I had the need recently to inject an array of strings (java.lang.String[]) into a bean property and I was curious about whether or not I could inject the strings as comma-separated values (CSV). With a little poking around in the Spring API I found that the supporting PropertyEditor is already there, but not configured by default. My next question was about how you go about configuring custom property editors.

I loved the Columns4Eclipse plug-in. It was well-written and well-documented… and then as of 3.2.x (or 3.3.x I don’t remember), it died. I posted a note on the forum as the bug ticket had already been made, but it seems that the project has died.

The Perforce integration plug-in for Eclipse seems to have some issues with Eclipse 3.3.x, which just came out a few weeks ago.

JMock 2 came out not too long ago and after some initial worry about backwards compatibility I decided to give it a try. It plays very nicely with version one, but you will want to run out and convert all of your tests once you see how truly beautiful version two is.

Nestled in the Jakarta Commons is a monstrosity called the Jakarta Commons - Collections API. It contains a wealth of extensions to the standard collections as well as new collections and collection-related utilities.

This is my most popular article and it is a bit outdated. The discussion here is based on Jetty 5, while Jetty 6 makes things a lot easier to do. I am working on a follow up to this article that will redo the embedding using Jetty 6.

I came across Jetty a while back and finally got around to really playing with it recently. I was amazed at how flexible it was and how easy it was to embed it inside a Spring Application Context. I did have to write a couple of small helper extensions to ease things along but other than that it was pretty much just a configuration exercise. What follows is a brief discussion on what I did and how I did it.¹

WOMAN: What would you do if I died? Would you get married again?
MAN: Definitely not!
WOMAN: Why not - don’t you like being married?
MAN: Of course I do.
WOMAN: Then why wouldn’t you remarry?
MAN: Okay, I’d get married again.
WOMAN: You would? (with a hurt look on her face)
MAN: (makes audible groan)
WOMAN: Would you live with her in our house?
MAN: Well, probably, it is paid for.
WOMAN: Would you replace my pictures with hers?
MAN: That would seem like the proper thing to do.
WOMAN: Would you sleep with her in our bed?

I started looking into RMI again; it’s been a while since I have used it directly and as often happens, I got sidetracked. I found out how easy it is very to setup an RMI registry with Spring and then access the bound objects via JNDI.

I could say that “they’re more than meets the eye", but that would really date me.

Continuing the example from my discussion of Predicates, I would not like to take a quick look at Transformers. According to the JavaDocs:

A Tranformer defines a functor interface implemented by classes that transform one object into another.

They are very useful when you need to preform an action of some sort on every element, or a group of elements, in a collection.

If you are familiar with the Spring Framework I am sure that you know how to create a context and fill it with beans using XML (DTD or Schema) or maybe even using properties files (have to try that one sometime), but have you ever tried creating a context programmatically… purely in Java? It’s actually not all that difficult, just a little verbose.