Interesting Links, 25 Jan 2016

  • From ##java itself, Hot deploy to Jboss from Intellij using deployment scanner documents a problem someone had while trying to deploy from IDEA into JBoss, and discusses how to get it working. Of particular note: “The Intellij deployment options for ‘upload external changes’ (turn it on!) and ‘preserve file timestamps’ (turn it off!) have given me particular grief in the past; if you find that Intellij doesn’t seem to be picking up changes and uploading them, look at the former.”
  • J2ObjC 1.0 has been released. From the project website: “J2ObjC is an open-source command-line tool from Google that translates Java source code to Objective-C for the iOS (iPhone/iPad) platform. This tool enables Java source to be part of an iOS application’s build, as no editing of the generated files is necessary.” The UI for each platform is still written in code for that platform, but this might make porting code to iOS easier for Java coders.
  • A user on ##java posted a link to a free app he’d written for iOS devices: Trident. It’s an app that interacts with Gitlab (and Github, in early preview form), with a primary focus on discussing issues, pull requests, and files from a mobile device. This isn’t an endorsement (your author doesn’t have an iOS device) but it might be worth watching.
  • We’ve seen a lot of JavaFX questions lately – mostly they’re from a small cluster of users (therefore: a few JavaFX users, each with a lot of questions, and yes, this is anecdata.) Gluon maintains SceneBuilder, which, well, builds scenes for JavaFX, and just had a new release, version 8.1.0 of Scene Builder.
  • Feature Flags are a way to release features to specific users. Turns out there’s a hub dedicated to the method, including a reference to multiple libraries that enable limited releases in wide-area deployments. (The hub itself looks like it’s provided by the authors of Launch Darkly, but that’s okay.) It’s not a new idea, I think, but it’s written up pretty well here and it’s nice to have a hub for the capability.