Those of us who run projects on java.net knows how painful the java.net web interface can be sometimes. Simple things like adding a person to your project take multiple mouse clicks, and when pages load slowly (like just now!), it can quickly kill your productivity. Today, I'm going to talk about the java.net tools that solve this problem.

The java.net tools is a simple command line tool. If you run the tool like the following, you'll see a list of available sub-commands:

$ java -jar javanettasks.jar
Usage: java -jar javanettasks.jar <command>
where command can be ...
  help
    display help about a particular command
  uploadFile
    upload a file to java.net
  grantRole
    grant a role to an user on a project
  declineRole
    decline a pending role request
  processRole
    process a role request automatically according to a policy file
  listMyProjects
    list all projects that you belong to.
  listSubProjects
    list all the subprojects of a given project(s)
  interactive
    launches a shell where you can type multiple commands

You can get more details about a particular command by using the help command, like this:

% java -jar javanettasks.jar help uploadFile
Usage: uploadFile <projectName> <filePath on server> <description> <status> <source file>

With this tool today, you can upload files to documents&files section, you can approve/deny a role request, add someone to your project with a role. If you have suggestions about other useful common tasks, please let me know so that I can add them.

The thing that I like about this tool is that it's fire-and-forget; you can just type in the command, hit enter, and then go do something else. I can even type multiple commands and run them simultaneously at the same time, by using background execution ('&') or multiple shell windows. The tool itself still takes a long time to run (since it still has to wait for the java.net web server to send the data back), but as far as you are concerned the task is done when you hit ENTER.

Oh, and you don't have to type in the user name and password every time either, which is a big plus (I hope java.net will implement the "remember me" feature!)

The java.net tasks project actually offers more than just a command line tool, for those of you who are interested. The binary can be downloaded from here.