Released JPublish 0.7 last night after my presentation for the South Florida Java Users Group. I am happy about both. JPublish 0.7 represents a big step forward in terms of ease of use and the presentation went quite well with over 30 minutes of question and answer afterwards. I am tired but I feel like it was worthwhile.
Getting closer to releasing version 0.7 of JPublish. I have been focusing a lot on making the examples easy to run and on improving the documentation. My presentation on web frameworks is today and I was hoping to have JPublish 0.7 released by then, but I really want the example application and documentation completed before I release it. Let's see how the day goes - perhaps I will finish the example app but not the docs and release it as such.
FormProc version 0.6 is now available at http://formproc.sf.net/.] . This release fixes the bugs in 0.5 and 0.5.1 and improves the deployment of the example code immensely by making the example application an executable JAR and the web app a WAR.
Now hopefully I can get back into JPublish...
I will be giving a presentation on open source Java web application frameworks at the South Florida Java Users Group if anyone is interested. The meeting is January 16th, 6:30 PM at Nova University in Ft. Lauderdale. I will be giving an overview of what web application frameworks are and then will explain the strengths and weaknesses of six different frameworks:
JPublish
Speaking of JPublish, I am currently working on the 0.7 release. My research into other frameworks has helped me realize that I need to focus on initial installation and ease-of-use of JPublish. To that end I am creating several WAR files which can be dropped into any servlet engine which supports WAR files. This has been challenging because currently JPublish requires full paths or paths relative to the working directory, whereas a servlet engine should use paths relative to the application context. It is coming along though, and I hope to have the next release out before my presentation.
Released version 0.5 of FormProc yesterday and a minor bugfix for it today. That'll teach me to not release after 10PM.
I am diving back into JPublish after some time away from it. I have decided that JPublish really needs to be packaged as a WAR so potential user's can just drop it into their servlet engine and see it actually running. Struts does a REALLY good job of this. Everything in Struts including the documentation is in a WAR so you have to deploy it to see it.
Haven't posted in a little while. I released version 0.4 of DataBind and EdenLib is now in Beta. I have been working hard on the next release of EdenCRM, but I just haven't been able to find the time to get it to a stable releasable state - I keep adding features. :-)
Has anyone ever considered writing load balancing software in Java? I was thinking about the state of load balancing software recently because our Local Director here at the office doesn't understand application level failures so it has no way of taking a box out of service if there is a problem at the application level. This got me to thinking: how hard would it be to write a Java app which would listen as a server on specified ports forwarding data to other addresses, which allowed you to easily add extensions which could deal with application level errors (for example doing regexp to determine if a server is sending 500 Internal Server Error messages)? Someone stop me because I see my next project on the horizon and I just don't have time to do it right now.
I finally received my new laptop and I must say that I am extremely pleased with it. I spent the weekend setting it up as a dual boot with Mandrake 8 and Windows 2000. Blew up the paritioning a couple times requiring me to start over. I finally found the good install order and now it works like a charm. I will finally be able to develop when I am away from the home and office!
EdenCRM
I have been working hard on EdenCRM. I spent a couple days rewritting the message storage and retrieval system in the mail module only to throw it away because I wasn't happy with how complex it was becoming. Now I am having issues with a swing component which seems to be caching its state in some way. Grr...
Development Environment
I am so stoked about the work which the authors of jEdit and all of the plugins for jEdit have done. If you want proof that Java can be used as a legitimate desktop development language then look no further than jEdit. Now that Ant integration is provided by the AntHill plugin I can ditch my commercial development environment and use jEdit exclusively! I love open source software and would much rather use it than commercial software.
This makes me wonder - do you think that commercial software developers are scared of the open source movement? I would be.
Work
Uhhh...yeah, I have to.
I finally got the creative juices going again. The funny thing is that I did it by working on a project who's last release 2 and 1/2 months ago. DataBind 0.3 is now available at http://databind.sf.net/. I added support for loading and storing collections of objects as well as for specifying search parameters in a data-store independant method.
Now if I can spend some time on EdenCRM...
I just can't get myself going today. I got postfix working on the Mandrake box I set up, along with IMAP and Tomcat. I know I need to work and be productive but I am just feeling drained today. I am not even in the mood to work on my open source projects. Guess this is one of those wasted days.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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