The Goldfish Chronicles

Got to wonder if anyone else at OSBC is committing tonight

r640727

Just sent out the announcement of the Commons Lang 2.4 release, which eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed sneaking out in the middle of the week.

It’s the first of three releases that I got to work on a lot in the dayjob, last summer at SourceLabs. Someday hopefully I can help get Taglibs Standard 1.1.3 and Quartz 1.6.1 out.

Minor note on how I do my Commons coding now. When time allows, I head over to igoogle.com and look at the front page. I have this configured to show my Google Reader latest on the front page, in which I have JIRA feeds connected [I use Bloglines for reading blogs].

I find this to be the best way to keep up to date with development. Much nicer than watching the emails fly by. A JIRA pain seems to be that new issues and update issues (which means comments usually) appear on different RSS streams. Here, in case it’s of use, are the urls I use:

New issues

Comments

I also monitor Quartz, ASF Infrastructure, osjava.org and sourcelabs.org in the same way. I’ve recently started starring the interesting ones so I can go back to my ‘watch list’.

Long before I started dumping code on Commons, I had my GenJava libraries. Originally these lived at www.generationjava.com, then they moved to osjava.org. I signified a util class with a W [it was before we had XxxUtils as such a common pattern, and yes it seems silly now]. It stood for Wrapper. Which meant something like Helper, but originally actually wrapped the underlying Java class. Its first few methods were probably written in early 2000, so 8 years of life.

Over the last couple of nights, I’ve been deprecating and removing code that has moved or parallel evolved at Commons. Tonight the StringW class, which originally made up a large amount of Commons Lang’s StringUtils reached the point where there was nothing of value left in it:

r2639

The aim is to deprecate gj-core as either being found elsewhere or not being worth the effort of maintaining.

Resurrecting this from the data for the Commons blog.

It’s always a pain to be putting in tracing statements (aka System.out.println) and find that the object’s data is hidden away in private attributes. One option is to break out the debugger, another (security manager willing) is to use the org.apache.commons.lang.builder.ToStringBuilder to output the Object in full. Here’s the very, very simple line of code to get this done:

System.out.println("TASK: " + ToStringBuilder.reflectionToString(task));

After what seems like forever, Commons CLI 1.1 is released; bugfixes and some minor improvements. In the end it was Brian Egge who pulled up his sleeves and finished off the last issues, so much thanks to Brian for making a release happen.

By the way, here’s the latest incarnation of the Commons JIRA report: http://people.apache.org/~bayard/jira-report-for-commons.html. It’s nice to be able to view it in one go rather than as many individual projects.

Commons hasn’t grown much recently - much is actively maintained but we haven’t added a lot of new things (SCXML and VFS the notable exceptions). I happened to be writing up a status for all of Commons and the number of components surprised me.

• 32 Released
• 12 Sandbox
• 38 Dormant
• Which equals 82 Total

I mentioned a while back that I wanted to make a report that gets sent to JIRA for Commons. It’s been done for a while, though it’s not being sent to the list yet. Here’s an example: http://people.apache.org/~bayard/jira-report-for-commons.txt.

It uses the trunk of Swizzle JIRA Report and custom vm file. The idea, as I mentioned before, is that it should give us a feel for projects that need to be considering releases, and issues that need attention. The logic is:

for each Commons JIRA project
  for each version
    show completed-issues-count and issues-count (how close to a release we are)
    for each issue with >= 2 votes
      show issue
  for Unversioned issues
    show issue

I like it, but I suspect it is still too noisy to have value.

I should have said this a few days ago - Congratulations to Martin van den Bemt on taking over as Jakarta Chair (or V.P., Apache Jakarta for the official records and the IRS). Martin’s been around at Jakarta for ages and will do a great job.