Thursday, October 10, 2002

smallest open source project ever? I often find thread pools useful. Its a nice simple abstraction for implementing multi-threaded processing algorithms. Just drop a Runnable object on a thread pool and let it run it when there's a thread free.. Runnable task = new Runable() { public void run() { do something... } }; ThreadPool threadPool = ...; threadPool.invokeLater( task ); Well, measuring in at a mighty, 1 interface and 2 classes is commons-threadpool :-). Its almost embarrasing how small it is. If it wasn't for the long package names, the jar wouldn't be close to its current 6k :-). 9:28:08 PM    comment []

any thoughts on junitdoclet? Chris Berry put me in touch with JUnitDoclet today. I think I've seen this before but last time I looked it didn't quite click. What are folks thoughts on it? It seems like a sneaky way to get your Clover reports green to me ;-). It reminds me a little of tools (and particularly IDEs) that generate Javadoc for you which is a bad thing; since the auto-generated stuff is next to useless. Whereas the absense of javadoc can easily be found, then humans can write it. I'm wondering how much of that applies to JUnitDoclet; does it hide stuff that should be hand-written? I guess it'd still be easy to find the methods that aren't tested particularly well. 7:58:18 PM    comment []

commons sql Commons SQL . So I've started looking at the persistence mechanism for my feed reader.I thought about Jisp, like Rickard suggested, but I can just see wanting to do too many different kinds of queries (show me the items since xxx in channel yyy). Maybe it's just my RDBMS bias, or the fact that I KNOW how to do that stuff with a database,but I couldn't see a better way than a relational database. So then it comes down to WHICH database to use. The natural, default answer to an embedded, fast, java database was obviously hsqldb. I hadn't looked at it in a while, and was never particularly familiar with its syntax, so I started reading up on it so I could start building the DDL. As I'm reading through the docs and trying to cobble together the "CREATE TABLE..." statements, I thought about the stuff I had read from James Strachan about Jakarta Commons SQL.With it, you can define your database model in an XML file, and use the Ant task to build your DDL for one of many different databases (Oracle, SQL Server,DB2, Hsqldb, Axion, ...).  So, long story short, I probably spent less time building the XML file (whichis much easier to read and understandthan DDL) and about 20 seconds (literally) to put the ant task into my build.xml,and voila, I've got my DDL for hsqldb, but I can easily create the same for almost any other RDBMS. Awesome! Next up, building the Castor mappingfile... Edited with Composite [Jason Carreira] :-). Glad you liked it. Generating other stuff from your XML file should be trivial; like the Castor mapping file or beans to map 1-1 to your relational model. Just use the commons-sql beans with Velocity or Jelly etc. BTW I don't think I'd recommend hsqldb to anyone unless its just for temporary data used by unit test cases. It only stores the statements executed, not the data. So startup time can take a long time if you use it for more than a day. 5:00:38 PM    comment []

ZOÀ, searching email and RSS ZOÀ, wow!. Check out ZOÀ. It's a pretty impressive webapp and mail server. It uses Lucene to index (for searching) your incoming email. Beyond indexing it tries to automagically create structure out of what it sees. Very cool, furthermore it's open source! First time I've encountered the Apple Public Source License though. Now if we have something like this that indexes all the Java.Blog RSS newsfeeds, then we'll have an instant knowledgebase. [::Manageability::] Agreed. I had coffee with James Carlyle a couple of days ago who was telling me he once had an RSS to email tool. This strikes me as a great idea and possibly much better than RSS aggregators. Allow RSS to be published to email feeds that any email client can subscribe to. It seems there are many more readers of blogs than there are writers and everyone has email these days but relatively few people use RSS aggregators; so having a bridge to email so folks can keep in touch with RSS feeds makes lots of sense. Then if we have an RSS to email gateway we can run ZOÀ off it to search & sort blogs. I guess users might want different kinds of email feed; 1 email for all Java blogs per day 1 email per day per feed that they are interested in (so thats like each RSS feed being its own email list with daily digest 1 email per hour of whats new 1 email per change per RSS feed Still from a basic RSS to email feed it should be pretty easy to do. 1:25:31 PM    comment []