Maven (bad) experience

I am feeling that I must write down this. As I was saying yesterday I convinced myself to give a chance to Maven for its site and/or xdoc goals. After passing through a number of files and looking into some CVS projects on my harddrive I have succeeded in creating the project.xml (the POM – in my mother language this means tree [blink/]). Continuing on the same tracks I have written also my maven.xml and some little xml-s for my documentation. Till now nothing too difficult.
I start playing with the colors for the site and after a while when I felt confortable with it I have tried to move the new colors to the xdoc properties (this task consumed me a lot because I can say I am pretty blind when it comes to web design and also web colors). And here comes the surprise: after matching the CSS classes to the property names and running again nothing happened. I have checked again the documentation and for a while I have tried to fix this, but no chance. Now I find myself stareing at it and keep asking: what is going on????

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New dynamic AOP framework

A new dynamic AOP framework was made public: JoyAop. I have quickly passed through the tutorial (while downloading it and so I might be wrong on what follows), and here are my impressions:

• being based on interceptors it only offers around advice
• offers the possibility of defining interceptor precedence
• pointcuts are defined using regular expressions or based on interface
• supports mixins
• aspect definition come in the form of an XML definition (a la AspectWerkz or JBossAOP)

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Generating project documentation

I am currently looking for a solution to generate the documentation for some of my projects. My requirements are quite simple:

• documentation should be written in an easy format(xml, wiki-style)
• the generation step to be automatic and in simple way configurable (to allow through simple configuration a degree of customization for the generated html)
• the generated documentation must be html

I would have one more, but this represents in fact a plus: plugable in Ant.
Till this moment I have tried to use DocBook (which corresponds to all my requirements, plus Ant integration through style task). But I’ve found it hard to configure and moreover too many tags to use in order to have it looking as I wish. A second choice I am analysing now is Maven xdoc. I have passed over my unpleasant feeling about Maven (Hani you are not alone [smile/]) and start trying this. While it seems pretty configurable and the document format seems very neat, what I find difficult is to configure Maven to run my goal (yep, I can call this a goal).
I have already received a suggestion from Andreas Mecky (author of JConfig): to use a Wiki-like tool which have export to static HTML feature. Unfortunately I do not have such a tool for the moment. I was talking with Channing Walton (author of Eclipse Wiki Editor Plugin) if such a feature is on his list, and surprinsingly I have found out that I am not the first one asking about the Export to HTML feature. I am looking forward to this.
Concluding, for the moment I do not have a really nice solution for the generation of project documentation. I will keep looking and I would much appreciate if anyone of you have some suggestions/solutions for me. I hope my requirements are not too high. Our users/customers are always expecting great documentation from us. Give me the tool(s) to provide it!

AOP revisited

I have to add more reference entries for AOP from blogs of Adrian Colyer (AspectJ), Jonas Boner and Alex Vasseur (AspectWerkz). The previous are published here.

• Using AspectJ with Spring Adrian Colyer
• Spring and AspectWerkz – A Happy Marriage Jonas Boner
• AspectJ Hacks – #1 From System.out.println to switchable debug output Adrian Colyer
• Implementing caching with AspectJ – part I Adrian Colyer
• Implementing caching with AspectJ – part II Adrian Colyer
• AspectWerkz in WebLogic – domain wizard Alex Vasseur
• AOP in J2EE, Tomcat tutorial Alex Vasseur
• AspectJ and AspectWerkz compared… sort of… Val’s blog

Transactions [update]

In a previous post a have listed some resources for J2EE transaction. Here is a reference one High Performance Transaction Systems Workshop. I hope the following days I will have the time to pass through’em.

Blogging for certification

Reading around I have found two very interesting blogs posting on different subjects for Java certification. Sriram Srinivasan is blogging on SCJP, while Ed Schepis is writting for SCEA. I will present here some of their entries:

• Patterns – An Introduction
• Classes
• Methods design
• Inner classes
• Thread states
• Analysis classes
• Use cases
• Distributed object frameworks protocols
• Capabilities Definitions
• Architectural Terminology
• Steps in Software Development
• Definitions of Architect and Architecture

Error recovery parsing

The last weeks I have spent some time working (in fact, to be realistic, I was just scratching some problems) on the code folding plugin Coffee-Bytes for Eclipse. (I start loving the code folding idea a long time ago, since the first usage of JEdit – if I remember well, and for a long time I was wondering why so many editors do not use this feature. But about this maybe other time).
The current investigations are for an error recovering parser. What I mean by this? A parser that is able to continue parsing (and maybe even return the broken nodes skeletons) after a failure (an unrecognized structure, a structure not according to the grammar).
I have some backgrounds on writting parsers (using JavaCC and ANTLR), but till now I have written only parsers that abort the operation on the first error. Moreover, this time I have to rely the parsing on Eclipse support. This job seems pretty interesting, but as you probably know all the documentation I have is the javadocs. So I would like to hear from you any ideas how such a parsing must work.

out-of-the-box essays on demand

Please make a little effort and read the essay. Quite a piece! But run down that page and see the real surprise: it is a completely meaningless generated bullshit essay. Wooow. Very neat! For some explanations about this project (or whatever we can call it) here is the original intro.
Made me think of Guantanamo project (oops, I am mean, or I am just not getting into Guantanamo mood).
(Links provided by a commenter on some blog – sorry for no names, but from time to time I am experiencing the same syndrom as Lasse. However many thanks!)

books [the must category]

I have updated the list of future readings – the must category. Here it is.

• Foundation of ORM [Mark L.Fussell]
• Concurrent programming in Java [Doug Lea]
• Effective Java [Joshua Bloch]
• Expert One on One J2EE Design and Development [Rod Johnson]
• Java NIO [Ron Hitchens]
• Java Performance Tuning [Jack Shirazi]
• Better, Faster, Lighter Java [Bruce Tate, Justin Gehtlant]
• Expert One on One J2EE Development Without EJB [Rod Johnson, Juergen Hoeller]
• Hibernate in Action [Christian Bauer, Gavin King]
• Java 1.5 – A developer notebook [David Flanagan, Brett McLaughlin]
• Mockobjects

Later today I will complete the list with authors and corresponding links. (I wait you back [blink/]).

I really do not get this Java to C…

Mark Lin tries to create a new rant Stop trying to turn Java into C !!!. I really do not get this. For so much time the community pressed SUN to include some features in Java, and now somebody tries to scream that Java si going C++ way! Maybe I do not find too many usages for vargs and the new printf, but I sure can talk for a while about generics and enums. And this guy seems conviced by the fact that Java has these features now to look like C++. Damn… I really do not get it.

Update: I am sorry for the broken link of a previous post today. Someway I screwed Blogger.