• Tips and tricks for designing logos
  Nice tips for creating logos.
  (tags: design graphics)
• Improving Groovy Console’s GUI
  The Remouleur strikes back
  (tags: groovy java mac macosx programming)
• Website screen capture in ruby
  Ruby gem to take snapshots of websites from Gecko.
  (tags: ruby howto mozilla)
• Groovy and JRuby Cooperating?
  One day they’ll be in bed altogether
  (tags: groovy jruby)
• Capistrano 2.0
  Capistrano 2.0 is out. Capistrano is a nice tool that nicely automates the whole deployment process of Rails applications. It is a bit hard in the beginning, but definitly worth it once you get it!
  (tags: deployment capistrano rails rubyonrails ruby programming)
• Capistrano Home
  The Capistrano homepage.
  (tags: capistrano ruby rails deployment rubyonrails tools programming)

… a very stupid Java library (or framework if you like that) for handling the JavaEE web tier like that:

• controllers are servlets, with requests dispatched either by a Front Controller servlet or a filter
• views are JSPs
• URL patterns routing to the controllers
• no complicated XML configuration
• … and that’s it.

To put it in another way, what I am looking for is a deadly stupid way of implementing the web tier in a similar fashion as what you can do with Rails or Django (note: I am not looking for Grails or another full stack Rails clone).

I’ve been Googling a bit and could not find that. I’ve also scratched my head a bit but could not remember having ever seen that in the Java space.

Thanks in advance

Hi everyone,

I’m leaving France tomorrow to stay a bit more than 3 weeks in Sydney, Australia, so don’t be too surprised if the activity here is slow…

Have fun

• Closures in Action: searching jars
  How to look for Jars in Groovy.
  (tags: groovy programming tutorial)
• Speaking thru experience: My Grails Practices
  Tips for Grails (Groovy RoR clone). I personaly don’t like Grails that much, but still worth the read.
  (tags: programming groovy)
• PostgreSQL publishes first real benchmark
  A benchmark of what I consider to be the best full-blown opensource relationnal database server. (full bench at http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q3/jAppServer2004-20070606-00065.html).
  (tags: database postgresql)
• Carol McDonald’s Blog: Sample Application using JSF, Seam, and Java Persistence APIs on Glassfish
  The PetStore JavaEE sample applications using JBoss Seam / JSF, JPA (new-generation CMP EJB ) running on Glassfish.
  (tags: java tutorial seam jboss)
• Storm
  A Python ORM developed by Canonical (Ubuntu).
  (tags: database db ORM programming python opensource)

If you started developing in Java only 2 or 3 years ago, you may not have known the good old times when Swing was ugly by default, Apache Jakarta or the Codehaus did not exist (or at least they were not that ubiquitous), the all-XML madness was about to start, and Ruby was still this hacker language that corporations did not care about.

I remember a few libraries and applications of that time. Incidentally, that was also the time when I wrote the first versions of the venerable IzPack Java installer

• XML was starting to be all the rage, but at that time, there was no such javax.xml.* package in the JDK AElfred used to be a nice SAX-style parser.
• Another XML library project, focusing on DOM-style interactions was NanoXML. IzPack still heavily relies on it, but the project has been dead for a long time (and you can’t even find the website anymore).
• JEdit was a famous programmers best-friend editor. Designed with a good plugins system, it had an strong momentum. It has dropped recently, especially since the main author decided to focus his attention on a language nobody cares about. Oh and he now also bashes everything which contains the word Java or that doesn’t emphasize how superior functional programming languages are to anything else…
• Jext was another editor based on a old version of the JEdit editor component. Romain stopped developping it, but since then, he has done quite a few interesting things JEdit was probably better from a technical point of view, but Jext had a better user interface. I wrote many versions of IzPack using Jext until I switched to Eclipse, and now a combination of IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse.
• Jython, a port of Python to Java was probably the first attempt at scripting languages on the JVM that had some success. The project then fell asleep for a while, sticking on Python 1.5. The development seems to have started again recently following the hype for dynamic languages on the JVM!
• SkinLF was a trendy Swing look and feel providing skinnable themes written by Fred Lavigne.
• Kunststoff was also a very trendy look and feel for Java. It was basically an extension of the default Swing Metal theme with grey colors and gradients. Oh, and I also contributed some code to this project

This list is all that came back to my memories for this evening, but please do not hesitate if you remember another project of the good old times of Java!