I'm constantly reminded about the horrible reality of working with jar libraries. I have a project that generates several deployables, including a server and client jar file. However being dependent on external jars makes it messy to do quick releases. I would love to have a way of bundling jars together in a master jars just like war files or ear files. This would allow me to release a packaged jar with the right libraries included in the jar file.

I'm aware of the ability to link libraries using classpath references in the manifest file however I want something nice and easy. Does anyone know of a way to archieve this ? If not, is there an interest for such a tool.

Basically a jar in jar file with a custom classloader that loads all classes and passes control to the real main method ?

Well here is a mystifying experience. I booted up IDEA and it looked just like the PC version. After working for a couple of hours It crashed and when I restarted IDEA it came up looking like a OSX native application instead of having the platform agnostic view. Not only did I get a new view, but its also snappier and boots up faster. Very strange indeed. Have anyone experienced anything similar before ?

I have to say that the whole discussion and controversy around JBoss bores me. Because of all the politics I decided to have a look at one of the less known opensource J2EE servers around, namly JOnAS. Now in version 3.2 it is starting to deliver on its promises. It supports CMP 2.0 and all you need for a proper J2EE application server. It has some good tools for administrating the server and all the documentation is available on the net

http://jonas.objectweb.org/

What can you say. Its built more traditionally than JBoss but hey it works and thats all I need.

So check it out and be supprised at how well it actually performs. Now, if they could just get it J2EE certified it would finish off the whole JBoss vs everyone discussion, which could only be a good thing in the long run.

I have been playing around with tapestry http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry and I'm falling for the concept of reusable web components. After playing with the .Net web framework and struggeling with JSP and struts, webworks etc ending up hating development of clientside code, I find the component driven world of Tapestry a breath of fresh air.

Just being able to work with the actual application logic and leave the presentation to the components and templates makes me want to shout of glee. I'm feed up wasting my time on HTML (Its below me :) , and I'm not particularly good at design either).

RAVE (A new development enviornment) from sun, that they claim will compete with the .Net web framework sound interesting. However looking at their past failure in the development tool market I'm wondering if it will have much of an impact. And what JSR's is it based on ?