You’ve just got to love the Maven Enforcer plugin. Anything with a byline of “The Loving Iron Fist of Maven” has got to endear you, no? The Enforcer is a collection of configurable rules that will force your build to stop if certain preconditions are not met. One of the common ways I’ve been using it lately is to ensure that a certain JDK (1.4 in my case – don’t get me started on Websphere) [...]

People who follow opencsv will find this hard to believe — but it actually happened! Thanks to a whole lot of work from Scott Conway, a whole slew of patches have been applied to opencsv 2.0 is out in the wild! Scott has fixed heaps of the outstanding issues, so if you’ve opened something, make sure you check back to see if it made it in (it probably did!). We’ll have some formal release notes [...]

If you’re around Canberra on Wednesday, August 12, make sure you drop by the Canberra Java User Group (CJUG) from 6PM where I’ll be giving a talk title “Maven is the new black”. Maven has really been gaining popularity lately in the Java ecosystem, so it’s a good chance to come along and hear what all the fuss is about. Maven is full of features, but often a little short on “getting your head around [...]