Boy, Don Brown is a busy man this week. He releases a new version of the Struts Cacoon plugin on Monday, and today he released a new version of Struts BSF.
This project allows Struts Actions to be written in the scripting language of one's choice rather than as Java classes. It uses the Beans Scripting Framework to allow scripts to be written in any language BSF supports like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, BeanShell, and I believe even VBScript.
Version 0.3 adds the ability to pass parameters from the Struts config file, a pluggable filter system to pre-define custom variables, more documentation, and more. [Learn More]
Looks cool, but I have no need (currently). If you're using the BSF and have experiences to share, please do so. I'm interested, it just hasn't made it past my crap filter yet.
From Matt Croydon:
Thanks to Russ and the guys at #mobitopia, here's an Inquirer article on the JBoss fork/coup:
8:00 am -- Seven consultants for The
JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their
contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network.
Their charter "is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open
source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the
marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source
projects".
For some reason, reading the article made my heart beat a little faster. Good? Bad? Who cares! It's engrossing!
Matt Kruse's JavaScript Toolbox is awesome. So good, in fact, that I've actually made a donation (small, but nevertheless, a donation). Today, I noticed a new script: Draggable IFRAMEs. I dig it. Don't know that I'll ever use it, but I've always liked drag n' drop examples for the web. While they are cool, I've found that sometimes a true popup window is much easier.
From Gavin on the hibernate-devel mailing list:
I plan to release Hibernate 2.0 final this weekend.
It would be nice if, at the same time, we have all the other "bits" built
and available for download:
* a special XDoclet build (I need to clear this with xdoclet team)
* avalon wrapper
* tools package (mainly for the sake of CodeGenerator)
* middlegen plugin (DONE)
The XDoclet team has also been trying to get out a new release - they don't seem to be having much luck though. That's the problem with these open source projects - they take too much time, with little or no ROI for the developer(s). I dream of a day that the company I work for actually pays me to work on Open Source projects. Maybe I just need a new client for Raible Designs, and then I'll just pay myself to work on OS!
Chuck Cavaness, author of O'Reilly's "Programming Jakarta Struts" book, gave a presentation to the Struts Atlanta User Group last week. [Download PDF, 41 pages]. Chuck also announced the availability of the Jakarta Struts Pocket Reference by O'Reilly.
This purpose of this small (144
pages) book is to provide a quick way of looking up often-used information
and have it small enough to shove in your back pocket. Information like
config files settings, built-in action usage and especially tags is covered.
In fact, 100 of the 144 pages are dedicated to how to use the tags,
including examples of each. [More Information, Table of Contents, Sample Chapter].
I don't see why you would need this book as the online docs and Google have always provided everything I've needed. Maybe it'd be nice if you lacked an internet connection. In other news, Don Brown (from Struts Training: Week 5), has released a new version of the Struts Cocoon Plugin.
The plugin that allows Struts actions to forward requests to
Cocoon has been updated and released as 0.2 This time it is released
as a full release rather than a developer prototype, complete with
better documentation. Cocoon support has been updated to version 2.1M2
More information can be found at: http://www.twdata.org/struts.
Don has also put together a sample website for the Struts Applications Project at SourceForge.
The site is built using Forrest which is based on Cocoon. Forrest is used to build xml.apache.org, which being in similiar purpose to us, makes a great template for a project site. I took their sources from their CVS and modified them to suite our purposes. One of the big advantages is the site is 100% static HTML so it could be hosted at Sourceforge easily. BTW, anyone wanna throw together a logo? [Discussion Thread]
