I recently thought about writing a Groovy script to search JARs for a specific string, but decided to first look for an alternative rather than writing a script. The alternative needed to be easy to use, freely available, and not bogged down with a load of dependencies. I was glad I looked first, because the Linux-based approach provided by "jan61" satisfied my need nicely.

Read more ...

There are some minor potential dangers associated with Groovy's def keyword. The Groovy style and language feature guidelines for Java developers provides some warnings about use of def.

Read more ...

When posting source code to my blog, I often need to convert less than signs (<), and greater than signs (>) to their respective entity references so that they are not confused as HTML tags when the browser renders the output. I have often done this using quick search-and-replace syntax like %s/</</>/>/g with vim or Perl.

Read more ...

This brief blog post provides another Groovy script that provides simple differencing of two JAR (or WAR or EAR) files and their MANIFEST.MF files.

Read more ...

My last post discussed comparing the high-level contents of two JAR files using a Groovy script and a 2011 post covered displaying a particular JAR file's manifest file. This post illustrates the combination of those two ideas with an example of comparing the Manifest files of two different JAR files.

Read more ...

It can sometimes be useful to compare the contents of two JARs. In this blog post, I demonstrate a Groovy script that acts like a simple "diff" tool for comparing two JAR files.

The Groovy script shown here, jarDiff.groovy, can undoubtedly be improved upon, but does perform what I wanted it to. The script compare two provided JARs in the following ways:

Read more ...

In several years of developing, reading, reviewing, and maintaining hundreds of thousands of lines of Java code, I have become accustomed to seeing certain "red flags" in Java code that often (but perhaps not always) imply problems with the code. I'm not talking about practices that are always wrong, but rather am talking about practices that might, in limited circumstances, be appropriate but generally are a sign of something wrong.

Read more ...

Packt Publishing invited me to review the recently published Learning JavaScriptMVC by Wojciech Bednarski. I describe my impressions of this book on JavaScriptMVC in this post.

Read more ...

This post very briefly summarizes some recent (within the past few weeks) developments in the world of Java.

Yet Another Java Versioning Scheme

Oracle has changed the Java version numbering schema again, this time in an effort "to avoid confusion caused by renumbering releases" because of the "recent increase of security releases" that have already led to skipped numbers and renumbered releases.

Read more ...

One of the defining characteristics of the brave new world of Java is the increasing prevalence of the builder pattern in the Java space. Groovy, which appears to be the most popular alternative language (to Java) on the JVM, is well-known for its heavy use of the Builder in both the core libraries and in Groovy-supported libraries and frameworks.

Read more ...