Felipe Leme's Blog: September 2003 Archive

Posted by felipeal on September 02, 2003 at 09:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Java Community Process (or JCP) is the main responsible for Java being open and "democratic". Everything that is incorporated to the Java platform - from specific APIs to full J2SE versions - is created through Java Specification Requests (or JSRs), and everyone can propose a new JSR or participate in existing ones.

The current version of JCP is 2.5, but a new version (2.6) is being forged by JSR 215. JCP 2.6 will make it easier for people - specially developers - to participate in the process, which in turn will facilitate the job of spec leaders and expert group members. There is a good article recently published at Sun's about how these changes will make things easier overall, so I won't repeat these details here.

So, if you are already familiar with the JCP/JSR processes, I suggest you take a look on JSR 215 and express your opinions (and you should hurry, as the Community Review finishes on September 8th). If you are not, I strongly urge you to do so. After all, being part of the community is like being a citizen in a democracy.

PS: usually, the Community Review is available only for JCP members. But as JSR 215 is a JSR that updates the process of the JCP, the expert group opened the review to the public, in order to encourage everyone to review it and send them comments.

Running ant in loop mode

Posted by felipeal on September 02, 2003 at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Once in a while I work in a Java project where I need to run a simple Ant task many times in a short period of time. Like web projects where the JSP files are located in a directory under source control and are deployed in another directory by an Ant task. If I change a JSP file, I need to run Ant again, and it takes an eternity (about 5-6 seconds), due to the overhead of running the JVM, reading the XML files, etc...

Wouldn't it be nice if I could leave Ant running in a loop mode in those situations, so when I change the file I could redeploy it without that overhead?

For me, the answer is "Yes, that would be nice". But Ant doesn't have that feature, so now what? Now I can change Ant to include that feature, and that is the beauty of open source projects: if you want a new feature, you can just grab the code and implement it yourself. The same with bugs: rather than wait for the vendor to fix, test and publish a patch, you can open the code and nail the bug!

Now back to that new Ant feature: I created such patch and opened a bug for it.

We've been using it for a while in my team, and so far it's working fine. It's not in the basecode of Ant yet - and it might never be - so I upload the code to my site. If you liked the idea, please feel free to download it and give it a try. And if you like the results, give me some feedback through the bug's page or this weblog.

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