[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.