Thoughts on agile software development
Sometimes changes to a library are made so easily that it’s not really worth talking about. The Maven Plugin from posts Build Automatisierung mit eigenen Mojos verbessern and Trivial Pursuit – API MarkDown generates AsciiDoc documentation for simple OpenAPI descriptions. So far, the Maven Plugin uses a JSON description as input format. Since the YAML representation is used more frequently, its support would also be desirable.
I am proud to announce the release of FreshMarker 1.0.0! Having started as a small example for blog posts two years ago, FreshMarker has evolved into a robust and versatile framework designed to meet diverse templating needs.
FreshMarker is an embedded Java template engine that focusses on extensibility and simplicity. For this reason, every implementation of an extension is associated with weighing up its pros and cons. For a long time, the import directive therefore remained an unrealised feature.
While reviewing the mutation tests for FreshMarker, I noticed an implementation gap in the logical expression. So if something needs to be changed, why not quickly add something new.
With Java 22, string interpolation is fighting for its place in the Java ecosystem. What works in other languages and many frameworks should now also simplify the work of Java developers. Some wishes are fulfilled for the developers, others unfortunately not and some would never have been expressed. But more on that later.
Some additions to a framework are so trivial that they don’t really deserve their own article. On the other hand, as a developer, you may ask yourself why this addition has taken so long. For unknown data types, FreshMarker uses the interpretation of the class as a Java Bean by default. This is a good solution for many POJO, DTO and Entity classes, but in some cases the class should be used as a primitive FreshMarker type.
The Rocinante library has now passed some important milestones. It can read and write messages and masters the scalar base types. The next step is now to support Repeated Fields. Repeated fields are the Protocol Buffer counterpart to lists and arrays in other protocols.
In the first article on Project Rocinante, we discussed the processing of Protocol Buffer definition files with CongoCC. In this post we will create the first Java classes based on this definitions.
For a software developer who wants to improve his own skills, it is always helpful to try out new topics. A nice side effect of such small projects is that you always get new material for articles like this one.
Zum Ende des Jahres lässt man all die vielen unerledigten Dinge Revue passieren und versucht noch das eine oder andere abzuarbeiten. Als letzter Beitrag des Jahres 2023 wird deshalb noch CongoCC vorgestellt. Der Congo Parser Generator ist der Nachfolger von JavaCC 21 und dem noch älteren JavaCC. Einige der hier vorgestellten Features existierten bereits in JavaCC 21, aber unter der Haube von CongoCC wurde in der Zwischenzeit eine Menge getan. Mittlerweile glänzt CongoCC mit Contextual Predicates, Context-sensitive Tokenization. Full 32-bit Unicode Support, Code Injection, Include Directive, Up-to-here Marker, Grammars for Java 19, Lua, Python and C#.