JUDCon 2011: London

I had the chance, thanks to work, to attend JUDCon 2011 with Matt in London last week. It was a great conference overall, well organised, talks on relevant subjects, held at a great venue, even the complimentary wifi worked well!

The most interesting subjects for me were:

BoxGrinder - A tool for automating the creation of virtual appliances from installing the operating system to downloading and configuring 3rd party software like Apache HTTD.
JBoss Forge – An extensible CLI tool to incrementally add framework support to Java EE projects.
Arquillian – An extensible enterprise test platform that takes your test to the container. It also integrates with Selenium (otherwise known as Arquillian Drone).
JBoss AS7 – The JBoss Application Server completely rewritten from AS6, based on JBoss Modules (OSGi).

Best talk of the conference had to go to the last one we saw from Andrew Lee Rubinger who gave a great overview of JBoss AS7, specifically the re-write, Arquillian and rapid enterprise programming.

Hopefully JUDCon will come back to the UK again next year.

Twitile in progress

Thought I’d post a quick screen shot of the current development progress on Twitile – a web based Twitter client.

More news to come soon.

Announcing hash.to

Late last year I released the first version of my latest project – http://hash.to – a url shortener written in Java.

It’s pretty basic in terms of the functionality on offer at the moment but I decided to release the MVP rather than wait until I’d got round to implementing the rest of the functionality.

I know there are plenty of really good URL shortener services already out there but as a developer I wanted to create my own for a few reasons.

• See if it was possible to create one in Java
• Learn a different Java web framework along the way
• Finally get round to using UrlRewrite in a project
• Buy myself a really short URL
• Create some web services that other developers can use
• Above all else to see if I could!

As I mentioned it’s written in Java; Struts 2 is used as the web framework, Hibernate for ORM, UrlRewrite to manage the URL design, MySQL as the database behind the service all running in Apache Tomcat on a VPS from Bytemark.

I’m looking for as many people as possible to test/use the service and provide some feedback and right now you can get yourself some really short URL’s!

I’ve also created a blog on Tumblr for the service which I’ll keep up to date with any changes to the service.

Using SVN revision as software version via Ant

I use Subversion for my personal projects and web sites and for one of my projects I wanted to use the SVN revision value as the version number for the project. As it’s a Java based project and I’m using an Ant script to package & deploy it I wanted to retrieve the repository revision in the Ant script and automatically set the version value in the configuration file. After a bit of searching I found this article on how to get the revision value via Ant, all it requires is that the command line version of Subversion is installed.

So I added the following target to my Ant script to retrieve the last changed revision (slightly modified from the original):

<target name="svnrevision">
	<exec executable="svnversion" outputproperty="repository.revision">
		<arg value="-c" />
		<redirector>
			<outputfilterchain>
				<tokenfilter>
					<replaceregex pattern="[0-9]+\:" replace="" />
					<replaceregex pattern="[M]" replace="" />
				</tokenfilter>
			</outputfilterchain>
		</redirector>
	</exec>
        <echo message="Current revision is ${repository.revision}" />
</target>

Then later on in my Ant script I use the extracted variable to set the version value in the version.properties file while copying it:

<copy file="./src/version.properties" tofile="./deploy/version.properties">
	<filterset>
		<filter token="version" value="${repository.revision}" />
	</filterset>
</copy>

The version.properties file simply has the following line in it:

version=@version@

And that’s it.

WordPress plugin development links

While developing Basic-SEO I’ve found the following sites very useful for reference purposes:

WordPress Plugin Repository – http://wp-plugins.org

You can’t beat learning by example, here you can browse the source code of all the plugins WordPress.org hosts.

WordPress PHP Documentation – http://phpdoc.wordpress.org/

All the comments from the WordPress source code extracted in HTML format and correctly linked, very useful for looking up functions.

WordPress Hooks Database – http://adambrown.info/p/wp_hooks

Database of all the action & filter hooks that have ever been available in any WordPress release and where it occurs in the source code.

WordPress Codex – http://codex.wordpress.org/

The official documentation for WordPress, has a very useful developer documentation section.

WordPress plugin: Basic-SEO

It’s time to unveil my first WordPress plugin: Basic-SEO. It’s a very, very simple plugin really, it applies a pre-defined set of search engine optimisations to your active theme. It has no configuration options at all at the moment it just achieves the goal I had in mind for it. I thought I’d release it as it is now in case anyone else finds it useful. I’ve already got a list of features I’d like to add to it but my next step is to get it listed on WordPress Plugins.

If you find the plugin useful or have an feedback then please let me know.

First WordPress plugin

As I’ve recently changed the theme I use in WordPress I’ve lost all the basic SEO tweaks I’d made. Rather than make the tweaks again to this theme I’ve decided to convert them into a simple WordPress plugin, should allow me to get my hands dirty with the inner workings of WordPress and plugins as well as save a bit of time in the long run. I’m also planning on documenting the development of the plugin here.

While Java is my preferred language of choice I’m sure it won’t hurt to stay involved in PHP.