July 2010 Archives

Yep, good guess, a Java API to bluga.net webthumb in now available. Making your Java application display website thumbnails is now something really easy to implement. Get your API KEY form bluga.net webthumb, download JWebThumb and start requesting and fetching thumbnails with just a few lines of code.   

• custom size thumbnails
• support for both JPG an PNG
• web services or REST based API
• either creates thumbnail instantly or sends notification when done
• free version 

I guess every Java developer dealing with JAVA/XML serialization/deserialization knows about XStream. I was using it for years until yesterday. What happened yesterday? I found out XStream dos not work out of the box with GAE. Well is's not exactly XStream's fault. A lot of stuff does not work properly with GAE due to its limitations and odd security restrictions. But my hope to quickly find patch/workaround, went away as soon as I realized the problem was reported to XStream over an year ago (http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/XSTR-566) and there is still no good solution. 

This way I was forced to look for alternatives. And I found Simple! Conceptually it's a very similar to XStream. Serialization is really simple to use and revolves around several annotations and a single persister object. I got the impression it's noticeably faster than XStream. It's feature list is quite long (it even claims to be bean version tolerant) but so far I've used the standard stuff like converters, transformers, persister, etc.

However since "Simple"

• does not depend on 3rd party libraries
• is available in central Maven repository
• works out of the box with GAE
• is capable of doing everything XStream is doing  

it's about to become my number one XML serialization/deserialization tool. At least until I discover it's dark sides.

A few weeks ago I was asked by Packt publishing to review the new Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Intranets book. Going through over 650 pages took me some time but finally I'm ready to share my thought about it. 

By now you are probably scanning the text for something like "In general this is ____ book". Don't bother, I'm not going to generalize in this post. In fact, what you put in place of ____  depends on who you are, what is your Liferay background, and what you expect to learn.