[LazyWeb] a maven plugin to find resources on your maven dependency path

Every now and again I get the dreaded log4j.properties / log4j.xml maven transitive dependency hell. Some resource is included in multiple jars so the one you think you're meant to be using isn't found first. 

e.g. you try changing the log4j levels and nothing happens. Much scratching of head occurs. Normally through frustration you shove a load of System.out.println() calls in your app :)

So the idea is how about being able to do something like

mvn classpath:find -Dresource=log4j.properties

and the plugin would search all the test scoped jars on the classpath, including transitive dependencies letting you know all the jars (and the dependency path to them) which included the resource you specified.

It'd be handy right? Any volunteers... :)

Writing unit tests? Give hamcrest a try

I'm not sure if its that well known but if you are writing unit tests in JUnit 3.x, 4.x or TestNG take a look at the tutorial, add hamcrest-all.jar to your classpath/project/pom.xml then give hamcrest a spin. I think you'll like it. Here's the pom.xml change...

<dependency>
<groupId>org.hamcrest</groupId>
<artifactId>hamcrest-all</artifactId>
<version>1.1</version>
</dependency>

assertThat! :)

If you are tinkering with VMWare on OS X

then a few links to save you a little googling. If you wanna use some of the public VMWAre images such as Ubuntu 7.10 desktop then you might wanna use BitTorrent to download it, then to unpack the RAR file try UnRarX. I've found the nicest way to use VMWare on Leopard is to run each VM image in a separate Space in full screen mode which is pretty neat...

UFace getting hotter

Check out Tom's report on the latest improvements in UFace - pretty neat eh. Also using CSS cross web apps, Swing and Eclipse is hot.

Easier Integration & Pattern testing with Camel and Spring 2.5

I'm really liking the testing features in Spring 2.5.x for easier unit testing with JUnit 3.8, 4.x or TestNG using Spring to do all your dependency injection before invoking your test classes.

I've just created a little document to show how to use Spring Testing with Camel, using the Camel Mock and Test endpoints for easier Enterprise Integration Pattern based testing. Incidentally Camel now has a new little Test endpoint which creates a Mock endpoint that automatically pulls its expected message bodies from another endpoint and auto-wires up the expectations for easier testing with minimal coding.

Public Training on Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix

As Bruce mentioned IONA is offering some public training courses on Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix on the following dates for the first two...

• London,UK - March 11-14
• Waltham, MA - March 17-20

If you're using either ActiveMQ or ServiceMix then these training courses are highly recommended.

Using Apache Camel, ActiveMQ and Esper for Complex Event Processing

David Greco just checked in a cute little demo that shows how to work with Apache Camel for Enterprise Integration Patterns, ActiveMQ as the message broker and Esper for Complex Event Processing. Enjoy!

Update: David bas blogged about this too :)

rest-ws looks great

I've long been a fan of RelaxNG Compact Syntax (I guess RNC is the abbreviation) over XSDs. Now to avoid folks struggling with XSDs and WSDLs in nasty verbose angle brackets, there's the rather nice looking relax-ws. Now we just need a nice eclipse plugin... Enjoy!

[LazyWeb] using Subversion as a front end to Confluence?

I hack a lot of Confluence spaces as part of my job. I've been working on the UFace project at Google Code so I've been getting used to the Google way.

One of the great things about google code is that the wiki is in subversion as *.wiki files; so you can edit them in any text editor (and TextMate comes with great MoinMoin syntax support, you just have to install the bundle...). So you can grab your wiki content, jump on a plane, hack it with your favourite editor then check in your changes when you're next online.

I wonder how hard it'd be to sync Confluence content with a subversion repo; so folks could still use the online Confluence site to edit content, which would get mirrored to an svn repo as *.wiki files - then folks could commit to the svn repo to update the confluence database? Anyone ever tried?

bored of your OS X desktop? Try DeskLickr

DeskLickr rocks! Have your desktop change every few minutes/hours using a nice new picture from flickr using tagged queries. Neat!

Quick review of Leopard, the latest OS X

I finally bought and upgraded to Leopard. Am liking it so far; Spaces is nice (though with a 30" and my 17" screens, I don't need many spaces, am mostly using a separate space for mail). The neatest thing of Spaces is when you use Expose to view your spaces (I'm using the move the mouse to the bottom right corner gesture), it shows both my 2 screens aligned for each space where I can drag and drop between both screens and spaces.

I love the new look and Cover Flow on Finder; don't much use the Dock as I use QuickSilver so the Stacks stuff doesn't get used.

I've gotta wait for me to buy a TimeCapsule before I can try out TimeMachine which does look cool. Apple are so good at sucking money out of my pocket :). Am gonna have to buy an Apple TV now too.... Wonder how long before they'll support the UK on movie rentals.

So far I still prefer iTerm to Terminal due to it being able to have preconfigured named shells & starting directories (I've often got tons of shells open).

The upgrade was great; I just installed the DVD, kicked off the install and came back later and it was all completed.

So far the only real nit was bash shells lost their prompt, so I had to add this to my .bashrc

export PS1="\w> "

Not an amazing upgrade or anything, but I am preferring Leopard.

Update : I've just noticed TextEdit now opens OpenDoc files natively - nice!

OpenSnoop is pretty handy!

See the details of how to use it on Leopard. I just used it to track the progress of my S3 online backup which was most useful.