A couple of my clients recently requested my suggestions for rich-text editors that can replace a standard HTML textarea tag. The best (free) one that I’ve seen is FCKEditor. It’s very nice and it will across on multiple browsers.
I’m often asked by my clients — “where can I find an open source tool for doing X in Java?” Recently I’ve been telling them to take a look at Java-Source.net.
I just discovered the TargetProcess web based project management tool. It’s described as an “Agile Project Management System” and states that “The Primary Goal of TargetProcess system is extremely clear — fast feedback about project state.” It’s not as feature-rich as VersionOne.net or other similar tools but TargetProcess is free and easy to use.
Just ran across another open source build management tool called LuntBuild. Seems like it’s similar to AntHill and CruiseControl but somewhat easier to use as is doesn’t require any edits of configuration files (fully web-based). Haven’t tried it yet, but looks like a good candidate for some folks just getting into automated builds and continuous integration.
Contrary to popular belief, you can’t just forget about memory management if you’re using Java. I’ve been meaning to write an article on memory usage and how developers can monitor their applications’ memory footprint for some time. The folks at IBM beat me to it. Check out their article on the topic.
If you enjoy using Ant, JUnit, and other tools for doing builds on Java, check out this article for how to use similar Open Source tools to do sophisticated builds on the .NET platform.
This morning I was asked about my recommendations for rules engines. On the Java side I’ve always recommended Drools or Jess (though there are many more Java-based open source engines listed on this site). The .NET rules engines that I’m aware of include NxBRE, QuickRules, and InRule. This thread on ServerSide.com presents a simple rules engine with source code along with a discussion that includes references to other available engines.
Recently I’ve been conducting architecture assessments for a couple of clients (mostly in .NET shops but this topic is equally applicable in J2EE enivronments). I was asked to conduct reviews of newer architectures in which the architects and senior engineers wanted to apply SOA (service oriented architecture) principles. A major discussion point in each of the reviews always centered around question of “what exactly is a service?” Attempting to answer that question has proven quite difficult but we almost always talked about the term “stateless services” so that’s probably a good place to start. Creating a stateless service is simple for many business cases but non-trivial for database-oriented applications that must support transactions that may potentially span multiple services. This becomes a problem when architects want to create fine-grained services where each service does only a small part of a transaction and leaves other parts of a transaction up to other services. When fine grained doesn’t work, we end up creating coarse-grained services to alleviate the transaction management issues.
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