It’s been mad the last few days – a three week one-man (me) initial iteration is coming to a close. Unfortunately a demo to the key stakeholder was organised about a week early, so have been wading through comments like “can we have button xxx in a different font”… I’m slightly surprised at the client’s low expectations – they see my test report dump code and praise the friendly UI. Maybe I’ll give them an XML dump in textpad next time.
Thought I’d run through the open source tools I’ve been using:
WebWork is a web application framework for J2EE. It is based on a concept called “Pull HMVC” Pull Hierarchical Model View Controller).
Struts is a bloated pig – switching to webwork is a breath of fresh air. This carefully thought out and intuitive framework is incredibly productive.
The standard Java libraries fail to provide enough methods for manipulation of its core classes. The Lang Component provides these extra methods.
I love the goal of the commons-lang project – to provide the bits’n’pieces that are missing in the standard jdk. I’m not completely immersed in this lib yet, but the bits I’ve used have been very handy indeed.
dom4j is an easy to use, open source library for working with XML, XPath and XSLT on the Java platform using the Java Collections Framework and with full support for DOM, SAX and JAXP.
Where is JDOM going? I really like dom4j – very intuitive and comfortable to work with.
SiteMesh is a web-page layout system and web-application integration system to aid in creating large sites consisting of many pages for which a consistent look/feel, navigation and layout scheme is required.
I definitely like the philosophy of the opensymphony group – sitemesh is small, simple, and intuitive. One thing I love about sitemesh is that it makes my JSP templates even simpler – the less time I spend working on JSP the better…
jCharts is a 100% Java based charting utility that outputs a variety of charts. This package has been designed from the ground up for displaying charts via Servlets and JSP’s
I didn’t have much time to search for a decent charting package a week ago. I am really pleased with the results from jCharts. An impressively flexible API.
All free – deployed on jboss. Integrated with a commercial application worth over £1m. That rocks !