The Revivification of Hamcrest

I love Hamcrest. I've been my first choice library for writing assertions in tests for many years. I know that there's other alternatives (such as JUnit assertions, or AssertJ), but I've always preferred the literate style and composability of Hamcrest. Some time in early October 2018, I was in a discussion with a colleague about … Continue reading The Revivification of Hamcrest →

A Small CruiseControl Fix, and a Critique of Spring

I quite like the new Dashboard that was added to CruiseControl last year. It has a certain style that makes it appealing to the end users who may be watching the build status, and is a step up from the old reporting JSPs. Until today, I had never really looked into how it was implemented. … Continue reading A Small CruiseControl Fix, and a Critique of Spring →

Ruby and Java in Eclipse on Ubuntu

I've been updating the development environment on my home computer. I'm running Ubuntu at home, and was expecting a pretty easy setup. I was rather surprised to find that the Eclipse environment packaged with Ubuntu 8.10 is actually pretty old (Eclipse 3.2). Given that Eclipse 3.4 has been out for quite a while now, I … Continue reading Ruby and Java in Eclipse on Ubuntu →

AFP Renderer 1.1.0 Released

(The following announcement is taken from the release notes) The AFP Renderer development team (that's Pete and I) is pleased to announce the release of AFP Renderer 1.1.0. This latest release can be downloaded from http://afp-renderer.sourceforge.net/download.html. The important changes since the last release (1.0.2) are: added support for outline fonts added sample fonts with distribution … Continue reading AFP Renderer 1.1.0 Released →

AFP Renderer

As part of a project that we're working on together, my friend Pete Townsend developed some library code to generate prints for insurance policy applicants. Input data comes from an XML document, and is converted to an AFP print stream (AFP is a MO:DCA print format used on mainframes). Leveraging available open source tools, Pete … Continue reading AFP Renderer →