scores with just days left in the contest. After the final question, only two contestants remained with perfects scores, me and Belgian developer Renaud Florquin. I was lucky to be randomly selected as the grand prize winner. (Thanks again, Manning.)

In addition to improving its marketing and pricing, Manning also has impressed me recently by expanding its ebook file formats. Previously, Manning offered its ebooks only in PDF format. Earlier this month, Manning announced it will begin offering its books in the mobi and EPUB file formats. That's great for me because I like reading books in the mobi format on my BlackBerry using the free Mobipocket reader. Ebooks have won me over from the paper version of tech books because of their searchability, the ability to cut and paste code, and their ultra portability by being on my phone and laptop when I visit customer offices. The mobi format is also supported by the Kindle, while the EPUB format is popular with devices like Sony Reader, the nook and the iPhone.

Keep it up, Manning. If you keep offering good technology books at great prices in flexible formats, I will continue to be a regular customer.
Wednesday November 25, 2009 Permalink Comments [0] Technical pride prompted me to write my first Griffon application Tuesday. Griffon is a Groovy-based framework to write Java desktop applications. Groovy takes some of the sting out of writing Java Swing applications and Griffon relieves more of the burden. My pride came into the picture when Manning Publications released its daily Pop Quiz yesterday asking what technique one would use to process the shutdown of a Griffon application running on OS X. Manning posts a new question each day of September, and as of today, I'm running a perfect score. I couldn't let a little question about Griffon stop me. However, since Griffon is so new (its stable release is 0.1.2) and developers are only now starting to play with it, googling around for a simple answer didn't turn up much.

After failing to find sample Griffon code that described the application shutdown process (especially with the question's wrinkle of using OS X), I figured I'd write a simple Griffon desktop application and give the technology a spin. In the category of famous last words, "How hard could it be?" Turns out, thankfully, not that hard.

After downloading the Griffon 0.2-BETA zip file, setting my GRIFFON_HOME environment variable to point to the folder where I unzipped the files, and adding the $GRIFFON_HOME/bin directory to my PATH for convenience, I was ready to create my first Griffon application. I followed the instructions on the Griffon Quick Start page and ran the command:

griffon create-app

and typed in my project name (quiz) to create all the files needed for a basic application. The create-app command generates the application scaffolding along the lines of other modern frameworks like Rails, Grails, App Fuse and even Maven.

Once the create-app command created the skeletal the application files, I followed the sample code on the Griffon Quick Start page to augment the files with code to create a simple desktop application. The application provides a window that lets you type in and execute code in the Groovy shell. Griffon structures its files around the Model-View-Controller pattern, creating subdirectories for "models", "views" and "controllers". Here are the directories in the project's "griffon-app" folder:

$ ls griffon-app
conf/  controllers/  i18n/  lifecycle/  models/  resources/  views/

Figure 1 shows the resulting application in action, which you can build and run using the command griffon run-app. I typed the two Groovy statements into the window and clicked the Execute button. One of my first tweaks to the sample application code was to put in place what I learned during my googling around for an answer. I followed the advice of Josh Reed, one of Griffon's six committers. Josh, who uses Griffon in his day job, wrote a blog post this month about how to intercept window closing events that proved quite helpful. I edited the file griffon-app/views/QuizView.groovy to define application properties for defaultCloseOperation and windowClosing so the top of my QuizView.groovy now looked like this:

QuizView.groovy:

import javax.swing.WindowConstants

application(
   title:'quiz',
   pack:true,
   locationByPlatform:true,
   iconImage: imageIcon('/griffon-icon-48x48.png').image,
   iconImages: [imageIcon('/griffon-icon-48x48.png').image,
                imageIcon('/griffon-icon-32x32.png').image,
                imageIcon('/griffon-icon-16x16.png').image],
   defaultCloseOperation: WindowConstants.DO_NOTHING_ON_CLOSE, // ADDED PROPERTY HERE
   windowClosing: { evt ->                                     // AND HERE
       println "QuizView.groovy: windowClosing event called!"
       System.out.flush()
       app.shutdown()
   }

In addition to the println statement to tell me my shutdown hook was invoked, I needed to add the call to app.shutdown() since I was now telling Java not to end the application when its main window was closed by setting the defaultCloseOperation property to the DO_NOTHING_ON_CLOSE. I followed Josh's tip on editing the griffon-app/conf/Application.groovy file to set the autoShutdown property to false. This flag is needed so my window-closing event code would be run instead of the default auto-shutdown behavior. (Thanks for the tip, Josh.)

Application.groovy:

application {
    title='Quiz'
    startupGroups = ['quiz']

    // Should Griffon exit when no Griffon created frames are showing?
    autoShutdown = true

    // If you want some non-standard application class, apply it here
    //frameClass = 'javax.swing.JFrame'
}
mvcGroups {
    // MVC Group for ""
    'quiz' {
        model = 'QuizModel'
        controller = 'QuizController'
        view = 'QuizView'
    }

}

Now when I run the application and close the window, the console shows:

$ griffon run-app
Welcome to Griffon 0.2-BETA - http://griffon.codehaus.org/
Licensed under Apache Standard License 2.0
Griffon home is set to: /home/tom/Projects/Griffon/griffon-0.2-BETA

Base Directory: /home/tom/Projects/ManningQuiz/quiz
Running script /home/tom/Projects/Griffon/griffon-0.2-BETA/scripts/RunApp.groovy
Environment set to development
Warning, target causing name overwriting of name default
  [groovyc] Compiling 3 source files to /home/tom/.griffon/0.2-BETA/projects/quiz/classes
QuizView.groovy: My windowClosing event called!

That's one way to add a shutdown hook to a Griffon application, by adding a listener to fire when the application's window closes. However, this discovery didn't answer the Manning quiz. None of the available answers showed this technique.

More searching around the web pointed me to the compellingly sounding griffon-app/lifecycle files created by the create-app scaffolding command. One of these auto-generated files is called Shutdown.groovy. It couldn't get more obvious or more easy than that, I suppose. The contents of this file show helpful comments describing how to add shutdown hooks to your application.

griffon-app/lifecycle/Shutdown.groovy

/*
 * This script is executed inside the EDT, so be sure to
 * call long running code in another thread.
 *
 * You have the following options
 * - SwingBuilder.doOutside { // your code  }
 * - Thread.start { // your code }
 * - SwingXBuilder.withWorker( start: true ) {
 *      onInit { // initialization (optional, runs in current thread) }
 *      work { // your code }
 *      onDone { // finish (runs inside EDT) }
 *   }
 *
 * You have the following options to run code again inside EDT
 * - SwingBuilder.doLater { // your code }
 * - SwingBuilder.edt { // your code }
 * - SwingUtilities.invokeLater { // your code }
 */

I thought I'd edit this file and add some custom shutdown code. I added this to the end of the above file:

import groovy.swing.SwingBuilder

def swing = new SwingBuilder()
swing.doOutside {
    println "doOutside called in the Shutdown.groovy lifecycle"
}

With these few extra lines of code, running the application (griffon run-app) and closing the window resulted in these lines on the console. (I eliminated the Griffon startup information.):

QuizView.groovy: My windowClosing event called!
doOutside called in the Shutdown.groovy lifecycle

Interesting to see that the application's window-closing event occurred before the application shutdown event. That makes perfect sense.

But Wait, There's More

Unfortunately, this solution didn't seem to satisfy any of the available options in the Manning quiz. (Except for the tantalizingly tempting "None of the above" fourth option.) I didn't want to give up yet in finding a solution. The available quiz answers that seemed worthy of looking into talked about defining event handlers for the "ShutdownStart" event or the "ShutdownEnd" event. According to the Release Notes for version 0.1, runtime events may be added to the controller class. The notes list all events that may fired by the application during its life cycle:

• BootstrapEnd
• StartupStart
• StartupEnd
• ReadyStart
• ReadyEnd
• ShutdownStart

Since no event for ShutdownEnd is in the list, I figured the Manning quiz answer was probably defining an event handler for ShutdownStart. Since I wanted to be sure, I added a tiny event handler, with code borrowed from the sample in the Release Notes, to my controller class in griffon-app/controllers/QuizController.groovy:

    def onShutdownStart = { app ->
        println "Controller onShutdownDown says ${app.config.application.title} is shutting down."
    }

I re-ran the application and shut it down, and the console now showed:

QuizView.groovy: My windowClosing event called!
Controller onShutdownDown says Quiz is shutting down.
doOutside called in the Shutdown.groovy lifecycle

The lines show all of my shutdown code successfully got called. So here's what I learned in my foray into Griffon:

• There are at least THREE ways to handle events that fire when an application is shut down
• Writing event listeners in Groovy/Griffon is a lot easier than Swing
• There is no requirement to register the runtime event with the source of the event
• Griffon (and Groovy) do their share to ease programming by defining conventions over requiring configuration

The nice bonus in playing with Griffon was the scaffolding-building create-app command got me started and running quickly. I was able to create a Griffon desktop Java application, add three ways to capture runtime events, compile and test the application several times -- all in less time it took me to write this blog documenting these facts. I don't know whether Griffon can win the hearts of developers who want to write desktop applications, but I sure think it can win the hearts of Java developers who would otherwise be stuck writing a straight Swing application. If you're a Swing developer, definitely check out what Groovy and now Griffon have to offer in ease of development and simpler code writing. I look forward to seeing what Griffon becomes once it reaches the 1.0 milestone.


Wednesday September 23, 2009 Permalink Comments [0] The bloom of the Japanese cherry trees in Washington, D.C. is at its peak, so Renee and I went over to the Tidal Basin at dawn this morning to watch the sun come up behind the Jefferson Memorial. We got some nice photos.

I was surprised at how popular the Tidal Basin was at 6 a.m. During the Cherry Blossom Festival, D.C. has turned Ohio Drive SW into a one-way street going north, with parking available on the west side along the Potomac. By sunrise at 6:47 a.m., there almost wasn't a parking spot left. There was a plethora of photographers lined up along the Tidal Basin walking path, all prepared with their tripods and telephotos. Renee set up her tripod near one tree, while I roamed around shooting hand-held, which made for a lot of blurry photos in the pre-dawn twilight. I shot at ISO 800 initially, then switched to ISO 200 in the hopes that it would let me blow-up the photos extra-large without as much graininess. Still, I was shooting at 1/30 of a second and slower for a lot of the early photos. That's what I like about shooting digital: I deleted about 60% of my photos with no thought to all the "film" I wasted.

Visiting the Tidal Basin before dawn to enjoy the cherry blossoms was a good idea. The area around the basin was packed a couple of hours later, with the usual gridlock traffic on Independence Avenue SW and the Memorial Bridge entering the district from Virginia. If you're in D.C. and plan to visit the cherry blossoms on Sunday, definitely arrive early. I saw a lot of cars idling along the Memorial Bridge, slowly crawling toward D.C. -- and probably not finding a close space to park.

I uploaded several of my photos from today and from last weekend to Picasa Web Albums.

Some cherry tree facts: There are 1,678 cherry trees around the Tidal Basin, with more surrounding neighboring roads and parks. Trees originally were planted around the Tidal Basin in 1912 as a gift of friendship from the people of Japan. About 400 of the present trees were propagated from the original 1912 trees. The health of the trees often suffers as a result of their beauty. The crowds who visit the area often tromp around the base of the trees, compacting the soil. The drainage in the area could use some improvement, too, as you'll notice when you have to walk around some of the flooded areas along the Tidal Basin path -- forcing you to compact the soil even more around those trees. New trees need to be planted regularly to replace the suffering ones, which is probably one reason none of the trees you see there are ancient.

If you are interested in planting a Yoshino cherry tree at your home like the ones along the Tidal Basin, the non-profit American Forests sells them online. My "green" plug for the planet.


Saturday April 04, 2009 Permalink Comments [0]