niallp

Eclipse 3.7 Release comes with Maven

2011-06-22T23:55:00Z

Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo) has been released and it now comes with built in Apache Maven support through the M2E plugin. The M2E plugin, originally developed by Sonatype, was donated to The Eclipse Foundation. Now its made into its first release it has finally become one of the standard Eclipse tools.

Wikipedia edited to mislead

2011-03-06T20:27:00Z

My wife's a fan of the ITV's Dancing on Ice show. Tonight they had a competition where the question was What soap is Suzanne Shaw currently starring in? Just after the question was broadcast, someone edited (twice) the Wikipedia page for Suzanne Shaw changing the Emerdale references to Hollyoaks.

The good thing was that it was only 6 minutes before someone else had corrected the entry back to what it should have been.

Commons Lang 2.6 released

2011-01-20T16:43:00Z

The Apache Commons team has announced the release of Commons Lang 2.6 which can be downloaded here.

See the Release Notes for details of changes / bug fixes in the release.

Commons IO 2.0.1 Released

2011-01-01T16:33:00Z

The Apache Commons team has announced the release of Commons IO 2.0.1 which can be downloaded here.

Java 7 & 8 Votes pass but 2 more EC members resign

2010-12-10T21:03:00Z

The votes for Java 7 (JSR 336) and Java 8 (JSR 337) both passed but with 3 of the Executive Committee(EC) voting against and half of those voicing their displeasure at the continuing Java licensing dispute.

Following the vote two more Executive Committee (EC) members of the Java Community Process (JCP) resigned. Doug Lee resigned in October and now Tim Peierls and The Apache Software Foundation have followed:

Stephen Colebourne has a great post titled Is the JCP Dead? which goes into the background of the issue.

Commons IO 2.0 Released

2010-10-23T17:11:00Z

The Apache Commons team has announced the release of Commons IO 2.0 which can be downloaded here.

Commons IO is a library that contains utility classes, stream implementations, file filters, file comparators and components for dealing with IO operations. The release notes contains the full details of the enhancements and bug fixes in IO 2.0, but below is a summary of whats new:

Java 5

Commons IO 2.0 has moved to JDK 1.5 allowing improvements both internally and in the external API. Except for the new minimum JDK requirement, however, it is otherwise backwards compatible with the previous release, which required JDK 1.3.

Streams, Readers & Writers

There are a number of new InputStream / Reader and OutputStream / Writer implementations in IO 2.0:

BOMInputStream (and its associated ByteOrderMark) - wraps a stream and provides functionality to detect and/or exclude a Byte Order Mark.
XmlStreamReader and XmlStreamWriter provide wrapper implementations that detect the encoding of XML documents
ReaderInputStream and WriterOutputStream provide wrappers to convert from Readers/Writers to Input/OutputStreams - these implementations are typically used in situations where an existing API only accepts a stream, but where the stream contains character data that must be encoded/decoded for further use.
TaggedInputStream and TaggedOutputStream provide a mechanism to tag an exception so that the stream causing it can be easily identified
BoundedInputStream limits the bytes read from a stream
StringBuilderWriter provides an un-synchronized alternative to StringWriter.
BrokenInputStream and BrokenOutputStream can be used to test stream exception handling (all their methods throw an exception)

As well as these new streams the Proxy InputStream, OutputStream, Reader & Writer implementations have had exception handling and pre/post processing support added.

File Alteration Monitor

The File Alteration Monitor is a component for monitoring file system events (directory and file create, update and delete events). It originated in the JCI FAM module but has been refactored to improve performance and allow selective monitoring of the file system using filters. See the FileAlterationObserver JavaDocs for examples of how to use this component.

Tailer

The Tailer component is a simple implementation of the unix "tail -f" functionality. Register a TailerListener implementation to be notified of new lines in a file.

Utilities

IOUtils

New Closeable and Socket flavour implementations of the closeQuietly() method
New skipFully() methods for InputStreams and Readers
A new toBufferedInputStream() method that avoids unnecessary array allocation/copy

FileUtils

A new isSymlink() method to detect sym links
A new sizeOf(File) method which, if the file is a directory, sums the sizes of the files recursively
New methods for getting the system's home directory file or path
New methods for getting the system's temporary directory file or path

FilenameUtils

New flavours of the normalize() and normalizeNoEndSeparator() methods where the separator can be specified

FileSystemUtils

New implementation of the freeSpaceKb() method that has no arguments
New implementations of the freeSpaceKb() methods that take a timeout parameter

Comparators

All the comparator implementations now include convenience methods for sorting lists or arrays
A new CompositeFileComparator implementation has been added which allows two or more file comparators to be combined
A new DirectoryFileComparator implementation has been added which compares files based on whether a file is a directory or not

File Filters

A new Magic Number file filter has been added which matches files containing a "magic number"
FileFilterUtils has the following additions:

New methods for creating name, prefix and suffix filters whether the case sensitivity is specified.
New methods to filter arrays, lists and sets
New varargs methods for creating AndFileFilter and OrFileFilter instances

Maven Hits the Sweet Spot!

2010-10-10T18:53:00Z

The Maven team has announced the release of Maven 3.0, which can be downloaded here.

I used to see Maven as a useful tool for producing consistent builds but that started to change with version 0.9.7 of M2Eclipse (current version is 0.10.0). Maven's integration with Eclipse through the M2Eclipse plugin makes it an important productivity tool enabling, for example, easy checkout and project setup. Good IDE integration was not possible with Maven 2 and was one of the reasons the Maven Team decided to rewrite version 3 with a complete new architecture. The M2Eclipse plugin (and NetBeans integration) has been based on Maven 3 code for a while.

Whats New?

The best new features of Maven 3 are internal and the real benefits of this release are the possibilities it opens up for features in the future. Jason van Zyl (founder of maven) talks about them in this video and blog, but these include things such as mixins (pom composition, rather than inheritance) and different format poms. Having said that there are improvements in performance (including parallel builds) and error and integrity reporting that make it worth upgrading. The other area the Maven team have put in a big effort are in integration tests to minimise the issues of upgrading.

The one area that is lagging in Maven 3 is reporting. The reporting section of the pom has been removed and report plugins now have to be configured in as part of the Site plugin's configuration. This requires a Maven 3 specific version of the Site plugin.

Even if you decide not to upgrade at the moment, try building your project with Maven 3 and fix the issues it reports. The error and integrity reporting catches more errors, displays better error messages & line numbers and provides links to help on the error.

Upgrading

Read the Compatibility Notes
Upgrade the plugin versions - see the Plugin Compatibility Matrix
Test the build with Maven 3, resolving any warnings or errors in the output
Upgrade the reporting plugin versions - see Site Plugin Compatibility Matrix
Configure the new Maven 3 Site plugin
Test the site generation

(Note: I encountered MSITE-484 when inheriting reporting configuration in a sub module, which the suggested combine.chlidren="append" solution resolved. The Site plugin is currently version 3.0-beta-2 and the maven team are working to improve the situation).

Creating an implementation of the Bean Validation specification (JSR303)

2009-10-23T03:14:00Z

JSR 303 is the specification request for Bean Validation which is currently undergoing the Final Approval Ballot (due to complete on 2nd November 2009).

The reference implementation for the JSR (Hibernate Validator 4) was recently released under the Apache License 2.0 and is available to download here.

A couple of people have expressed an interest in creating a version 2 of Commons Validator based on the Bean Validation specification and an area in the Commons Sandbox has been setup to do this. Until recently, not much progress had been made, so I decided to try and kick start the effort with the following proposal to the Commons dev mailing list.

In summary the idea is to have three modules:

Bean Validation API - a new clean room implementation of the JSR 303 API - DONE but needs javadocs
Validation Routines - based on the existing Validator routines & checkdigit packages, these are standalone routines with no dependencies (including JSR 303) - DONE.
Validation Framework - A new validation framework implementation based on the JSR303 implementation (depends on API and routines modules) - NOT YET STARTED

So anyone interested in helping create a JSR 303 implementation is welcome to join in at Apache Commons (N.B. access to Commons Sandbox is available to ANY existing Apache committer - you just have to ask).

London Java Web User Group's 5th Anniversary

2009-05-20T23:57:00Z

The London Java Web User Group (JAVAWUG) held its 48th meetup tonight hosted, for the first time, by EMC Consulting at our London Bridge office.

It was the fifth anniversary since the group started and its come a long way since 2004 when it was the Struts London Meetup with five or six of us having a few beers and a chat. Most of us have moved on from Struts and so has the User Group with talks on a wide range of java related topics and technologies. Kudos to Peter Pilgrim who has run this from the start and turned it into a success. Hopefully EMC can play a small part in helping that to continue.

Tonight’s meeting was an open mike style with five short talks. The first was a demonstration of custom JavaFX components built for a BBC sound emulator (Peter Pilgrim), followed by a demonstration of dodgy hacks of JDK classes (Peter Lawrey) and an intro to Jasper Reports (Phil Zoio). The star of the evening for me though was Cagatay Civici's demonstration of the PrimeFaces Ajax JSF component library and I hope there’s an opportunity for him to come back and give a full presentation because it looked impressive. Paul King wrapped up the evening with a quick overview of the highlights in groovy 1.6 and whats upcoming in 1.7.

To be honest I'm not a big fan of the open mike style since there isn't enough time to go into any depth, but it was a good event with a reasonable turn out and the only hitch for our first time hosting JavaWUG was a lack of wifi access.