It’s time to upgrade from the Windows 7 Release Candidate

While most people who tested Windows 7 have now moved to the final version, some are still running the Release Candidate. If you haven’t moved yet, it’s time to replace the RC.

Starting on March 1, 2010 your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Your work will not be saved during the shutdown.

The Windows 7 RC will fully expire on June 1, 2010. Your PC running the Windows . . . → Read More: Windows 7 RC Expiration]]> I received a mail from Microsoft today morning about Windows 7 expiration. Here is the essence of the mail:

It’s time to upgrade from the Windows 7 Release Candidate

While most people who tested Windows 7 have now moved to the final version, some are still running the Release Candidate. If you haven’t moved yet, it’s time to replace the RC.

Starting on March 1, 2010 your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Your work will not be saved during the shutdown.

The Windows 7 RC will fully expire on June 1, 2010. Your PC running the Windows 7 RC will continue shutting down every two hours and your files won’t be saved during shutdown. In addition, your wallpaper will change to a solid black background with a persistent message on your desktop. You’ll also get periodic notifications that Windows isn’t genuine. That means your PC may no longer be able to obtain optional updates or downloads requiring genuine Windows validation.

To avoid interruption, please reinstall a prior version of Windows or move to Windows 7. In either case, you’ll need to do a custom (clean) install to replace the RC. As with any clean installation, you’ll need to back up your data then reinstall your applications and restore the data. For more details about replacing the RC, see the Knowledge Base article KB 971767. For more information, visit the Window 7 Forum.

Thanks again for helping us test Windows 7.

The Windows 7 Team

This sounds very unprofessional and disappointing. Why shutdown the operating system every 2 hours? Why change the wall paper to “a solid black background with a persistent message on your desktop”?. Why display “periodic notifications that Windows isn’t genuine”?. Did we cheat Microsoft by running Windows 7 RC? Why not just expire gracefully with some friendly reminders.

What do you think about this?

You can get more information about Windows 7 RC expiration from Microsoft Knowledge Base.

This tutorial is directed towards new users of Linux or people who migrated from Windows to Linux recently. If you are a Windows user, TortoiseSVN . . . → Read More: Subversion and RapidSVN]]> Subversion is a very popular version control system. Though Subversion provides a very robust command line client, most of us prefer using a nice GUI front end. Windows users are really fortunate to have a powerful tool like TortoiseSVN which without any argument is simply the best front end for Subversion. Unfortunately, TortoiseSVN is available for just the Windows platform. Here I would like to highlight about RapidSVN, a cross-platform GUI front end for Subversion.

This tutorial is directed towards new users of Linux or people who migrated from Windows to Linux recently. If you are a Windows user, TortoiseSVN might be the best bet for you. Learn more about TortoiseSVN from the post “Extending Subversion by using TortoiseSVN“.

Pre-requisites
Subversion

Installation
Installing RapidSVN in Ubuntu is a breeze,

sudo apt-get install rapidsvn

Once installation is done, RapidSVN can be found under “Applications -> Programming”. Or if you use a dock like GNOME-Do, you can launch it by typing “rapidsvn”.

For other platforms, download the latest release from the RapidSVN site.

Adding a repository to RapidSVN
Unlike TortoiseSVN which seamlessly integrates into Windows Explorer, RapidSVN allows you to manage the files from a dedicated user interface. RapidSVN will display details like status, author, revision number etc in separate columns.

To add a new repository to RapidSVN, right click “Bookmarks”, click “Add Existing Repository” and enter the repository url.

Checkout a working copy
To checkout a working copy from the repository, right click a repository, click “Checkout New Working Copy” and enter appropriate details.

RapidSVN will display any unversioned files in your working copy, if any.

Adding files to working copy
Right click any unversioned file and then click “Add” to add them in your working copy. Click “Add recursive” if you want to add a folder with multiple sub folders inside it.

RapidSVN will display appropriate status regarding the files that are added in your working copy but not yet committed to the repository.

Commiting changes
You can commit the added files, modified files by right clicking them and selecting “Commit”.

View history (Log)
To view the change history of a file, right click a file and select “Log”.

Reverting local changes
Right click a modified file and click “Revert” to revert the changes you made to your working copy.

Compare the changes made (Diff)
Unlike TortoiseSVN, RapidSVN does not provide built in support for “Diff”. However, you can instruct RapidSVN to use any externl diff tool to fill that gap. So this is what you will see when you attempt to run “Diff” on a file,

Fortunately, there are many excellent “Diff” tools available. I use “Meld” as the diff tool in Ubuntu Linux. “Meld” should be available in all major Linux distros. This is how you will install “Meld” in Ubuntu,

sudo apt-get install meld

Once you have your diff tool of choice installed, you need to tell RapidSVN to use the diff tool. In RapidSVN, click “View -> Preferences” and then open the “Programs” tab. In the “Programs” tab, look for a section called “Diff Tool” and enter the command name there and save the changes.

Now you can diff the changes made to a file by right clicking it and selecting “Diff” or “Diff to Head” or “Diff to Base”.

Once you click “OK”, RapidSVN will invoke the respective Diff tool to display the differences.

Other Settings
If you want to open and edit files right from within RapidSVN, open “Edit -> Preferences” and then enter the appropriate value in the “Standard Editor” section.

If you want to explore your working copy from within RapidSVN, then configure the “Standard Explorer” section in “Preferences”.

Overall, RapidSVN is a solid Subversion client especially to linux users. What Subversion client do you use?

SolitaryGeek Poll

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily – leading to multiple integrations per day. - Martin Fowler

Hudson is a popular open-source continuous integration server used by many organizations like Redhat JBoss. Though there are many well known and well established open-source projects like CruiseControl, Continnum and some commercial offerings like Bamboo, what makes Hudson special is it’s powerful yet easy to use web interface, it’s simplicity and it’s extensible architecture with many plugins.

Objective

The objective of this . . . → Read More: Hudson CI Server – A quick start guide]]> Introduction

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily – leading to multiple integrations per day.
- Martin Fowler

Hudson is a popular open-source continuous integration server used by many organizations like Redhat JBoss. Though there are many well known and well established open-source projects like CruiseControl, Continnum and some commercial offerings like Bamboo, what makes Hudson special is it’s powerful yet easy to use web interface, it’s simplicity and it’s extensible architecture with many plugins.

Objective

The objective of this tutorial is to setup, configure and learn to use Hudson by building “Apache Commons IO“, a well known java project.

Requirements

• Hudson
• Subversion (or any other version control system like CVS, Mercurial, Git if you want to build your own project)
  
• (Optional) Tomcat or Glassfish
• Apache Ant (or Maven)
  

Installation and Starting Hudson

Installing Hudson is super easy. Just download the war file, open your terminal/command-prompt and issue the command “java -jar hudson.war”. Now point your browser to http://localhost:8080. That was easy, right?

Hudson has an embedded servlet container called “Winstone” which works much like a standard servlet container like Tomcat by serving your JSP pages and servlets.

If you want Hudson to start on a different port, say 8180, issue the following command,
<code> java -jar hudson.war –httpPort=8180 </code>

Ofcourse you can deploy Hudson to Tomcat, Glassfish or any other supported servlet containers. The following guides can be useful in that case:

• Hudson and Tomcat
• Hudson and Glassfish

More container specific guides can be found from this hudson wiki.

Once you started Hudson or deployed it to a servlet container, this is what you might see in your browser when you start Hudson for the first time.

Hudson Home Directory

All your Hudson jobs/settings are stored in the Hudson home directory. If you did not specify one, Hudson shall assume some defaults like <code> ~/.hudson </code> in Linux or your respective home directory in Windows. It’s ok to go ahead with the defaults while you test drive Hudson but once you are done, I strongly recommend you to define a Hudson home directory of your choice, preferrably on a separate partition or drive. This will ensure that all your Hudson configuration/jobs are intact in case of any system crash.

Say, suppose your home directory is “/hudson” (in Linux), this is how you will define the Hudson home directory,

If you are using the embedded servlet container, start it by specifying the java system property “HUDSON_HOME”,
<code> java -DHUDSON_HOME=/hudson -jar hudson.war </code>

If you are using Tomcat, follow the explanations in this wiki. However, if you run Tomcat as a windows service, you need to do some tweaking to let Tomcat set this property. In that case, you will be better off if you start Tomcat using it’s batch file and set the property right there. (Or if you managed to run Tomcat as a Windows Service and still able to define the Hudson home correctly, why don’t you share your views with us?)

If you are using Glassfish, go to admin console and add the JVM option <code> -DHUDSON_HOME=/hudson</code>. More detailed explanations can be found on this wiki.

Just remember that the idea is to define a system property “HUDSON_HOME” through any of the possible ways.

This is how the Hudson home directory shall look like.

Manage Hudson

Hudson provides an easy to use web interface to manage the configurations needed to administer a continuous integration server. Let us do some basic configurations to get Hudson ready.

Start Hudson and click the “Manage Hudson” link located on the left.

Now click “Configure System”. Hudson will display a page where you can configure things like access control, JDK, Ant, Email Settings etc.

Access Control

We will enable security to secure our Hudson setup. Otherwise anybody can go and meddle with your Hudson jobs. If you don’t want that to happen, check the “Enable Security” checkbox.

Once security is enabled, we need to tell Hudson the type of “Access Control” we want to use. Let us choose the Security Realm as “Hudson’s own user database” and leave the option “Enable users to signup” as checked. (If you do not check the “sign up” option here, Hudson is definitely going to whack you later!. ) Under the “Authorization” section, choose “Matrix-based Security”.

Now add an user called “administrator” and give the necessary privileges. ENSURE THAT YOU GIVE “ADMINISTER” PRIVILEGES TO THIS USER or else, you may not able to access the administrative console once security and access control are enabled. (Again, if you miss it, Hudson is gonna whack you!)

Hudson will display an error symbol near the user we just added. That’s because the user does not exist  in the system. Do not bother, we will create the user a little later. Now go ahead and add users who might be accessing Hudson. Give appropriate access controls to the users and do not give full access to everyone. That will eventually create a system that is difficult to manage.

Configure JDK

Done with security? Now we need to configure the JDK which Hudson shall use to build the jobs. Find out the section “JDK” in the same page. Click the “Add JDK” button and then enter the details of your JDK.

Configure Ant

We need to tell Hudson where Ant is located. Find out the section called “Ant”, click “Add Ant” and enter the respective details.

(Follow the same procedure, if you want to configure Maven.)

That’s it! Hudson is now almost ready for prime time. Feel free to configure the Email Settings as well with the appropriate values. When you are done, press the “Save” button to save all the changes you have made.

Once you press the “Save” button, Hudson will redirect you to a login page.

Manage Users

Click the “Signup” link at the top right corner of Hudson and register a new user called “administrator” (or whatever name you gave in the “Access Control” section).

Hudson will automatically login the user provided the user was already configured in the “Access Control” section. Once a new user (administrator) is registered in the system, Hudson will provide an option called “Manage Users” in the “Manage Hudson” page.

You can now create other users from this page.

You will be using this page to manage all your Hudson users. Looks like we have covered quite a lot of information. It’s time now to create some jobs and see Hudson in action.

Creating Job

That’s the core feature of Hudson. Hudson jobs can fetch the source code from a repository, execute your build scripts, run your tests, prepare javadoc, notify you in case of any failure, archive the build artifacts and much more. That’s where you can really see the power of Hudson. Enough talking, let us explore these Hudson features now by creating a job.

The Hudson job which we are going to create now is going to be very simple and is capable of doing the following:

• Checkout the source code of apache commons-io project using subversion
  
• Run the build script (build.xml in case of Ant, pom.xml for Maven)
• Archive the build output
  

Create a job by clicking the link “New Job” on the left. Give a name for the job, select the option “Build a free-style software project” and then press “OK”.

Configure Job

Hudson will create a new empty job for us which we need to configure.

Let us configure the repository for this job first. Go to the section “Source Code Management”, choose the option “Subversion” and enter the repository url  as “http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/commons/proper/io/trunk“. Enter the “Local module directory” as  “.”

Look for the section called “Build”. Click the button “Add build step” and select “Invoke Ant”. Leave the rest to default. (Maven users, choose the appropriate action)

Go to the section “Post-build Actions”. Select the checkbox “Archive the artifacts”. The apache commons-io build script shall create the jar in the directory named “target”. So enter the value “target/*.jar” in the text field titled “Files to archive”. Though this is not mandatory to build a job, I recommend you to do this as this will help the users of your continuous integration server to download the build outputs quickly.

NOTE: Since we are building the apache-commons-io project we are entering the value “target/*.jar”. If for example, your build output directory is “dist”, then you should enter here as “dist/*.jar”.

Press the “Save” button at the bottom. Our job is ready and just click link “Build Now” at the left to start building the job.

Once the build is initiated, you can relax and watch the progress in the “Build History”.

If you are restless and want to see exactly what is going on, just click the link (corresponding to the build number) in the “Build History”.

Now click the link “Console Output”.

Hudson will display you the console view where you can do all your research.

Now that the build is successful, you might want to have a look at the jar built by this job. You can find that under “Last Successful Artifacts”.

You can also have a sneak preview about the builds from your Hudson home page.

If in case some of your builds failed, Hudson will report that as well neatly along with displaying the build stability.

That’s it for now. But you can do a lot more like configuring Hudson to build this job every few minutes or just poll the repository once in a while and trigger the build whenever someone commits to the repository. Explore them under the job’s configuration page and enjoy. And did I mention that Hudson has a lot of good plugins already? Maybe I will try to cover those advanced concepts in my next post.

If you are using NetBeans as your IDE, then you have a got a lot of Hudson features integrated right into the NetBeans IDE. Check that out in my post NetBeans 6.7 – A quick glance.

Are you using Hudson? Are you planning to use Hudson? Why not leave a comment below and share your thoughts?

Read also: “NetBeans and Maven – A quick start guide”

I was quick to download the “All Java” pack of NetBeans IDE for linux. Installation, as usual was pretty smooth on my Ubuntu 9.04. The installation didn’t give me much surprises and it was very much similar to version 6.5. I customized the installer to install Glassfish v2.1 and . . . → Read More: NetBeans 6.7 – A quick glance]]> NetBeans 5.0 – Simplified Swing development
NetBeans 5.5 – Simplified Java EE development
NetBeans 6.0 – Made the NetBeans editor and other core infrastructure on par with competitors
NetBeans 6.5 – Looked beyond Java development by supporting languages like PHP
NetBeans 7.0 6.7 – Tries to make collaborative team development seamless.

I was quick to download the “All Java” pack of NetBeans IDE for linux. Installation, as usual was pretty smooth on my Ubuntu 9.04. The installation didn’t give me much surprises and it was very much similar to version 6.5. I customized the installer to install Glassfish v2.1 and Tomcat 6.0.18 for me.

Splash Screen
The splash screen has changed a bit and the startup was quick. But I wouldn’t comment about the startup speed at this point of time since I haven’t created/opened any projects in the IDE.

Intuitive Start Page
The start page has got the much needed face lift and is very attractive. The big and clean text reminded me about Eclipse which has got a really good start page. With this new start page, installing plugins is just one click away.

The start page also offers an intuitive way to activate/de-activate IDE features. Say suppose you don’t want certain IDE features, for example, Mobile development, it’s very easy to turn it off right from your start page. Good work!

Hudson Integration
That’s my favourite feature in this release of NetBeans. Hudson is a great continuous integration server which helps you to automate your build process. And if your team uses Hudson, then this NetBeans feature might be very useful to you. As per my understanding, currently NetBeans supports only Hudson continuous integration server. If you are using other CI servers like CruiseControl, no great news for you in this release of NetBeans.

Open the “Services” window in the IDE and look for “Hudson Builders”. There you can add your existing hudson urls.

With the hudson support, you can now manage the hudson jobs without opening a browser. You can even copy the build artifacts to your netbeans projects.

You can also watch the remote hudson build console at the comfort of your IDE.

Issue Tracker Integration
If you are doing any serious development, it’s most likely that you will be using some issue tracker. There are many popular issue trackers available like Bugzilla, Trac, Jira etc. NetBeans 6.7 provides out of the box support for Bugzilla but Jira support is available as well through a plugin.

I registered my mozilla issue tracker account in the IDE. Once an issue tracker is registered, you can find as well as add/modify issues.

Finding issues from a bugzilla based issue tracking system is just a click away.

Reporting new issues is not a tough job either.

I didn’t try the Jira integration yet. In future, I would love to see integration with more issue trackers like Trac.

Error Reporting
Another neat feature which I like in this release is the enhancements made to the exception reporter.
In previous versions of NetBeans, the issue log file shall be uploaded to the netbeans server and you will be displayed a message in the browser regarding the status of the issue. Now that’s integrated into the IDE as well.

You can view all the issues filed by you by clicking the button “Show my issues”.

Others

Other highlighed feature of NetBeans is “Project Kenai” integration. For those who are wondering what is this all about, “Project Kenai” is a place to host your open source projects much like sourceforge, google code, launchpad etc. But I couldn’t complete my testing on this NetBeans feature and as such I couldn’t write about this at this point of time. But to be frank, I’m not very excited about this feature. A sourceforge.net integration would have made me much happier but nevertheless it’s a great effort put forward by NetBeans team.

There are many other improvements in the areas of code completion, debugging, profiling, Maven support, Groovy support etc. You can get more details about that from the netbeans wiki.

Summary
Overall, NetBeans 6.7 builds on the strong platform of 6.x series and takes team development one step further. Hudson integration is really very good and I believe Bugzilla integration is also pretty good. But there are not many new features in this release that can make a Java developer happy. Whatsoever, it’s a great effort from the NetBeans team and we must appreciate them for this solid work. So what about you? Have you tried NetBeans 6.7? How do you feel about it?

New!

Learn more about Hudson from the blog post Hudson CI Server – A step by step guide – Part I.

Subversion is arguably the most popular version control system as of now. No wonder NetBeans has very good support for Subversion. I personally feel that a java developer must be familiar with both these tools. This article shall help you to get started with both these tools.

Objectives:

- To create a simple java project in NetBeans.

- To import the java project into the subversion repository.

- To commit the changes made in a java source file.

- To view the revision history of a java source file which was changed.

- To rollback to the previous . . . → Read More: Subversion and NetBeans – A quick start guide]]> Introduction:

Subversion is arguably the most popular version control system as of now. No wonder NetBeans has very good support for Subversion. I personally feel that a java developer must be familiar with both these tools. This article shall help you to get started with both these tools.

Objectives:

- To create a simple java project in NetBeans.

- To import the java project into the subversion repository.

- To commit the changes made in a java source file.

- To view the revision history of a java source file which was changed.

- To rollback to the previous revision of the java source file.

Requirements:

- NetBeans 6.1 Beta or NetBeans 6.0

- Subversion

- TortoiseSVN

- Though not mandatory, but a basic knowledge of subversion concepts.

Note: You can read this article to learn how to install/configure Subversion and TortoiseSVN.

Step 1:

Create a new “Java Application” project called “SimpleLogin”.

Step 2:

Create a new JFrame called “LoginFrame” under the package “org.example.simplelogin” and add the necessary components as shown below.

Step 3:

Name the swing components accordingly.

Your application should like this now on preview:

Step 4:

Create a java class named “LoginService” under the package “org.example.simplelogin”.

Step 5:

Add the following code to the LoginService class.

Here we are defining a simple method which shall return true if the username is “guest” and the password is “password”.

Step 6:

Now open “LoginFrame.java” and add the following methods.

The above methods are self explanatory. We are just doing a simple validation and calling the login method we defined previously in the class LoginService.

Step 7:

Now double click the login “button” in the design mode of LoginFrame.java to create the event handling method named “loginButtonActionPerformed”. Add the following code to call the “performLogin” method.

That’s it.

Step 8:

Run the project.

If you enter the username as “guest” and password as “password”, you will get an output like this.

Otherwise, you will be getting an output like this.

Ok, our simple login application is ready for prime time . Now let us import this project into a subversion repository.

Step 9:

Create an empty folder called “MyRepository” in a preferred location.

Step 10:

Create a subversion repository in the empty “MyRepository” folder as mentioned below, by right clicking anywhere inside the windows explorer.

Accept the default option (FSFS) in the “Create Repository” window.

That’s it. Your repository should be ready when you press “OK” and it should look something like this.

Step 11:

Let us import the NetBeans project we have created into the subversion repository. Right click the NetBeans project we have created and then click “Versioning -> Import into Subversion Repository”.

NetBeans will prompt you with a window. Enter the path of your repository as shown below.

Click the “Next” button and enter the “Repository Folder” name into which you would like to import your project. To make things simple, let us enter our NetBeans project name itself as the “Repository Folder” name. Also enter a small description about this import activity as shown below.

We are almost there. Click the “Next” button and the IDE will show a window like this.

Accept the default entries and click “Finish”. Congratulations! you have imported your project successfully into the subversion repository.

Right click anywhere in your desktop/windows explorer and click “TortoiseSVN -> Repo-Browser” and then enter the path of your subversion repository. You can see all your project files sitting comfortably inside the subversion repository.

Step 12:

Let us play around with some more cool subversion integration features offered by NetBeans. Open the class “LoginService.java” and change the value of “DUMMY_PASSWORD” from “password” to “guest”.

You can see the IDE markup a blue shade near the line you made the change. This indicates that your source file has got something different than the version in the repository. You can also note that the IDE change your java source file name’s font-color to blue.

Let us turn our focus to the editor window again. Click the blue stripe shown by the IDE near the  place where you made changes to the source file. The IDE will popup a small hint-window.

You can see the previous value of the DUMMY_PASSWORD there. The IDE also provides you a set of buttons to revert back the changes or to have a “diff” view on the changes made. Let us explore the “diff’ functionality of the IDE first by clicking the “diff” button.

The IDE will display the “diff” view of the “working copy” and the “HEAD” revision (the latest committed version) in the repository.

From the above figure, you can see the current and previous value of the string DUMMY_PASSWORD. Now you can revert back to the old value of “DUMMY_PASSWORD” by clicking the replace  button (displayed like an arrow)

When you press the “replace” button, the IDE will replace the “current” value with the “original” value.

The “diff” view provided by the IDE will be very useful to examine and compare the changes made to the “working copy”  alongwith the option to revert back to the original version in the repository. But if all you need is to quickly revert back some change to the original version in the repository, you can click on the blue strip in the source code and click the “revert” button.

That’s cool, right?

Step 13:

Enough playing. Now let us commit the changes we made in our source file. Ensure that the source file you are willing to commit is in focus and click the menu “Versioning -> Commit”

When you click the “Commit” menu item, the IDE will prompt you with a window to enter the “message” for this commit operation. Enter a commit message and click the “Commit” button.

Step 14:

Let us explore the history of our source file and see the the changes we made all along. Click the “Versioning -> Search History” menu.

The IDE will display all the versions of the source file.

In the “Search History” window, the IDE offers two views, “summary” view and “diff” view. By default, the IDE displays the “summary” view. The “diff” view contains more information.

You can straightaway “revert” or “rollback” to previous revisions just by right clicking a particular revision.

Nice, isn’t it? There are still a lot more cool subversion features offered by NetBeans. I will blog more about that later. I hope the information provided here was useful to you.

Read also: “NetBeans and Maven – A quick start guide”

SolitaryGeek Poll

- Firefox (Do I need to say anything about it?)

- Apache Ant (Not needed, if you use NetBeans. NetBeans has got bundled ant)

- JEdit (Mainly for it’s wide range of plugins. I use it’s LogViewer and HexViewer plugin frequently. Also it has got excellent syntax highlighting for your properties file, java files, nsis scripts etc)

- Subversion Version Control System(Got excellent integration with NetBeans and Eclipse. You must consider it atleast for your personal development.) You . . . → Read More: Must have tools for a Java Developer]]> Apart from your favourite IDE, I feel, a Java Developer might be very productive with the following tools (in no particular order):

- Firefox (Do I need to say anything about it?)

- Apache Ant (Not needed, if you use NetBeans. NetBeans has got bundled ant)

- JEdit (Mainly for it’s wide range of plugins. I use it’s LogViewer and HexViewer plugin frequently. Also it has got excellent syntax highlighting for your properties file, java files, nsis scripts etc)

- Subversion Version Control System(Got excellent integration with NetBeans and Eclipse. You must consider it atleast for your personal development.) You can read more about installing subversion here.

- Apache Tomcat (The ubiquitous servlet container.)

- Glassfish (The best open source application server, at the moment. Thanks RedHat for making JBoss AS development sluggish. JBoss AS users are waiting for nearly 1 1/2 years for the 5.0 release.)

- Hudson (The fastest growing continuous integration server. This can be an excellent add-on to your ant/maven based build process). You can read more about hudson here.

- Java Service Wrapper (An excellent product to launch your java applications as a windows service)

- CheckStyle/PMD (Excellent code coverage tools to make your source code more maintainable)

- JASYPT (Excellent cryptography library to encrypt/decrypt your passwords, files etc.)

- Apache Commons Library (Contains almost all the utility classes you will ever need. Kindly check this project before writing your own utility classes)

- JUDE Community (An excellent free UML modelling tool. You must definitely give it a try. It’s lightweight and it’s very simple to use.)

- MySQL (The most popular open source database at the moment)

Did anybody say that I forgot to add Google as well

What else do you use? It will be of great use to the community if you can share about your experience as well.

Note: I tend not to include frameworks like Spring, JSF, Wicket etc.. Because you can see these frameworks too are highly subjective and a major reason for lots of flamewars. And that’s the reason why I didn’t mention any IDE as well. Whatever IDE or framework you use, it’s very likely that you might need the above mentioned “tools” except a few like database/application server, whose choice are mostly defined by a particular organization.

You should read this article in the perspective of “tools needed for your personal java development”. Because there are “lots” of factors involved in your work environment regarding the selection of tools.

And lastly, this is my humble suggestion only. So if you find your favourite tool missing, don’t get panic. Cheers…