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Random bullet points that are related to Java stuff

I have been very busy lately as I am still writing my PhD thesis... many apologies to my readers, I promise to become more active as soon as I can

Here is a collection of (not that) random thoughts I have collected over the week.

• Guilder is a promising build management project that wants to fix the Maven shortcomings. It is based on Groovy to make a nice internal domain-specific language. Oh and it uses IzPack
• PicoContainer is still alive! The developers have upgraded it to Java 5 and made a few nice improvements. If you are looking for an IoC container then I strongly suggest that you have a look at it. I know that Google Guice is highly hyped these days, but quite frankly PicoContainer is a very solid alternative: lighter, simple containers model, works with 3rd-party libraries out of the box, simple lifecycle facilities, ... Trying both is the best way to make a choice, but my personal preference is set on PicoContainer over Guice.
• Groovy is an amazing productivity booster... I've been writing research prototypes using it and all I can say is that it really made my code nicer in much less time. I've had to rewrite something I had done in Java before, and the code is now smaller, more readable and I didn't notice any runtime performance hit although the algorithms have been written in the most naive fashion. It works seamlessly with existing Java code, and it looks like normal Java to Java code. I should be able to let you know more about this in the next few weeks
• I had a very quick look at Grails a few months back. For sure it was similar to Rails, but I couldn't see a strong reason why I would choose Grails over Rails. I have had another look recently and I've been quite impressed by the thing...
  The Grails documentation is very good. The framework is a well-built layer on top of existing Java technologies. The scafolding generates good looking pages that you could nearly reuse as-is. I think that choosing Grails instead of Rails really makes sense if you are in a JavaEE environment. But again, try both, see what works best in your context, and stay away from flamewars

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