For those of us who deal with business applications for a living, date/time functionality is crucial. The Joda Time package is an open source library that makes dealing with Calendar, Date, Time, and other related classes easier and provides additional functionality not found in the standard JDK classes. It’s worth checking out.
If you’ve been looking for a free code coverage tool that rivals the features in Clover, look no further.
If you’re looking to enable a service-oriented healthcare architecture you’re going to need some good DTDs and XSDs (XML Schemas) for managing patient data. This link contains information about the ASTN DTDs for exchanging patient data. The HL7 group also has their own Clinical Document Architecture.
Just ran across this nice link that lists many open source projects that could be useful for health/medical informatics professionals. Another good link is http://www.linuxmednews.org/ which is a Slashdot-like site with links to many others.
I just ran across the DWR library that lets you call Java code asynchronously through Javascript without reloading a webpage. The “Direct Web Remoting” library allows you to easily call server-side Java POJOs through Javascript remoting on web browsers. Techniques like this are used by GMail and other “interactive” web applications to provide rich client functionality on normal browsers.
I’ve been a longtime user of CVS and am still generally happy with it. However, to keep up to date on the latest technologies I’ve been considering moving to something more modern. While studying up on the subject of revision control I ran across this Version Control System Comparison article. Seems pretty thorough and quite useful.
Senior Java architects like myself have complained for years that the EJB standard and its associated programming model was overly complex and probably didn’t provide a good return on investment. While EJB 2.x was a big improvement over 1.x, the new EJB 3.x spec seems poised to finally allow an actual reduction of both code and complexity for persisting business objects. If you haven’t already done so, check out the EJB 3.0 second early draft. I’ve been programming with JDK 5.0 and EJB 3.x for about a month and have found that using POJOs for entities, the richer association model, annotations for meta data, and much nicer EJB QL will, in my opinion, give EJB 3.x the kind of following that the 2.x and earlier versions never received.
Much of my consulting work happens to be in the healthcare industry so HL7 is a major standard that I have to deal with. I just ran across this great set of HL7 utilities, all written in Java. Mike’s written some good code to parse and browse, send/receive messages, and create reports based on HL7 data. It’s worth checking out.
One of the most hardest problems all engineers have to deal with is the appropriate, accurate, and timely documentation of their code. I just ran across a new tool called Documentation Enhancer for Java that adds some real value to JavaDoc generated API documentation by adding semantic information. The utility adds information about the behavior of classes to their Javadocs based on the actual method implementations and not just the method signatures. This allows for the tool to automatically add call-graph information and reference data about callers and callees. Definitely worth checking out.
