Older blog entries for aeden (starting at number 29)

Released EdenLib 1.0 and JPublish 1.0b1. EdenLib at 1.0 is pretty cool, I suppose. It is the first open source project which I have actually brought to a production release. In a sense it is not extremely significant considering that EdenLib is just a collection of useful Java classes. When I bring one of my other projects, say FormProc or JPublish, to version 1.0, that will be significant.

I have begun work on a new project as well called Open Business Engine (OBE for short). OBE is a workflow engine written in Java, designed to be the primary controller for application flow. It supports execution of tasks synchronously and aysnchronously. It also supports conditions which can have an unlimited number of different result case types. The first draft of the engine is done (and should be released in the very near future). OBE also comes with a GUI design tool called OBEDesigner as well as an remote administration tool (called...you guessed it...OBEAdmin).

I just found out that SwiftMQ (a Java messaging router) has gone commercial. They were never open source but the product was free prior to February 2002. From this event I have learned something which I believe is very important: Making something free and making something open source are two TOTALLY different things.

I have decided to never use another free, non-open source product for development or production systems from this point on. If something is free but not open source then I will not even bother installing it. While I don't mind paying for good products, it disturbs me greatly to be screwed when a free product "converts" to a commercial product.

FormProc 1.0b1, the first FormProc beta, is out the door. I believe that a 1.0 production release is not too far away at this point. Thanks to all of the help of the developers who are using FormProc I believe that the API is now stable and will prove to be highly useful.

JPublish 0.9 is finally out. Now I can rest for a few days (yeah, right).

Fixed a bug in EdenLib which was causing a runaway thread to grab as much CPU as it could. I actually had to download a trial version of JProbe because there are no decent open source JVM profilers (don't worry, kiddies: this niche will soon be filled).

Released FormProc version 0.9. Coming closer to the 1.0 release.

JPublish finally has some support for specifying content encoding. It still needs work, but at least I feel like I am finally getting somewhere with it, thanks largely to my i18n friends. I hope I can get JPublish 0.9 out soon. I am shooting for sometime this week. Perhaps I will put out 0.9 and then 0.95 before 1.0 if necessary.

JPublish seems to have generated a little bit of a buzz based on the number of downloads for the 0.7 release. I am currently working on the 0.8 release and am aiming for a 1.0 release within the next month or two. Perhaps after I get back from vacation in February.

Released JPublish 0.7 last night after my presentation for the South Florida Java Users Group. I am happy about both. JPublish 0.7 represents a big step forward in terms of ease of use and the presentation went quite well with over 30 minutes of question and answer afterwards. I am tired but I feel like it was worthwhile.

Getting closer to releasing version 0.7 of JPublish. I have been focusing a lot on making the examples easy to run and on improving the documentation. My presentation on web frameworks is today and I was hoping to have JPublish 0.7 released by then, but I really want the example application and documentation completed before I release it. Let's see how the day goes - perhaps I will finish the example app but not the docs and release it as such.

FormProc version 0.6 is now available at http://formproc.sf.net/.] . This release fixes the bugs in 0.5 and 0.5.1 and improves the deployment of the example code immensely by making the example application an executable JAR and the web app a WAR.

Now hopefully I can get back into JPublish...

I will be giving a presentation on open source Java web application frameworks at the South Florida Java Users Group if anyone is interested. The meeting is January 16th, 6:30 PM at Nova University in Ft. Lauderdale. I will be giving an overview of what web application frameworks are and then will explain the strengths and weaknesses of six different frameworks:

• Apache Struts
• Webwork
• Apache Turbine
• JPublish
• Enhydra Barracuda
• Maverick

JPublish

Speaking of JPublish, I am currently working on the 0.7 release. My research into other frameworks has helped me realize that I need to focus on initial installation and ease-of-use of JPublish. To that end I am creating several WAR files which can be dropped into any servlet engine which supports WAR files. This has been challenging because currently JPublish requires full paths or paths relative to the working directory, whereas a servlet engine should use paths relative to the application context. It is coming along though, and I hope to have the next release out before my presentation.