The folks over at MyEclipse are doing a good job. I subscribed about 10 weeks ago and have been very impressed. You can probably find equivalents to most of the plugins they provide for free, but the fact they are all provided on one easy to manage bundle is well worth the yearly fee.
They are really good at keeping up with Eclipse releases/milestones and the xml/struts support is making my life much easier at the moment.

As discussed earlier I’ve been flat out with many things over the last few months. A combination of that and the team I work with having moved to Eclipse has meant that I’ve not kept my Sourceforge project nbCheckstyle up to date.

However a couple of days ago I got a series of patches sent to me from Shawn Bisgrove which upgraded my old (and really shameful) code to run under Netbeans 3.6 using the latest version of Checkstyle. So what was a previously dead project has been brought back to life - thanks Shawn.

It has been quite a while since I’ve posted, mainly for good reasons as things are flat out with my company at the moment.

One of the things that I’ve been up to is learning to use a few tools which are now saving me bags of time.
I had previously used xdoclet to generate EJB interfaces etc through ant..
Over the last few months several of the new projects have been struts based, again xdoclet has come to the rescue and allowed me to forget about swathes of configuration files. Highly recommended.

I’ve been doing some work which requires me to have local copies of dtd files due to limited connectivity. I’ve been using the Saxon XSLT processor as part of this work and been struggling to get catalog managers working correctly.

Richard Dallaway has an excellent document DTDs and XML Catalogs which provides many helpful clues as to how to proceed with getting the catalog system up and running for parsing and xsl-t.

My evaluation of Jira is now complete and we have bought a copy for the project I am working on at the moment. It is a great issue tracker and has been very easy to integrate into our application. If you are involved in a commercial project that needs a strong issue tracking mechanism then for 1000USD it really isn’t worth trying to write the functionality yourself.

It is easy to plug in your own authentication mechanisms (we had an existing EJB authenticator), but I do have one word of warning. Make sure that you take a look at the cookie handling that Seraph uses under the hood. You can easily replace the mechanisms that it uses, and you really should if the application you are using is at all sensitive.

Fired up my browser yesterday morning for the first time in a couple of days and found that the plugin is now able to update itself. I got a message in the toolbar telling me that an update was available and a few minutes later I was running the latest plugin version. All in all a very nice system when I’m running standalone, I’m not sure how happy I’d be if a major step was taken (to JRE 1.5 for example) if I was running a series of WebStart apps in an enterprise……..

I’ve been playing catchup with RSS technology recently. Whilst playing around with feed generation/consupmption I found NewsMonster aggregation tool.

It integrates into the Mozilla sidebar mechanism, when asked to aggregate channels it launches a Java process via Web-Start (although this is in the process of being replaced) to pull down article summaries etc. With current events its very useful to be able to get the sets of headlines from multiple news sites at once. It also allows content extraction down to PDA style devices although I’ve not spent time with this yet. The author also has some really cool plans for building a ratings/reputation system - its already a useful tool and the future looks very interesting.

Getting punch working on a Zaurus

As threatened earlier I’m writing up my experiences on how to get a midp applicaiton called Punch up and running

on the Zaurus. If you haven’t seen Punch before its well worth a look, it is a time management application that simply allows you to “punch” in and out of projects. At the end of a week you can get elapsed hours on the projects you are working on. I find it extremely useful for sorting out my weekly timesheets, so getting it working on the Zaurus was a priority for me.

It Works - update

I lied - looks like blogger doesn’t like opera for functions like delete!

It Works

I’ve been asked if the zaurus works with the blogger site. Well the proof is in the posting! Seriously though, it does work but the two thumb keyboard means that its a little painful.