Javalobby has launched a very useful new site: JDocs.com. JDocs offers easy access to Javadocs for many widely used APIs, including the JDK, XML APIs such as Xalan, Xerces, JDom, Castor, and JiBX, frameworks such as Struts, utility APIs such as the Apache Commons APIs, and many others. Currently, about 50 APIs are covered on JDocs, but there are plans of extending this number to 100 or even 150 soon....
An introductory article on the Groovy language has been posted at IBM’s developerWorks website. I have only skimmed it briefly so far, but I definitely need to take a closer look at this article as well as at Groovy in general. Groovy is a dynamic language that runs on the JVM. It looks similar to Java but without many of its restrictions, and thus closely resembles scripting languages such as Ruby....
I took a look at Eclipse 3.0 over the weekend, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed. I have been using IntelliJ IDEA for several years now, and I am a big fan of this IDE. At the same time, I love open source tools and am always happy to try something new. Eclipse has definitely come a long way since its first release - far enough that I have installed it at work today in order to try it on a real project and see how it measures up with IDEA....
IntelliJ IDEA 4.5 was released a few days ago. For those of you that haven’t used it: IDEA is a truly awesome IDE - lightweight and quick, extremely intuitive and smart, and with great refactoring features, as well as solid integration with external tools such as Ant, JUnit, and various source control systems. It is an IDE for programmers that actually want to work with code, without wizards and other bloat....
I have recently had a chance to look into several XML object binding frameworks, including JAXB, Castor, and JiBX. As usual, each framework has its strengths and its weaknesses. I should add that our requirements are pretty special, as the classes that are bound to XML will form part of an SDK and therefore need to be clean, follow Java conventions, and contain good Javadocs that describe the XML properties that they are mapped to....