In this example I will show how you can perform a standard Maven build whilst keeping your unit and integration tests in separate packages.

Other techniques specify using either a naming convention or a separate module to do this. This example allows true package separation and is self contained in a single profile so it can easily be used across projects. Alternative profiles can also be created for different types of test.

This solution lends itself well to generating code coverage metrics using Sonar and Jacoco.

Sonar PHP Plugin provides PHP language support to Sonar. The plugin enables all Sonar builtin features for PHP projects. It relies on well known analysis tools for PHP: PHP Unit, PHP Depend, PHPMD, PHPCPD and PHP_CodeSniffer to provide some additionnal metrics and to detect violations.

The maven-dependency-graph plugin generates a transitive dependency graph of a maven project. This can be helpful in identifying unnecessary and unwanted dependencies.

The plugin generates a graphml file that can be viewed using a tool like www.yworks.com/products/yed

In this blog entry, I present a maven plug in that generates an XMI model from a pom.xml file and it's dependencies. XMI is an XML standard most commonly used to represent UML models. Most professional modeling tools can read XMI files. The XMI itself is not directly a visualization of the dependencies, but with a decent modeling tool, all kinds of fancy visualizations are possible.

And then, in a sort of poetic irony that makes this story almost seem like it was pre-scripted to Teach us a Lesson, JAVASCRIPT succeeded in doing what JAVA had intended to do. Microsoft, Java, Sun, Netscape, all were brought low by their hubris. But humble Javascript, the throwaway, 'you get 10 days to make this', blink-tag-replacing runt of a language was able to sneak onto every computer in the world thanks to its clever disguise. Servers are written in Javascript. Databases are built to talk Javascript. The people who build browsers and operating systems move heaven and earth to make Javascript just a tiny bit faster. Java's still out there, of course. In various forms. It probably makes sure your account is updated when you pay your water bill. It's making the underpinnings of your android phone work. It's figured out a way to play host to a zillion new trendier programming languages. But Javascript won the original prize.

Joda-Time provides a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes. The design allows for multiple calendar systems, while still providing a simple API. The 'default' calendar is the ISO8601 standard which is used by XML. The Gregorian, Julian, Buddhist, Coptic, Ethiopic and Islamic systems are also included, and we welcome further additions. Supporting classes include time zone, duration, format and parsing.

Jelly is a scripting and templating language from Apache's Jakarta project. It is similar to Ant, in that scripts are XML, and each tag maps to a Java class, but has a more sophisticated internal pipeline model for tag interaction, much like JSP taglibs. See the Jelly website for more details.

JIRA comes with a number of Jelly tags implementing core operations in JIRA. This provides a scriptable interface to JIRA. There are many possible uses for JIRA Jelly tags, the most common being importing data into JIRA from other systems, and automating common administrative tasks (see the examples below).

Donald Ferguson commenting on why Websphere was his "biggest technology mistake:"

Because I had come from working on big mission-critical systems, I thought it needs to be scalable, reliable, have a single point of control ... I tried to build something like a mainframe, a system that was capable of doing anything, that would be able to do what might be needed in five years.

I call it the endgame fallacy. It was too complex for people to master. I overdesigned it.

Because we were IBM, we survived it, but if we'd been a start-up, we'd have gone to the wall.

org.apache.commons.ssl.KeyStoreBuilder is able to convert OpenSSL style public/private keys into Java KeyStore files. It can also convert Java Keystore files into the PEM format that Apache likes.

Create a new keystore from an existing key and an existing certificate: java -cp not-yet-commons-ssl-0.3.9.jar org.apache.commons.ssl.KeyStoreBuilder PASSWORD KEY.pem CERT.pem

Guacamole is an HTML5 + JavaScript (AJAX) viewer for VNC, which makes use of a server-side proxy written in Java. The current version is almost as responsive as native VNC and should work in any browser supporting the HTML5 canvas tag.

Guacamole provides access to your VNC server through a proxy written in Java. The server-side half of Guacamole thus requres a servlet container like Apache Tomcat, while the client-side requires nothing more than a web browser supporting HTML5 and AJAX.