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.

• The Oracle Lawsuit Will End with Google Owning Java. A fairly old article now but it’s still a very interesting view on the outcome of the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit. I see this as a positive outcome if it were to happen. (0) #

• Puppygames Ultrabundle – bundle of games from an indie developer all for less than £4!! Quite impressed that all the games are written in Java too so they’re available on Windows, Linux & Mac. (0) #

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.

• Wide Awake Developers: The Future of Software Development – this is an example of the negative view on Java I was talking about. As much as I disagree with the comments on Java the rest of the article has some interesting comments on development in general. (0) #

• Dev Derby 2010 – good to see Team Java won the challenge. Shows that Java can compete with PHP, Ruby & Python as it see to be getting a lot of bad press at the moment. (1) #

• Creating Shazam in Java -  Lots of good information on how to analyse/match music including sample code. Seems to have triggered a legal threat! (0) #

• Initial Thoughts on Oracle vs Google Patent Lawsuit – Miguel de Icaza. Includes some interesting background information. I do hope this gets resolved quickly as I’m a big fan of both Java and Android. (0) #