Have you ever struggled with the mass of .jar files that you can find in a directory of Java libraries? You have no idea what version each of them is and what its dependencies are. You want to put your own application jar in there, but you know that will mean needing to get hold of 20 other jar files to deal with its dependencies.
Sonatype Nexus is a repository for build artifacts, which is particularly handy if you have a Maven project. Once you have your Maven project configured, every time you run mvn deploy Maven will do a bit of building and then upload the resulting artifacts (.jar, .war, …) to the repository. If you browse Nexus you will then be able to find those artifacts with a unique name and download them.
This is all great, but if your project is running on a snapshot version, then every time you deploy to Nexus, the artifact file name will be appended with date and an ever-incrementing number. For my purposes, I wanted to be able to go on to a Linux test server where I have Apache Tomcat installed and grab the latest .war file. Maybe I need to relax more, but I was getting a bit irritated with having to manually find the snapshot in Nexus, copy the link and then fire off a curl -O -L http://... command every time I updated the project.
Originally posted @ gratiartis.org on May 12th 2011.
I have been playing around with Apache Camel for a couple of projects recently, and so far I’m very impressed. Camel is one of a number of frameworks that seem to have sprung up over the past few years in response to the book Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. It attempts to provide mechanisms to support all the patterns described in the book. And it does so very well, from what I have experienced so far. So I thought I would mention a couple of things I have done with it.
Originally posted @ gratiartis.org on April 5th 2008.
When at work, I’m generally in the worlds of Windows and Solaris. But these days I’m doing my home development work on a MacBook Pro. But I’m keen to make sure that I can do everything that I do at work so that I can experiment in my own time. So here’s a list of the software I use to develop on the Mac and where to get it.
Since I’m now playing around on a MacBook Pro I thought I’d see whether it was possible to get BEA WebLogic running on it. As it turns out it’s quite simple. These instructions seem to apply to anything from 9.0 upwards, but there’s a link to instructions for 8.1 below.
Originally posted @ gratiartis.org on April 16th, 2007.
The financial industry does seem to be loath to share the fruits of their efforts. There doesn’t seem to be a lot around. And certainly not much that is regularly updated. Maybe everyone is worried about sharing trade secrets, but the rules for calculations are well established and I’m guessing that everyone must be writing their own implementations or buying in over-priced modules.